Chris Hall is an ecommerce entrepreneur turned media operator. His new "Ecomm Cowboy" show broadcasts live Monday through Friday on X and YouTube. The mission, he says, is twofold: deliver daily news to sellers and offer companionship to those working alone. Chris first appeared on the podcast in 2023 as the marketing head of a D2C brand. In this our latest conversation, he addresses his goals for Ecomm Cowboy, production challenges, and, yes, the power of AI tools for one-person brands.
But most shopping AI agents are firmly attached to one particular LLM or retailer, like ChatGPT and Perplexity's new shopping response flows that guide their own shopping-related queries. And then there's agentic shopper pups: Walmart's Sparky and Amazon's Rufus, which are meant to help customers shop across their retail footprints. What people need is an independent agent that peers across retailers and is entirely focused on ecommerce services.
Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent cofounded by Marc Lore and CEO Melissa Bridgeford, is coming out of a nearly 5-year private beta with an ambitious promise: to end the era of endless scrolling in ecommerce and replace it with a personalized and streamlined shopping experience. Launched publicly on Feb. 11, the New York-based startup is betting that the next wave of online retail will be driven not by bigger marketplaces,
"We've heard so much from our customers recently that they have so much data, but less than a third of them feel like they are confidently using that data in their browsing behavior. Are they using the right strategy? And they're really overwhelmed by the fragmentation of where all that data sits," Diana Williams, VP of product at Intuit Mailchimp, told MarTech.
Like most founders, the early days of my company were very much geared towards solving a real problem. I wanted to create products to fill a market gap a loved one had personally experienced: finding effective, holistic and affordable solutions to common foot conditions like bunions. Product development and direct-to-consumer sales were my initial focus as CEO, but as the brand grew and I began to recognize the inherent potential in what we were building, retail expansion became a natural progression.
Will Critchlow is joined by Matthew Morrissey, Organic Search Director EU at adidas to talk about life at the cutting edge of enterprise SEO at a major global brand. Learn about the power of hunting insights, and insight rate over wins and testing cadence, team alignment, and where great ideas come from.
If Q4 is the holiday shopping season, then Q1 might be the season of returns, or more specifically the season of return fraud. Retailers and ecommerce merchants are seeing a growing trend of returns and fulfillment scams that drain profit margins after big sales. This fraud was the impetus for Thursday's launch of Pinch AI, a startup that aims to mitigate such losses to fraud and marketing scams, with $5 million in venture backing.
UK businesses invest heavily in digital marketing. Yet many struggle to grow. The issue is not effort. The issue is disconnected systems. Ads, websites, and CRM often work apart. This makes it hard to track leads and sales or scale with confidence. This problem is common in: Home eCommerce brands, like furniture and home decor stores, that depend on online sales
Today, instead of typing "best running shoes," consumers simply ask their favorite AI, "What running shoes should I buy?" These models respond quickly, often drawing on vast stores of user-generated content, reviews, and discussion threads-a dynamic "source stack" that looks very different from traditional SEO rankings. What's more, they can answer highly specific, long-tail questions, from "Which running shoes are best for flat feet in rainy climates?" to "What sneakers do marathoners recommend in 2024?"
Microsoft has something special just for you. The company just introduced something called Copilot Checkout at the NRF 2026 retail conference. This is exactly what it sounds like. It's a shopping assistant embedded within Copilot. The feature is rolling out now in the US and integrates with PayPal, Shopify, Stripe and Etsy. It lets people complete purchases directly inside of Copilot without having to withstand the grueling experience of being redirected to a retailer's website.
Adobe Analytics, which analyzed online transactions and website traffic for its shopping trends report, said traffic from generative AI chatbots toward retailer's sites, increased by 693.4% from the 2024 holiday season, indicating a shift in the way people shop. Before the holiday season began, FedEx reported 97% of U.S. retailers were planning to use AI for shopping, including incorporating tools for customer service and pricing.
The Alibaba economy is a huge ecosystem comprising of the company's core commerce platforms (Tmall, Taobao, Ali Express and more), digital media and entertainment divisions (Youku, Alibaba Music, Weibo etc), local services, payment & financial services (Alipay), logistics, marketing services & data management and cloud computing. Connecting the entire ecosystem is the company's vast data technology, which Alibaba sees as the keys to the empire.
In March 2025, 900 U.S. adults shared their browsing behavior with the Pew Research Center. Roughly 58% of those adults encountered an AI Overview when searching on Google. Only 8% then clicked a traditional listing. Conversely, 42% of Google searchers received no AI Overview; 15% then clicked on a listing. The immediate impact - 8% vs. 15% - is material and measurable. According to eMarketer, zero-click searches have reduced traffic to many websites by 25% or more.
To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, "Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients." From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or leaving the chat.
The Product Network shows items from across participating merchants where? Shop App? even if it that item isn't carried by the store any given person is browsing. For example, someone buying home supplies from a Shopify merchant's site might search for "organic cleaning supplies" or some particular soap fragrance. If that merchant doesn't carry anything that fits the search, the customer could see some of the closest-to options from that seller, interspersed with products from other sellers in the network with items that do fit the bill.
