Welcome to the launch of Retailgentic - a new substack and accompanying podcast (coming in < 30 days). In this post I’ll lay out the who/what/why types of questions that are likely come up so we can get onto talking about the intersection of Retail/ecommerce and Agentic GenAI.
The ‘Who’.
I’m your host here, Scot Wingo, I am a 5x founder based out to the Triangle region of NC. Most germane to this topic are these three companies:
AuctionRover (1999-2000) - In the earliest days of ecommerce there was an explosion of auction sites. We built the first cross-auction search, bidding agent and cross-auction selling software. We were acquired after 18 months by Goto.com, the inventors of paid-search, who then changed their name to Overture and then were acquired by Yahoo!
ChannelAdvisor (2001-2022) - Now part of PE-backed Rithum - After selling AuctionRover, the dot come bubble burst, leaving only one auction site, eBay. We focused on our selling software and spun out of Overture as ChannelAdvisor and bet that some day auction sites would morph into marketplaces and be a big deal. It took ~7yrs for the second marketplace to come along, and it was from this bookstore called Amazon. We raised $90m in venture, went public in 2013, hit a $1b+ market cap at our peak and sold to PE for ~$700m in 2022 and merged with CommerceHub - today that is called Rithum. Today I no longer have any affiliation, but once a founder always a founder as they say.
ReFiBuy (2025-)- Just this year, after hearing the siren song of GenAI and the new Agentic frameworks, I decided to dust off the ecommerce saddle and get back on the horse. I co-founded ReFiBuy with three folks I worked with previously with at ChannelAdvisor: Cameron Bowe, James Frawley and Derek Conlin. You can learn more in our launch release here and our site is here.
Ok that’s work, how about outside of work?
I have lots of wacky hobbies, one of them came about in 2015, one of the great friends I made serving on the Shop.org board (founded by Scott Silverman, acquired by NRF and re-branded digital retail ultimately), was this guy who is SO into retail he calls himself Retailgeek if you can believe that (NERD ALERT!). One tradeshow we were at back in 2015 about 10 years ago now, we were having some libations after a long day of tradeshowing and I said to him - I always learn so much from my conversations with you (at the time he was big on payments, offline retail and the digital ad world’s intersection with retail and I am and will always be a big marketplace person) - we should (wait for it) do a podcast.
The World Famous, Award Winning Jason and Scot Retail/Ecommerce Podcast is Born!
I got home from the tradeshow and 2 days later a giant Amazon delivery arrived with a pro-audio microphone fancy microphone arm and other gadgets and wires. Turns out Jason Goldberg (aka Retailgeek) thought it through and wanted to do the pod. The Jason and Scot show was born. A 1-2x per month podcast.
At the start of that adventure, Jason was at Razorfish and that was acquired by Sapient and then that was bought by the mega giant firm Publicis. Along the way Jason’s title has grown to be:
SVP
SVP Commerce
SVP Commerce + Content
Strategy
Strategy Officer
Chief Strategy Officer
Chief Commerce Strategy Officer
Chief Digital Commerce +Content + Strategy + Retail Media Networks + Generative AI / Agentic + Retail Strategy Officer (his business card is 18 inches wide now and his title still has to be in a 4-pt font for it to fit!)
You can find our podcast here and if you like this type of content, Jason always jokes there’s well over 300 hours of content you can catch up on over there. As of this writing we have 320 episodes we’ve published and it will keep on rolling, this substack and the new podcast in no way replaces this - think of it as augmenting it really.
Sadly, along with Jason’s many many well-deserved promotions and title expansions, his time available to pod has diminished so we’re more of a quarterly plan these days.
The ‘Why’ / ‘Why Now’?
What got me off the bench and back into an ecommerce/retail oriented startup is I was reading up on GenAI/LLMs, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and the very new (Q4 2024) concept of leveraging LLMs+RAG to power AI agents that collaborating together are agentic solutions and because of my now 26 years in this space, I could see a a future-state of retail that is mindblowing (we’ll talk about this in future articles and pods). But I realized, thanks to my ChannelAdvisor experience that brands/manufacturers and retailers are not ready for this. In fact, while I have 100% confidence the agentic/llm/genai side will get there, I am worried that it will get there too fast and our industry won’t be able to provide what is needed on our side to have amazing new agentic fueled consumer experiences.
That’s why I started ReFiBuy (an homage to the Research, Find, Buy cycle) and why I’m starting this substack and pod.
Our Retail Agentic Future is Very Important
I believe our retail agentic future is so important that it is worth it’s own focus area. In the industry we have focus areas on payments, platforms, RMN, marketplaces, omnichannel/harmonized. I believe by 2030 and probably sooner, the intersection of retail, ecommerce and agentic AI will be bigger than all that.
Like many of these past waves we’ve seen retail to ecommerce, from desktop to mobile, from DTC to marketplaces, and everything in between, the nimble fast and brave brands and retailers that jump into a new space, learn it and adopt it take share.
Traditional retailers that survived ecommerce, have learned the innovator’s dilemma is as big an existential risk as the changing world itself and are now likely to be some of the first to embrace this new world. Surviving becomes thriving and you learn to adapt or die very quickly.
The ‘What’.
That brings us to the ‘what’. The best substacks and podcasts know their lane and stick to it. I think that’s why the J+S show is so popular -we don’t wander too far out of our strike zone except the occasional Star Wars convo.
The Intersection of Retail and Agentic → Retailgentic
As I’m sure you’ve figured out, the name Retailgentic is the mashup of Retail and agentic. And within that name is the ‘what’ - as in what are we going to cover and talk about here?
Before we dive into that, one question that is sure to come up as I’m a big ecommerce guy (heck, ChannelAdvisor’s stock symbol was ECOM), is “Scot, what about ecommerce?”. I was having a catchup with a friend of mine, Justin Bomberowitz who historically helps brands scale up their online DTC efforts. This was a 90min meeting and he was riffing on the state of the art for what Brands have to deal with and I realized that in that time he never really said digital or ecommerce. I asked and he basically said: “ecommerce and digital as designations are dead - it’s all just retail now.’
When I talk to any retailer, we move in and out of their online and offline capabilities, the lines are blurred… it’s all just retail.
“….It’s all just retail now”
In a way this is sad, the digital rebellion is over. But isn’t the best measure of success that you’ve become so strategic and part of the old thing that it’s just now assumed that when you say retail there’s an offline and online underlying component in there. We’re so harmonized, we don’t even need to throw a new adjective (digital retail) or term in there.
Thus implied in Retailgentic is downstream impact to the digital and analog sides of that technology stack.
Retailgentic mission
Our mission at Retailgentic can be summarized as: To shine a spotlight on the new Agentic mega-trend and help retailers and brands navigate what a very rapidly changing new strategic risk and opportunity.
Detailed Topic Map
With that mission in mind, here’s what you’ll be finding here over the coming weeks, months and years:
Core Concepts and Foundations - Our initial content will lean heavy here because there’s tons of news coming out and since we’re joining this party already in motion, we want to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Retail strategy and impact - Most impotantly, we’ll be focusing in on what this means for retail. This is an important lense, because let’s say Meta comes out with Llama 4.1 - if that release doesn’t have anything new or new impact on Retail, we won’t cover it. However if it has a new shopping agent and a merchant center, giddy up.
Changing Consumer Behaviors and Experiences - Perhaps the biggest unknown right now is - will consumers care? If they do is this cannibalizing DTC with DTA or is it an incremental new customer?
Agentic Ecosystem Dynamics - Here we’ll be tracking the news coming out of the big LLM frontier providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.) as well as the retail technical stack providers (platforms, payments, personalization, etc.) that change the dynamics of the industry enough to impact your strategy.
Future speculative and Strategic Frameworks -Here we’ll read the tea leaves, try to figure out where this 90mph retailgentic puck is zipping to and give some predictions and strategic frameworks for brands and retailers to work within to help future proof from what’s sure to be a period of chaotic change. I just learned this week, that space is called the liminal space and, good news, we’ll be doing some hanging out there. We’ll be talking to a lot of folks on the bleeding edge about what’s working and what’s not working and gathering their predictions to see if we can get some crowdsourced ideas here.
There are sure to be more areas we’ll dig into, but that’s our current thinking.
What Retailgentic is Not…
In business I’ve found when defining a mission or strategy, it’s always helpful to also talk about the other side of the coin - what your mission/strategy is NOT.
Retailgentic is not for:
We are not here to promote what we’re up to at ReFiBuy - if you want that, we’ll be pushing that out via our LinkedIn Page and on the site.
We’re not going to be covering Jason and Scot typical broad ecommerce stuff like Amazon’s marketplace news, RMNs, anything of that nature, UNLESS, it fits our mission and has a relatively big and obvious retailgentic impact.
This is not a general AI news or strategy substack - If you want that, I can point you to 20 great newsletters and 100 awesome podcasts.
The Importance of Community
Finally, my hope for Retailgentic is that we carve out a space where our audience feels comfortable enough to share their opinions, collaborate and have robust discussions about the future - it’s by sharing, stress testing and learning that we all get better. As we progress, we’ll be turning on more and more of the substack community features such as post comments, chats, substacks or a discord, and so on. Perhaps at the next Shoptalk and NRF Big Show we can have a meetup or work to get some retailgentic content into those agendas. If you have ideas here, reach out.
Here’s what this will look like in Substack→
Up next….
Since we’re joining a very fast moving space ‘in action’, in the next post, we’ll catch you up on everything going on in the agentic retail world and
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The force is strong with you sir