The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & News

Amazon Ads Slow to 11%, FedEx Raises Outlook, Shopify’s AI Orders, Walmart’s $6B Robot Bet, Klaviyo Beats Guidance

Amazon’s ad business grew 11% to $19.6 billion last quarter. Media reports called it Amazon’s first ad miss in seven quarters. Amazon says moving Prime Day into June took

AWS Grew 39% and Jassy Now Sees Two Trillion-Dollar Businesses Within 10 Years

Andy Jassy told investors and analysts that Amazon may have two trillion-dollar revenue businesses within five to 10 years, though it doesn’t have one yet. Rick Watson an

Retailers Say Under 5% by 2027. Shopware’s Co-Founder Says 30% by 2030

Shopware co-founder Stefan Hamann thinks about 30% of buying will be in the hands of agents by 2030, and probably more in B2B than B2C. Rick opens with a state of the u

DoorDash Buys Instacart, Anthropic Files to Go Public, and PayPal, UPS Earnings, and $300B in PE Debt

DoorDash agreed on October 29 to buy Instacart for $65 a share, about $17 billion in equity value. It promised grocers they can keep using any delivery platform. Rick thi

Anthropic Files to Go Public at Up to $2 Trillion. Is Software Doomed?

Anthropic has filed its S-1, and Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky use the filing to ask whether software companies are in real trouble. Reported targets put the raise at $

Retailers Admit Their Data is Bad, Then Vote to Start AI Anyway

I asked the retailers and brands at Retail Club to raise a hand. About ten or eleven went up. When I asked who had good data, one hand stayed. This was our first Watson

Salesforce Buys Braze, Walmart Bundles Sam’s Club, Amazon Drops Grocery Storefronts

Salesforce agreed to pay about $5.7 billion in cash for Braze, the software brands like Instacart and Urban Outfitters use to send push notifications and texts. Rick work

If AI Agents Do the Shopping, Shopify Might End Up Owning Only the Checkout

Shopify has bought shop.com from Market America and won’t say what it paid. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky use the deal to work out where Shopify fits once AI agents do

PartsTree on Replatforming in Peak Season After 20 Years of Homegrown Code

PartsTree has sold replacement parts for lawnmowers and other outdoor power equipment for about 20 years, mostly on software its own team built. By this year the code had

Conversion Has Been Stuck Near 3% for 20 Years. Darin Lynch Says B2B is Counting the Wrong Checkouts

Vinny O’Brien says e-commerce conversion rates have hovered around 3% for twenty years. He puts that to Darin Lynch at Shoptoberfest, and Darin’s answer is that a lot of

UPS and Amazon, BJ’s cuts its assortment, $30B tariff refund class action, Albertsons vs Kroger, Agentic Island summit

UPS has now shed almost all of its Amazon volume. The 18-month wind-down took out about two million pieces a day and roughly $4.5 billion in expenses, leaving UPS with a

Starbucks Is Spending $1.2B on Comfier Seats. Rick Wants Better Coffee

Rick thinks Starbucks has lost its way. Jess thinks Brian Niccol’s turnaround is working, and she points to four straight quarters of growth. Niccol has put handwritten

Keith Pires of Boldest on AI sales agents and the Shopware MCP

Keith Pires is CRO and co-founder of Boldest, an agency built on top of an agent platform called Pathfinder. Vinny O’Brien caught up with him at Shoptoberfest in Nashvill

A Mattress Brand Grew 68% in July While the Category Shrank

Naturepedic has made organic mattresses for years. Its three owners are engineers, and the marketing used to read like their spec sheets. Arin Schultz, the chief growth o

C.H. Robinson Pays More Than 40x EBITDA for RXO

C.H. Robinson is paying $5.8 billion in cash and stock for RXO, which Rick works out to more than 40 times RXO’s expected adjusted EBITDA for this year. The deal deck bri

Costco Runs its Own Chicken Plant in Nebraska to Keep a $4.99 Loss Leader Going

Costco’s sales rose 11.2% last quarter, and Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky talk through where that growth is coming from. Costco says members under 40 now make up more t

Tom McFadyen's AI Commerce Book Went From 125 Use Cases to 500

Tom McFadyen has spent decades building marketplaces and commerce platforms at McFadyen Digital. His firm's new book, AI Best Practices for Commerce, runs more than 500 p

Anthropic Has $518B in Compute Bills and $4.6B in Revenue

Amazon now lets US sellers run their eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Walmart sales inside Seller Central, free of charge. Amazon says more than 95% of its independent sellers a

Amazon Blocks AI Shopping Agents as Oreos Climb From 10% to 70%

Amazon is blocking nearly every AI shopping agent, starting with Perplexity. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky go through Goldman Sachs' 64-page report on agentic commerce,

Your Data Lake Won't Make You AI-Ready

Every retailer wants AI agents, and very few have data an agent can use. Abhi Sachdeva, co-founder and CTO of EKYAM, has spent 18 of his 24 years in technology inside ret