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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
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Brent Peterson (00:00.108)
Welcome to Talk Commerce, I'm Isaac Mori and today's episode is another compilation of conversations we recorded at E-Tale Palm Springs. One of the best parts of E-Tale is all the people that you meet there. The event really attracts a great mix of founders, marketers, retailers, and strong personalities with stories to tell. That made this episode especially fun to put together and case in point, we're gonna start it off with Scott Osmond who brings great energy
and sharp insights followed by a whole bunch more conversations from across the show floor at eTail Palm Springs. Let's jump right into it. So what's the buzz here at eTail at Palm Springs so far? Buzz you've heard a thousand times. No, I do think it's now where we were last year of AI, AI, you know, now they're like, yeah, I use this AI tool for this. I use this to...
make my content creation more, you know, we're actually, have like tactical applications now. Yeah. I think. And then everybody's still scared and unknown and not sure. What's your AI hot take? I think we're going to 26, we're going to have not a bubble, we're going to have a blister. We're going to have a correction. We're going to have some, there's going to be winners and losers. And then
As you see, because I'm seasoned, I've been around a little while, what typically happens is new technologies that are as disruptive as this is usually go and they are attracted to mediocrity. And what they do is they take mediocrity and they usually flush that out. And so who's standing at the end, which I think at end of this year and this next holiday, that's when we're going to start seeing AI in the shopping and commerce.
The mediocre ones who really haven't been that great in a while, you know what I'm saying? They're gonna get called out and they'll start seeing them and then the ones who are adapting and evolving next year, you're gonna kinda see them flourish. And what about from the brand side? What's the mediocrity look like there? What mistakes do you see people making? Well, I think, and there's a lot of debate about this, but I sit and close my eyes, I think the D2C market in our business for brands are actually gonna have a little bit of a heyday because
Brent Peterson (02:21.87)
as the traffic, just the pure traffic of the LLMs just continue to just, we're standing here recording this, they've probably added like millions and millions of more people, right? Well today, most of that is popping out to these websites, it's popping out to these DDCs, it's popping out to these things. So there's a massive traffic kind of bump I think that's about to happen, and it's unpaid so far.
So I think brands who are really actually paying attention that I'm not caught up in the generative engine optimization or the answer. I'm not caught up in that. think if you're doing good work and you have foundation, I think yes, you know, you'll be set up, you'll be positioned okay. That's for me. And in the Amazon circles, Amazon's not there yet. Rufus still sucks. And so there's just not much.
there's not much to glean there or really optimize or really be proactive, but it will. You gotta be ready. So I don't know, that was a long answer to a very short question. No, that was a good answer. Let's see, any final words? You know.
Brent Peterson (03:40.398)
No, think content, I'm learning a lot. There's actually a lot of really, really smart people here that have not only been in this, they have such, the thing I like is you have so many different perspectives and they're formed by different things. And so the experiential shopping thing is coming, is that really happening versus content? I just think there's another evolution. And my last words is like, we just simmer down, okay?
The mass consumption of all this stuff, we're in the bubble. We're sucked in it, right? I just think it's gonna take more time. Just relax. It'll happen. But I don't think the general consumer is just like, my God, I'm never going out of AI ever. I'm not there yet. Is it happening fast? Yes, but just calm down. What's your favorite part about e-tail? First of all, this particular e-tail is in
Palm Springs, California. It's 75 degrees. It's sunny. It's warm. It's amazing. It's also done in this hotel, this beautiful resort. It's just, it's got good vibes. I don't know. It's like, even the exhibitors, I say this all the time, Isaac, I don't know if this is your experience. Am I supposed to ask you questions? No. can ask me questions. Like a lot of times you go to these conferences and trade shows, whatever you go in and the vendor thing is just not happy with people because they paid a lot of money.
and either they're not getting enough people, not enough, you know what I mean? Every time I walk through that hall, it's like pretty damn good vibes. Are some people happier than others? But I think it's just the mood, the sunshine, Brent's wonderful, vibrant print shirts. It's just, I don't know, people are happy here. That's my etude. Awesome. Well, thanks Scott. Thank you. Appreciate you coming on our Talk Commerce short and we'll be on Always Off-Brand at some point before we wrap up.
Elizabeth Leshar, hi everybody. I'm with Resolve AI, I'm the EVP of the Americas. Great, thanks for sitting down with us Elizabeth. To kick things off, why don't we just talk a little bit about Resolve and give us the elevator pitch. What is it that you guys do for your clients? So Resolve AI is the end-to-end platform for agentic commerce. We've been around for 10 years, which most people don't realize. We have 600 plus customers around the world, we're on five continents.
Brent Peterson (06:06.072)
you know, we have so much more to share. So we're so happy to be here in Palm Springs and meeting lots of customers. Great. And why should companies care about Agentic? Yeah, you know, I was sharing with some customers this morning, actually. I have a nine-year-old daughter and the generation Alpha is upon us. They're worth five trillion in buying power and that's going to happen in the next three to four years. So I think that thought process, they're a generation that's already doing search verbally.
They're digitized, they want one-click wonders, and I think the traditional waterfall approach of e-commerce is end of life. I we're really in the digitalization of the future. So I think we need to really think about that hyper-personalization that our kids, but also now that we all want. Yeah. For those of us who are a little less tech savvy than Jen Alpha, what exactly is a Jen's e-commerce?
Yeah, it's the ability to work either human to agent, so it isn't a chat bot situation. It's using large language models, so it's smart. It's almost human to human, it feels. Or it could be agent to agent. So what does that look like? It looks like we could, in the future, have agent shopping on our behalf. But it means that technology starts to learn what is meaningful to us, what we really desire, and then goes out to find it. And I think brands...
are going to need to really embrace that and who they are and how they fit into that shopper's experience or life and how they add value to it. Awesome. And why is now the right time to move forward with Agents e-commerce? Well, again, I'm asking all of our retailers and their partners to be ready for that to be a future fit. But ultimately, I think that we're all looking for experiences.
And that isn't just, I want a dress, I'm buying a dress. It's, I'm going to a party and I want shoes and I want to know what the weather is and I want to know if I can eat the meal in this dress. And I want a handbag and I also need to know logistics. How am I going to get there? Is there parking? Do I need an Uber? It's no longer a one, two, three, four kind of approach. It's circular. It's being in multiple places at once. People want to know the full experience of what else.
Brent Peterson (08:27.278)
these brands and these retailers can offer in terms of that one-off purchase. But I think what Resolve AI brings is that conversion of shopping carts. We know that 97 % of everyone that shops online doesn't even put anything into a cart. So how do we convert and bring revenue growth with our retailers instead of just cost optimization? And then how do we ask the frontline workers and those people in the stores to be...
be more knowledgeable as to where inventory is and what location that resides in. So merchandising by region and in this kind of landscape of shorter supplies and shorter availability, I think that's going to be a secret to success for conversion. Awesome. And what do you envision e-commerce looking like one year from now? I mean, I really think we're in conversational commerce now, which means it's being smart and having
deep multi-layered questioning and getting answers. It's looking at something not just from a blazer body type, but its color, its fabric, its size, its understanding what goes with that blazer, the blouse, the underneath, the shoes. You know, it's no longer just a one-stop shop. It's looking at a 360 view as part of a lifestyle. So the storytelling is not going to be any longer a search that says,
I want a blazer. It's gonna be I'm in Palm Springs. It's very warm What kind of blazer can I buy and what goes with that blazer? And by the way when I have lunch, can I still wear the blazer? Yeah Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. Do you have any final words or hot takes you'd like to close on? Yeah, I would say You know for everybody out there. We should be talking conversational already and the agentic Story is so powerful because we need to get data ready
data, we need to get data ready. So Resolve AI can support our enterprise customers to do that. And I would say don't underestimate that end-to-end platform. So just going from search discovery, multi-dimensional search, to conversational, to agentic, and to payments. mean payments are going to be automated before you know it. So I would say.
Brent Peterson (10:46.21)
you know, really for everyone we shouldn't just look at that year out, we should look at the next couple years and be ready for it. But we're happy to join everybody on the journey and feel free to call us to support you on that. I work to Arc'teryx, you might know them, they're the leading brand in jackets and outerwear. What I found and what all of our co-founders found from a retail background is that intelligence from your market and competitors is incredibly fragmented.
It's anecdotal at best. So if you're looking back at Black Friday, Cyber Monday, most brands can relate to this as a key moment for them. When you look back, you'll know exactly what your brand did. But if you want to look at what happened in your market, there's people with anecdotal screenshots that were saved on their desktop, or maybe an email, or a paid ad that they caught, or something that they sent in a DM. And they're going to bring that to your steering committee. And they're going to try to...
use that as inspiration for your next campaign. You really think that one digital touch point is gonna be representative of the entire market and how your competitive set is showing up on a key moment like that. What we found is that as we look at every single digital touch point from your brands, your competitors, and any wholesale or reseller channels, any campaign moment like this often happens in a more nuanced way than you think is true.
There's emerging campaign opportunities that you miss. The timing is much more nuanced than you might recognize because internally you might be starting Black Friday on the Wednesday, but we can look at your market and show you that on Monday, that's when 90 % of your competitors first launched their sale and how they flipped day to day, turning a retro from something that might provide a bit of uncertainty to absolute clarity.
and a predictive view of what's going to happen next. Awesome. So you might have touched on this a little bit. Can you tell us more about the pain points that you're finding retailers sharing here at E2? Yeah, one of the things that I'm seeing very often is challenges around pricing. So there's a lot of brands and retailers, and we're so focused on D2C, but there's a lot of brand and retailers that have huge wholesale networks or their first party on Amazon.
Brent Peterson (13:11.886)
And they're finding that there's new competitors emerging or competitors that they already know about pushing out similar products at similar price points or different price points. And what they're seeing because of that is perhaps they're missing some margin in between or perhaps that there's some white space in the actual product lines that they're selling. And so what we've created is a digital pricing intelligence module on our platform where
We match your product to similar products from other brands and we show you exactly how their price is stacking up to yours and where the white space is for you to either adjust pricing to your benefit or create new product lines to fill a gap in the market. Hey there, Isaac Mori here again. If you've listened this far, there is a good chance that e-commerce and retail innovation are topics that you care about. If so, then we should get in touch.
we're gonna be at eTale Boston this August. So if you're attending, I'd love to meet you in person, potentially even feature a conversation with you on Talk Commerce. Don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn and send me a message if you're going and let's talk. We invested in building our own machine learning predictive analytics platform. And this was about, I think five years back. And I really wanted to, through this book, emphasize on the power of the machine learning predictive analytics version of AI, the old AI, let us say.
because it really makes a performance impact. So this is about 250 experiments that have been run in the last year for all of our clients and they have driven cumulative, if you really look at the additional revenue, is close to about $30 million. We are talking about big numbers now which can be driven through experiments and that's what we are talking about here. For a company who's maybe never heard of NetElixir, what's your elevator pitch?
We combine human expertise which we have really built over the last 22 years now. We are one of the initial digital marketing or performance marketing agencies along with AI which has been built by our own team to really drive exceptional performance for our customers. We also have a bit of a bragging right. We are the agency with number one in terms of NPS score, Net Promoter Score. We have a Net Promoter Score of 84.4.
Brent Peterson (15:29.932)
which is double the industry average. Anything you're hearing a lot of people talking about here at ETAL Palm Springs? I think AI is moving from buzz to action. So people are really talking about, I know you have a great AI, but does it really drive any results or outcomes? And that's what people are talking about. And luckily we have through LXR insights been able to really prove that, that there is AI which can drive measurable outcomes or results. Yeah. Cool. As we wrap up, do you have any final words or hot takes to close with?
I mean, hot takes is one, is there is a lot of talk about AI, AI, cetera, but as e-commerce businesses, I think the big focus should be, are you able to really utilize or tap into the power of AI to drive incremental revenues and identify opportunities which may be not apparent to the regular campaign management and optimization area. So think of performance AI is, think, the next that I think everyone will be sort of pursuing or needs to pursue as well.
First, just starting off with our founders. Our founders were part of the engineering teams that built Google Ads and the Instacart ad platform. And essentially what we are is an agentic AI for Google Ads management. So customers can spend or pretty much plug in their Google Ads platform, their Google Analytics, Shopify, all their first party data. And what we do is we go up, analyze all the historical data from all of that, and create a really comprehensive media plan and build out kind of bespoke campaigns and autonomously manage ads for e-commerce brands.
So, once they're using typically agencies doing it in-house, kind of wondering if they're getting the best out of their ad spend, we do that for them autonomously. Super. Well, we're here at eTail Palm Springs. What's been the buzz? What have you been hearing from your...
Brent Peterson (17:39.218)
Cool. Any new
products or features that you're launching in 2026 that you want to hype? so it starts with Google Ads. That's what we're best at. That's what we've done really well with across for our customers. I think the next question we always get is, you do meta ads for us? Can you do Amazon for us? Can you do Bing, et cetera? And the answer is yes. We just came out with Bing. So we're doing Google Ads and Bing. then probably the next month or two, we're also going to do meta ads as well. So the idea is we're going to be kind of cross-platform and be able to manage your ad spend across multiple platforms.
and really optimize everything for you. we're gonna be kind of the one stop shop for your paid ads. Here at eTale, I mean, we work with tons of retailers who are already here, but essentially for the retail space, think about it from an intelligence layer. We're a detection platform. We are client side detection. And when we put that pixel up on your website, we're now unlocking the doors and providing you with so much intelligence and turning on the lights for marketers that they never had access to before. Think about it from the top of the funnel. We wanna create more quality coming in to impact revenue down below.
And how we do that is from the paid side or the direct or organic traffic that's coming to your website, we can help reduce ad waste from your paid media side by 70%, but then also be able to understand everything around the LLMs and the AI and the invalid traffic that's happening today on your website, right? There's some level of invalid traffic that is on your website today as a retailer. You just have no idea about the actual levels of that, right? So we want to unlock and be able to provide you with that intelligence.
So really it's an ability to provide intelligence and reduce ad waste and create a safer environment and more quality coming in the doors. Because right now there are malicious actors and LLMs and AI bots. But again, the old world used to be that AI and automation on your website was really bad. But today we want to be able to, it's a very nuanced situation because we're in this hybrid world where LLMs and AI are actually acting on behalf of consumers and businesses and actually creating a lot of positivity.
Brent Peterson (19:40.334)
potential revenue opportunities for your business as well. So you need to really understand that and not just block anything that's bad, but we want to be able to provide you that intelligence and help block the malicious bad actors as we call them. Any new features or products, services you've got launching in 2026 that you want to add? Yeah, I we're always investing in the platform, I look at it from the whole funnel perspective we can provide.
We have compliance tools, right, because a lot of websites are under attack today for compliance and being able to be compliant with what's going on today across the country. we have compliance tools like tag management tools, but overall, the first use case we typically work with retailers like yourself.
is exactly that top of the funnel. Creating more quality coming in, providing you with that intelligence, cleaning up your data from a holistic perspective, creating more accuracy, and it allows you to have more actionable business insights, right? From being able to have intelligence that you never had access to before. And that's because we are the only client side detection platform out there. If you think about the cloud flares and probably a lot of CAPTCHA stuff that you're working with, that's server side detection. But because we are client side,
We're now able to fire 2,000 plus proprietary challenges and be able to really understand so much more about user behavior, browser detection, all the various things that will help us categorize your visitors into that suspicious, malicious, or valid traffic buckets. Well, we're here at E-Tail Palm Springs. big takeaways here from the conference? No, I would just say that the conference has been great. Everyone's been so friendly, and there's just been a great audience here. I think everyone's very engaged. Obviously, it's hard. There's so many.
know, vendors and people and there's like, I bet you it's very overwhelming for a lot of people, but for us it's been really nice to meet with current clients, but also potential new clients as well. you know, we're here to really just try to provide that layer of security and provide more protection for retailers. Yeah. Great. I see you're speaking. Can tell us just a little bit about what you'll be talking about? Yeah, we just talked about like, you know, your ROAS, your return on ad spend, I think is really key, right? Because right now, like we said, there's some level of...
Brent Peterson (21:41.184)
invalid traffic and also add waste that's happening every single day on your site, right? So you're investing in all these various paid media channels and you're not getting the maximizing return on investment there. So we really wanna unlock that for you. But then also just the AI hybrid intersection we're in today, right? Everyone's using AI more than ever before. You are, I am, right? We're all using LLMs. But also it's not just gonna be malicious moving forward, Gardner predicts one in five interactions and executions and purchases.
on your retail website is gonna be some type of LLM by 2028, right? So that's a pretty significant chunk that's gonna start happening on your website, but you don't wanna just block automation because that's bad. You wanna have the intelligence to understand, are they actually acting on behalf of a consumer? Is it a cloud bot? Is it an open AI bot? Is it something that's actually doing something positive? I wanna say maybe they're trying to understand what the best type of solution or product is for this exact consumer, so.
We provide you that level of detail that you never had access to before. So it's really interesting and I think that's really what's gonna provide you with such a positive ROI moving forward, especially on the ad spend side. That concludes today's coverage of eTail Palm Springs. A big thank you to all our guests and to the eTail team for hosting another outstanding event and continuing to build one of the best communities in e-commerce. For more conversations like these, subscribe to Talk Commerce.
We will see you in the next episode and we'd love to see you at the next eTail Boston 2.