Announcing RetailPlaybook: New Channel Focused on ACO for Amazon/Alexa, Walmart/Sparky and Target/TSA Featuring Andrew Bell

Based on YOUR feedback, Amazon expert, Andrew Bell, joins our content team and today we're launching a new channel (substack+podcast) with a completely different focus area.

Here at ReFiBuy/Retailgentic HQ, we talk to hundreds of brands and retailers every week. Amongst brands, both Hybrid (DTC+Wholesale) and Wholesale-only Brands, as well as large 3PM sellers, one theme has gone from a whisper to a roar:

Alexa, Sparky and Target Shopping Assistant are changing the buyer behavior on these 1P/3P channels very quickly and causing a fair amount of chaos for established brands.

We’ve talked to top brands who have been top 1/2/3 in their category for years that are now seeing disruptors leverage Rufus/Alexa to upsurp them. We’re seeing dynamic and nimble 3P sellers who understand the importance of this on Amazon and Walmart surge in sales while incumbents scratch their heads as they look everywhere to understand what’s going on.

These Retailer agents are very new and all built on LLMS so we’ve seen some pretty crazy hallucinations like saying something is Kosher when it isn’t or telling a shopper that some chicken nuggets are vegan (they are not).

The Hunger for more “Retailer” Answer Engine Content

As these conversations have surged, so has the popularity of our content on Retailgentic on this topic. Our coverage of the Rufus data from SensorTower here and here was extremely popular and viral. Our Sparky coverage has been equally well received and the messages from readers like you has been - we want more!

Enter: Andrew Bell

After looking at the data at how popular our Rufus→Alexa and Sparky articles are, we had a wacky idea, what if we had someone that focused 100% on this. We researched everything we could about optimizing systems like Alexa and Sparky, every piece of content pointed back to one person who was the authoritative source of information, largely in the form of playbooks.

Close observers took note when we announced that Andrew Bell had joined as VP of Research and we got a LOT of questions about what was going on.

Well fellow Agentic Commerce Maximalists, the time has come to reveal a bit more about what’s going on, but not everything 😀

Introducing RetailPlaybook

Today, we are launching RetailPlaybook, a new ‘channel’. It’s a substack newsletter and companion podcast authored and hosted by Andrew.

RetailPlaybook’s Focus

Built for 1P Brands and 3P sellers, RetailPlaybook provides cutting-edge research, original heavily researched playbooks, and future-proof strategies to optimize for agentic commerce on Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping, Walmart’s Sparky, Target Shopping Assistant and beyond. As the name implies, Andrew is going to be publishing regular Playbooks that address the current and top concerns from 1P and 3P brands and sellers. The initial focus will be Amazon, but there will be plenty to cover on Sparky and Target as well.

Here at Retailgentic, we’ll continue our focus on the Answer Engines and the occasional big news items over at Amazon and Walmart and the overall Agentic Commerce industry.

Check out RetailPlaybook Today!

Today the inaugural substack article is available here and podcast is live.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc.

Or, we have a video version of the RetailPlaybook podcast on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!) →

Next Steps…

If you want to optimize your product catalog and drive increased sales on Amazon, Walmart or Target, make sure to:

1. Subscribe to the RetailPlaybook.ai substack!

2. Subscribe to the RetailPlaybook audio pod here.

3. Subscribe to our RetailPlaybook YouTube Channel here.

We hope you enjoy this new offering from Andrew Bell!