[00:00:00] Phillip: Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I’m Phillip.
[00:00:04] Brian: I’m Brian.
[00:00:05] Phillip: And last year, Shopify merchants generated a record $14.6 billion—with a B—dollars in revenue. That’s US dollars, not Canadian dollars. I think Canadian dollars would be a lot more. And that’s just over Black Friday and Cyber Monday as we head into this holiday season. I think the more interesting question is what’s going to happen after that rush? And what happens to in-store retail? As we’re looking at this holiday season, you know, agents are a big part of the conversation, right, Brian?
[00:00:34] Phillip: How are we going to look at how online and offline play together? And what gives people a reason to shop between both? And our guest today, she spent her career building technology for people who make commerce work, from Intuit to Clover. She works at the intersection of culture and commerce, retail operations, customer experience, and she’s going to break it all down for us. She is now the Vice President of Product at Shopify, leading retail and POS, and in her third month of employment at Big Green over there. Ellen Linardi, welcome to Future Commerce.
[00:01:07] Ellen: Thank you. Very nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:09] Phillip: I’m so glad to have you. You have spent your career building products to help small businesses compete with the bigger players. What does a store need to do today that it didn’t need to do five years ago?
[00:01:22] Ellen: You know, I think part of the challenge of what’s been very interesting just working on technology for small business over the years is I like to think of it as people with consumer resources but enterprise problems. Right? Because buyers at the end of the day don’t actually care whether you’re a small business or you’re a large merchant. Their expectation is you can give me what I need, find the things that I need, and be able to have a great experience. So the challenge, I think, of technology has always been how do you bring the latest and greatest and the complex technology that, you know, honestly, platform and industry allows to the fingertips of merchants who don’t have that much resources, don’t have the technology know-how, and make it actually useful and usable. Right? And so I think that’s what’s been very exciting for me since coming to Shopify. It’s like that’s kind of the ethos of the company. Right? Like, commerce better, make commerce work, and that just sort of speaks to, I don’t know, life’s work. So it’s been really fun to be here.
[00:02:19] Phillip: Yeah. It’s been our life’s work too, and yeah. Feel very, very aligned in that as well.
[00:02:23] Brian: True. True. True. Yeah. And it’s funny you’re three months in and you’re already on the eve of Black Friday, which is where we are here recording this, you know, really in the months leading up to BFCM at this point. And so you’re being thrown right into the fire when these, prior to the internet age, brick and mortar… smaller brick and mortar stores are now forced to be confronted with all of these technologies: omnichannel, like buy online, pick up in store, go in store, have it shipped to your home. Like, these are things that were previously considered enterprise-level technologies that are now being made available to every merchant out there. And so as, you know, Shopify enters this era, which some people are calling dead, which is ridiculous given the numbers from last year, how do you see merchants and brands start to think about using technology to help capture more of these shoppers and build upon the success of last year?
[00:03:33] Ellen: So I think fundamentally, right, like, a lot of the key jobs of what retailers try to do with their buyers is really develop a deeper relationship with them. Right? And while I would think of, like, online as an opportunity to start forming the relationship, a lot of the deepening and sort of kind of, like, higher loyalty with brands actually happens in person. Right? It happens with your associate when it shows up. It happens in the experience that you create in store. And really, I think a lot of our DTC brands, right, have seen it as an opportunity to actually expand their relationship beyond the goods to actually, like, a much more personal touch. So that’s been a really fun experience of, like, seeing how digital brands bring a different kind of experience to physical commerce. But at the same time, yeah, to your point of, like, where you’re supposed to sell keeps changing. Right? It used to just be in store and then they’re like, now go online. After online, they’re like, wait, it’s social media. Now it’s AI. So keeping up with that has been really tricky.
[00:04:33] Ellen: And I think one of the areas that we focus on from a retail, like, retail team perspective is not only for the DTC merchant, but for merchants who are actually retail-first or retail-only. Right? It doesn’t actually remove the need for consumers and buyers to be able to find you digitally, to be able to find you through AI searches and things like that. And we really kind of extend a lot of the power of the platform and capability that Shopify has gotten, like, really strong at to actually help a physical-first and physical retail merchant. So I think that’s been so exciting to me. And I think in the days of, like, BFCM, buyers are searching online. Right? Like, they’re going online to find out where to go, which business to visit, where to find the latest, greatest, like, fun products. And then they kind of go to the store and actually wanna experience, wanna touch a certain amount of it. And I think that’s kind of how both online and, like, physical commerce, I see, is coming together for this year.
[00:05:31] Phillip: Where they’re going online, I think, might be changing. Right? Where the points of discovery might be changing. Right? But their… the behaviors are the same. And, you know, our BFCM coverage found, you know, the rituals are still ritual. And even doorbusters, doorbusters are coming back, or at least they were last year. I’m gonna wait to see. My Gen Alpha kids, you know, they were like, let’s get up at 3:30 in the morning, go, you know, stand outside of Sephora. I’m like, for crying out loud.
[00:06:03] Ellen: It runs longer. I think that that’s really what has changed with BFCM. It’s not just that one day. It’s… it actually runs a much longer period of time of when, like, deals and opportunities tend to float around.
[00:06:16] Phillip: Yeah. We had some data from Deloitte, who were just on the show a couple weeks ago, that showed that some shoppers are, you know, some 40%, 50% of shoppers are done by the time that Halloween’s rolling around. You know, it’s like, that’s crazy to me. Obviously, ecommerce powers so much of that, right? We have this passive consideration of the ability to sort of always be on in shopping. We found in new modes research last year, 50% of people are always in a purchase consideration mode. They’re always thinking about what to buy next. And it’s not necessarily always for them. Right? And we see this now come out in so many ways. I mentioned nostalgia; novelty is another. How is the pull toward nostalgia and novelty showing up for the merchant set for Shopify, you know, across all of the retailers, you know, from DTC natives to omnichannel? I know POS is such a big part of your focus there.
[00:07:19] Ellen: Yeah. There’s a little bit of, like, experience that you can’t just quite get by going to an online store. It kind of reminds me of one of the recent versions of this that I went to. It’s a little, like, children’s shop in New York called My Little Sunshine. And they have this, like, vintage airplane in the corner where kids come and get their first haircut. If you go in there, like, there’s a haircut for your little kids. So people come in, making, like, an experience that could otherwise be somewhat scary for your kid just much more pleasant. And that’s kind of what I’m seeing a lot of when you mentioned nostalgia. It’s like a little bit of a blend of an experience with the shopping itself. Right? So it’s not just about the goods. It is certainly a lot about the recommendation and, you know, the point of view that the owner might have, the suggestion of the associate, what they tell you you could buy and all this stuff, but there’s a distinctive experience that I think physical retail can now create, and we see a lot more brands kind of leaning towards that. Right? Like, down to businesses that say, hey. Like, we’ll give you a whiskey as part of trying on the boots, and that’s part of our hospitality. Right? But a lot more experiential, I think, opportunity to bring that nostalgia and, like, unique relationship into an in-person setting.
[00:08:38] Phillip: That’s something that we are always harping on, is I think when people think of experiential, like, it’s almost been reduced to just putting a cafe in the store, which is kinda, I think, sort of sad. When I was growing up, it was FAO Schwarz. Like, let me…
[00:08:56] Ellen: Yes. Yes. Run around and get lost there.
[00:08:59] Phillip: What happened to spectacle? Right? And I love how you put it there. I really think that we are seeing a trend back toward that, and tactile. Something that comes to mind is I was in Columbus a few months ago and there is a tiny store in the, like, convention center area. There’s a tiny shop called Big Fun, which… it doesn’t have to be big for it to be big fun. And it’s just packed to the brim. Like, this place is… it’s full of nostalgic toys, and they’ve just got the best curation in the world of, you know, every He-Man, every My Little Pony. And it sort of runs the gamut from, you know, seventies and eighties toys all the way to today. And it’s, you know, spanning generations. I think it can be done. So I think it just requires a lot of thought and intentionality, to your point.
[00:09:53] Ellen: It’s one of the things that makes it really fun from a technology perspective to be in the space, right? Is that technology can be helpful, but it’s also so distracting. Right? You can spend so much time trying to set up, so much time trying to learn, like, what is the latest, worrying about, like, all these, you know, changes in the market, that honestly, if your favorite thing is to collect, like, little toys and, like, funky things in order to be able to sell and distribute, like, that curation, period. Like, we want to be able to bring technology to allow merchants to spend more time doing what they love and less time kind of fussing around with the technology. It should just work. Right. Like, the workflow matters, your efficiency, where you’re spending your… how quickly can you get to a task? All of that matters because it’s simply a distraction from what you’re there to do. Right? Curate the best things for your stores and create the best experience for your customers. So I think that’s been kind of, like, a cornerstone of how we think about our product. And grounded on that is the reality that every business has their workflow. Every business is going to have something a little bit unique, and especially when you’re running their, like, operational interface, it’s so, so important just to be respectful of that.
[00:11:05] Brian: We talk a lot about good friction versus bad friction and how a lot of the friction that’s been in the way of making purchases has been technology-related. We have to fuss, like you said. It’s always a challenge. It can be in the way. Instead, we wanna have opportunities to create friction that’s good, where it’s relational and sort of helpful and life-giving. I think one of the things that’s really interesting about this coming moment, and we found this in a study we did last year, is that 40% of shoppers sort of expect to use AI as a concierge.
[00:11:48] Brian: And there… what’s interesting about this is people are using AI on the go. They have it on their phones. They’re actively, like, using AI as they shop in store. And you talked about sort of that direct relationship between the shopper and the storekeeper and the associate. But we’re introducing almost, like, a third person into the relationship now in AI. Do you have any advice for how brands can plan for interacting with someone that’s actively using AI in an in-person experience?
[00:12:27] Ellen: I think it starts on two fronts. It starts before they show up, to make sure that, I think, your store, your retail, your business is actually searchable, available. Right? Like, I think as part of the Edition, one of the things that we’re sharing is the fact that the retail stores and locations are all actually going to be searchable and accessible through AI on, like, the UCP side, right, which is really important. So from our side, on the platform, making sure that our businesses are available, searchable, and can be returned back to the buyers as an opportunity to come and visit when they’re looking for different things is number one: get them through the door. I think the second thing is then, you know, to your point of how do you interact with it, it’s like there’ll be information that AI has been able to provide them with, maybe the kinds of goods, what to consider. Right? So then the question is, what’s the unique experience that you bring to them when they show up? That’s more of the experience side, the efficiency. So, you know, not letting your customers sit there for ten minutes while you go to the back of the room to go find their items.
[00:13:33] Ellen: Right? Like, that becomes really, really important. So what we’ve seen with some of our customers is, you know, we have one that does customized boots. Right? Tecovas has this challenge of, like, you gotta run to the back room and go find the boots that are right for your buyer, what they’re looking for. And they might’ve found it on AI. Right? They’re like, hey, there’s this awesome boot place. Historically, they had to wait, like, five, ten minutes for someone to go to the back before they can try it. Now what I think we’re seeing businesses do is, like, creating capability that allows your associate to quickly communicate to the back office, like, hey, bring me up this size, this color, this particular style. Right? And then, you know, from some of our merchants, we see them, like, cut down from five to ten minutes, between the time you call out what you wanted to trying it on, down to, like, one minute forty seconds. And that kind of, like, efficiency, like, maximizing the time in person because it’s so hard, because it’s so valuable, is just really, really key for your, like, in-store experience.
[00:14:34] Phillip: There’s a… again, I think that comes back to some of the capabilities that have existed in the sort of enterprise experience before now being democratized to everybody. You mentioned workflows earlier. I kind of want to double-click into that. I think there’s something that’s sort of overlooked in conversations like this, is, like, sort of the tactical. Like, what specifically do you see merchants jumping into right now? What are they actually putting into practice that is providing the efficiency in their business? And, like, what do you think is most interesting for folks right now as they’re adopting POS? Because I think that right… especially right now, people might be in budget planning season or looking at making a change for next year.
[00:15:31] Ellen: Workflow is key. It’s almost… it’s everything. Right? Because, you know, one of the things that I’ve learned over the years just serving small businesses is not a single one is created exactly the same as the other. Right? Like, this particular one might say, hey. We want you to ask for the customer name, and we want you to be able to mention that, hey, you have an upcoming birthday. Whatever flow and process it is. Some people might need ID, other folks might have suggestions of add-ons or bundles, but it’s quite unique to each business. And I think the idea of actually customizing your point of sale, like, selling form to the workflow that you have, is quite powerful. Right? So we have this thing called Smart Grid, which allows you to customize the quick buttons, the searches. Like, for a boutique store, it might be surfacing, like, the latest set of catalogs, so your associate can, like, easily access it. For a drugstore, it might be to ask for your date of birth, right, to be able to, like, quickly enter, you know, when you were born in order to be able to sell you, like, what you’re looking for. So…
[00:16:38] Phillip: We’ve used it in our pop-ups. It’s been fun.
[00:16:40] Ellen: Yeah. That’s awesome. So I think Smart Grid is incredibly powerful because it’s an acknowledgment of the different workflows that exist for our merchants. Right? And so one of the things that we see folks do is, you know, try to customize this flow to make it right for them. Now, part of the challenge is I still do think that the majority of folks, like, set it and forget it. And the thing is, like, businesses evolve. Right? Like, maybe today you didn’t have a discount and you find out that, like, dude, like, giving that 15% discount after your first visit is just key and you wanna add that. So over the years, what we’ve seen is, within the Smart Grid, there’s inefficiency that starts surfacing within maybe the number of searches that your associate is doing. Right? The number of taps that you’re doing. This is kind of where the technology becomes really cool, because we’re able to, like, measure the number of taps that different associates are using on the Smart Grid and now provide a recommendation of how businesses should improve their stuff. Right? And so we are seeing, like, a decent amount of traction with people going back into their Smart Grid, trying to optimize it, get it better. I do think it’s actually an underutilized component in the stores today. And what we’re trying to do from a platform perspective is make it easier for merchants to recognize and identify places where inefficiency is actually happening, because they tend to, like, creep up on you.
[00:18:04] Phillip: Yeah. I think too, like anything, like, sort of we fall into ruts, and maybe we call them SOPs. Right? I think that’s… and that can happen too, especially in holiday traffic time, and maybe we have seasonal staff, right? That’s probably not the time to be making a lot of changes. But into next year, I think that’s the time to really look at, okay, what’s working, what’s not working, where can we measure, where can we look to find improvements in prep for this? We were thinking about sort of the psychology. I think of Shopify, and I follow Harley and Tobi on Twitter, who can’t, right? I think you all are very cerebral. You all lead with thought leadership a lot. So, you know, I’m thinking about the fundamentals of good retailing, how you’re building POS for how people are shopping, both from the customer experience side and, what we were just talking about, the merchant experience side. So, you know, what’s new on the roadmap because of merchant feedback and data? And maybe how is that informed by customer feedback and data? Because I’m sure you see both sides of it. Yeah. And how are you putting it into practice in thought leadership? There’s three questions for you.
[00:19:30] Ellen: So we’ll start with kind of what’s new. Right? Like, I have… and you’re gonna hear a similar theme around, like, uninterrupted, like, personal and customer service, right, and ways for the platform to actually keep enabling that. So especially in the season of, like, busy selling and things like that, like, really optimizing this year for uninterrupted selling. So whether you’re on the counter, on the go, side-by-side selling, right, to actually have the form factor and help our businesses be able to do that a lot more successfully, whether it’s through their mobile phones, through a terminal. Right? Like… but I think selling is moving away from the counter to wherever the buyers actually happen to be. Right? And so kind of really enabling that uninterrupted selling, not just for line busting, but maybe, like, approaching a customer and a buyer who is exploring something, being able to close out the sale right there on the floor. So really facilitating and making that easy for everybody to be able to accomplish, I think, is gonna be key here. The second thing I would say is, you know, knowing who you’re actually selling to and knowing who your customers are, to be able to then establish a relationship, has always been the challenge of retail.
[00:20:42] Ellen: I used to say, like, one of the biggest challenges we have with physical in-store purchases is everyone’s anonymous. Right? Like, people are anonymous. You get a receipt, you get a paper, they walk away, and there’s no way to bring them back. So one of the areas that I think is really important, and is a key part of what we’re accomplishing during Editions, is how do we make it easier for the buyer and merchant to actually establish a relationship. Right? Removing that friction increases the ability, and to enhance that, like, it really increases the ability for those relationships to be formed. And then to carry along, whether it’s through an email offer or to an online offer or wherever it is. Once you have a customer identify themselves to a merchant, they tend to spend significantly more with the business over time. So I think that’s a really important part of it, is, like, actually transitioning from, like, thinking of that sale moment just simply as a transaction to a relationship-forming motion.
[00:21:40] Brian: I think it’s really interesting. We, you know, we say that an in-person transaction is the most anonymous transaction we have and yet it is the most personal transaction that we have at the exact same time. The store associate and the person that interacts, the customer that interacts, that’s a more human engagement and a deeper moment of relationship building than any online transaction ever has been. And so I think what’s really interesting about what you’re saying is, because people do spend a lot of their lives online in a digital context, having a digital relationship is an important part of being able to continue to, like, build upon that in-person moment. And so I… I’m curious, like, as Shopify starts to continue to improve the experience for the store associate, give them more data, give them more tools, give them… make it easier, how are you coaching, or are you providing guidance, thought leadership, as Phillip said, for brands and merchants to be able to not just make the interaction more efficient, but actually find ways of using the time that’s available to establish real connection? Because there’s a world in which we remove all the friction out of an in-store shopping experience and people begin to feel like there’s no difference between going in store and shopping… what’s the point? So what are some of the ways that you’re thinking about, okay, this is actually something special, someone’s taking the time to be here, and how can we use the data that we have to help make it even more special?
[00:23:35] Ellen: Yeah. I think, you know, as to Phillip’s question on, like, you know, thought leadership and what it is that, like, Shopify sees and does differently, is this idea of, like, the continuous relationship and experience of a buyer online and offline. Right? And so if we think about, like, a store that has an online store, I go in my browser, I add a couple of things to my cart. And I was like, I don’t know. Right? You leave it, and then you come in store, and then they see that I’m Ellen, like, identified. So this whole idea and concept of, like, a cart that actually follows me to a store experience. Right? This concept of, like, abandoned cart and being able to see actually what did Ellen browse? What was Ellen interested in? Right? The ability for the associate to actually have that data and information, to know what I as a buyer was browsing online, and be able to kind of carry on from that and be able to provide recommendations. Potentially, if you have stores where different associates are managing different sections. Right? Think of, like, a department store where I’m buying clothing from one. I’m gonna, like, look at, like, makeup or, like, bags and shoes in a different section.
[00:24:42] Ellen: The ability for one associate to then, like, share a cart with somebody else, another team member of mine, to be able to finish that experience. So it’s… I would say, like, the… I don’t know if it’s novel, Phillip. Right? Like, but maybe the key hypothesis is to make the buyer’s experience as whole as possible. Right? And that comes with, like, our expectation, really. Right? Like, set everything aside and think of yourself as a consumer who’s trying to purchase. Make it magical for me. Right? Whether I show up online, I show up in store, I’m talking to an associate on Floor 13 or 7, I leave and come back, that you know who I am, you know what I need, and you just make me feel special and understood in that experience. And I think that is where brands and businesses have an ability to, like, leverage the technology and the data and the information to actually create that. Right? And in a way that, like, makes it easy. Right? I can just, like, share a cart. I can see your abandoned cart. I identify who you are. The same centralized, I think, information is part of what makes, like, Shopify commerce actually really, really powerful. Right? The minute your information, your data, and everything sits in multiple disjointed systems, it just…
[00:25:54] Ellen: It takes too much work to be able to string all the information together. And I don’t think we’ve spoken about this too, but, like, you know, especially for larger merchants, this is not a problem that has never been solved before. Right? A lot of the things that we’re talking about have been, like, the hypothesis of what a lot of large businesses have been trying to do for years and years and years. The question is how hard or how easy is it for you to do it? Right? How many different, like, back-end system integrations? How many different developers do you need to hire in-house? How much time does it take to do all of those? And it’s really an abstraction and removing a lot of complexity, because fundamentally, it’s a single catalog. It’s a single customer identity. It’s a single customer journey that is accessible regardless of whether you’re online or offline. I mean, like, that is both, like, the… I would say, like, the novel idea, as well as you’re like, it just makes sense. Right? Like, how is this not just a thing? But it is really, really hard. And I think historically it has always been accomplished by piecemealing different pieces together.
[00:26:59] Ellen: Right? Trying to make it work, and therefore impossible for small businesses and smaller merchants to actually accomplish on their own. Right? So I think that is, like, the cornerstone of our hypothesis. Right? Our belief of what it is that we can do for retailers, how we can help them create this both aspirationally difficult, but it totally makes sense, kind of experience.
[00:27:22] Phillip: And I think that’s, you know, probably part of the thing that leads to such growth and success, right, is… the data shows it. The offline POS GMV grew 32% year over year. That’s in Q2 2026. I’m sure the recent numbers could probably… again, you can come back at me, but, you know, you have… I’m just looking at the list of brands: Canada Goose, GUESS, David’s Bridal. What are brands at that scale shaping? We talked a little bit about how the smaller players are trying to gain the capabilities of the enterprise. The enterprise, when we talk to them every day, they look at the smaller players as disruptive. They want those capabilities too. So it kind of goes both ways, right? How do those brands at that scale shape what Shopify is building next? How are you learning from them in that conversation? Right? Because I have to assume that the growth is coming from both ends of the scale as far as adoption of the platform.
[00:28:29] Ellen: Yep. Absolutely. What enterprise fundamentally does is, like, it exposes the friction that the platform has when it reaches a certain level of complexity. Right? And so in a lot of ways, what they do is they raise our bar on, like, reliability. It raises the bar on, like, accuracy, our handoff on customization. This helps us actually understand the things that need to be enhanced on the platform, and then places where it should just be extensible. Right? Like, for example, one of the things that we do is, like, quick device activation. Right? Just scan a QR code to be able to activate your next devices, because the ability for an enterprise business to be able to just light up, like, multiple different devices during the high selling mode without having to send email and password and login and all that stuff is really important. We take that capability, put it back in the platform, and then make it available for all the merchants afterwards.
[00:29:23] Brian: Yeah. And that… it seems essential to have that toolset going into holiday, because actually, a lot of holiday is actually about new customer acquisition. You know, there’s all the new deals. There’s things that people end up buying that they wouldn’t have been able to buy before, potentially, or wanted to dip their toe into. A lot of holiday shopping isn’t just about gifting. It’s about purchasing for yourself too. There’s a lot of data about this as well. You have so much data coming out of your ecosystem to help merchants turn these one-time acquisitions into long-term retention and loyalty. So can you give us a little bit of a window into how that… how you’re able to do that?
[00:30:04] Ellen: Yeah. I think the holiday season is a chance to establish a lot of new relationships with buyers. And then as we look forward to, like, January and the post-holiday shopping season, to be able to follow up with them and actually bring them offers, opportunities, inform them of what else your stores are doing. It’s that ongoing engagement with consumers through the messaging platform, being able to communicate what your stores are actually doing, that the platform can help you with. And I think helping our businesses easily be able to accomplish that based on recommendations, based on templates, just ensures that they don’t simply create a list without engaging with the customer afterwards. Right? Like, a customer list is as good as what you do with them afterwards. So I think the follow-through on a lot of the, I’ll say, the data and the information that the platform makes available is very key to all of these businesses.
[00:31:04] Phillip: Yeah. I think that when the whole job, the entire job in retail is to acquire a customer once and then keep them loyal. Right? Unfortunately, the job has been how do we stop reacquiring the same customer over and over? The nature of the job has changed a little bit over the last few years, especially post-pandemic. We did some research recently. Ellen, we were looking at… we got this dataset of 600,000 customer reviews from, I think it was a little over a dozen celebrity-founded brands. And we found that even if there’s a notable name behind a brand, it’s still all the things that you might expect that drive people back to a repeat purchase. It’s product quality, it’s good customer experience, right? It’s how fast did the product arrive? Was it, you know, what I expected it to be? It’s the product reviews. It’s what other people said about the product and their experience with it. And so hype doesn’t sustain. It’s all the things that you might expect. Fundamentals are still fundamental, right? You have a lot of experience here. Is there any advice that Shopify has to help retailers, you know, think, especially in holiday acquisition, to convert those customers into lasting customer relationships? What are the fundamentals? Yeah. How do you think through that?
[00:32:35] Ellen: I think a couple things that are maybe worth mentioning is we are definitely seeing a lot more creative point of view being demonstrated and communicated in, like, physical retail. Like, Tuckernuck was a really interesting merchant who created their store, like, like your home. Right? Like, you go into your own closet and things are hanging there, and it really delivers results. Right? Like, they actually see $100 more spent when people come in store than they do online, and that’s amazing. Right. Yeah. Like, I think to really think about the physical store as an opportunity to communicate a point of view and an experience. And I think, secondarily, being able to optimize the experience of what your associate can actually do with your customer, maximizing the time spent with your buyer because, you know, like, Brian, like you say, it’s a hard thing to get people in your store. So when they are, maximize the time. And then once you have that relationship, to remind them, right, of what you represent… to remind them of, like, what else your stores can offer to them, to bring them back. But, yeah, the basics never change. Right? So making sure that expectations when people show up can actually be met, and if not, exceeded.
[00:33:46] Brian: Well, yeah. And on that note, then… and I love where your mind’s at, but, like, if you… if we fast-forward five years and an agent can buy anything on our behalf, and… according to data that Meta put out recently, 25% of the use cases for Muse right now are shopping.
[00:34:05] Phillip: That’s what I hear.
[00:34:07] Brian: Yeah. That’s…
[00:34:08] Phillip: I have a hard time believing it.
[00:34:09] Brian: That’s just being helpful.
[00:34:10] Phillip: Don’t quote me on that.
[00:34:11] Brian: I am also skeptical. But what does the store evolve into? You know, we… we kind of already see some of this motion. But, yeah, where do you see kind of the endgame of physical retail?
[00:34:25] Ellen: Yeah. I mean, honestly, a lot of us are all projecting. Right? Like, technology is changing so quickly. We’re like, maybe this is what will happen, but I think the ability for us to create a nice experience for the buyers matters a lot more. Even during COVID, it’s that you just have to meet the buyers where they are. Right? And that buyer expectation continues to evolve. But to make that easy, right, maybe I can browse online and say, I am gonna come in, and there’s these three things I’d like to be able to, like, test out and try out. Right? Like, imagine, like, I personally can imagine browsing online, pulling up seven outfits, and saying, I’m gonna go in store and I’m gonna try them on. And by the time I show up, the stuff is waiting for me and I get to maximize my time in store. Right? And so I think it just continues to evolve to say, like, buyers are not forgiving with wasted time.
[00:35:17] Ellen: Right? And time in store is not wasted time. It’s only wasted time when you’re waiting. It’s really minimizing all the inefficiency for the buyer. Retail is not gonna really shift in the next five years in what we actually want. The technology is going to allow the friction to be eliminated. And, you know, really, from a platform or software perspective, what we’re trying to do is to make that possible and to enable that for everybody.
[00:35:42] Phillip: That’s what we’re all about. What a great way to end it. I think we’re… I think we have talked for so long, Brian, about, you know, the elimination of friction, the introduction of good friction, or what we qualify as friction. Is it even friction? Is it just the stress?
[00:36:02] Phillip: It is. It’s relational. We need some friction in our lives. It’s the kind that we adopt. It’s the things we like. It’s the things that slow us down. Right? You wanna slow down with a good book. Right? It’s… I like a physical, tactile book. I could, you know, like Billy Evans, I could 3x chemistry videos on YouTube. I could do that. That’s probably not, you know, probably not good for anybody. We can work down content. Sometimes you want to slow down. And I think that’s a great perspective, Ellen, on where maybe we’re headed. It’s like, yeah, I love that perspective. What a great time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing it. I love where you all are heading. Thank you for thinking of the merchant, and thank you for making the customer experience better too.
[00:36:45] Ellen: Thank you for having me.
[00:36:46] Phillip: Yeah. And thank you all for listening and watching this episode of Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast at futurecommerce.com. And if you wanna bring more Future Commerce into the world, you can do that. You can visit us at our summit. It’s coming to the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, February 10. We have an incredible lineup. Go check it out: visions.futurecommerce.com. Joining us back, you know, once again, we’ve got futurists, technologists, visionaries from all across the world. You don’t want to miss it. visions.futurecommerce.com for our annual VISIONS Summit. And you can save a little bit between now and Black Friday. Go and save a couple hundred dollars off of your admission, and, very proud to bring that back to you once again. And remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We’ll see you next time.
