Shopify Exec Reveals the Future of Post-Anonymous Retail

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1:10We'll see you at the Vision Summit, visions.futurecommerce.com. Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Philip. I'm Brian. And last year, Shopify merchants generated a record$14.6 billion, with a B, dollars in revenue. That's U.S. 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 this holiday season, agents are a big part of the conversation, right, Brian?

1:46Oh, always. 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 employee at Big Green over there. Ellen Lenardi, welcome to Future Commerce.

2:21Ellen Linardi: Thank you. Very nice to be here. Thanks for having me. 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? You know, I think part of the challenge of what's been very interesting just working for 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 doesn't actually care whether you're a small business or you're a large merchant.

2:55Ellen Linardi: 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 industry allows to the fingertip of merchants who doesn't have that much resources, doesn't have the technology know-how and make it actually useful and usable. And so I think that's what's been very exciting for me since coming to Shopify is like that's kind of the ethos of the company, right? Like make commerce better, make commerce work.

3:25Ellen Linardi: And that just sort of speaks to, I don't know, life's work. So it's been really fun to be here. It's been our life's work too. And feel very, very aligned in that as well. 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 month 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 now forced to be confronted with all of these technologies. Omni channel, like buy online, pick up in store, go in store, have a chip to your home.

4:13Like these are things that were previously considered enterprise level technologies that are now being made available to every merchant out there. And so as 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?

4:46Ellen Linardi: So I think fundamentally, a lot of the key jobs of what retailers try to do with their buyers is really develop a deeper relationship with them. And while I would think of online as an opportunity to start forming the relationship, a lot of the deepening and higher loyalty with brands actually happens in person. It happens with your associate when it shows up. It happens on the experience that you create in store. and really I think a lot of our D2C brand right have seen it as an opportunity to actually expand their relationship beyond the goods to actually like much more personal touch so that's been a really fun experience of like seeing how digital brand bring a different kinds of experience in physical commerce but at the same time yeah to your point of like where you're supposed to sell keep changing right it used to just be in store and then they're like now go online And after online, you're like, wait, it's social media.

5:44Ellen Linardi: Now it's AI. So keeping up with that's been really tricky. And I think one of the areas that we focus on from a retail team perspective is not only for the D2C merchant, but for merchants who are actually retail first or retail only, right? It doesn't actually remove the need for consumer 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 gone like really strong at actually helping to a physical first and physical retail merchant. So I think that's been so exciting to me.

6:21Ellen Linardi: 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 want to experience, want to 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. Where they're going online, I think might be changing, right? Where the points of discovery might be changing, right? But the behaviors are the same. and you know our our bfcm coverage found you know the the rituals are still ritual they're 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 crying out loud it runs longer i think that that's really would have changed for like BFCM.

7:21Ellen Linardi: It's like, it's not that just one day it's, it actually runs a much longer period of time of when like deals and opportunities tends to float around. Yeah. We, we had some data from Deloitte who were just on the show a couple of weeks ago that showed that some shoppers are, you know, some 40%, 50 % of shoppers are done by the time that Halloween's running around. You know, it's like, that's crazy to me. Obviously, e-commerce 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 our new modes research last year, 50 % of people are always in a purchase consideration mode.

8:04They're always thinking about what to buy next. And it's not necessarily always for them, right? 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? Across all of the retailers, from DTC natives to Omnichannel, I know POS is such a big part of your focus there.

8:32Ellen Linardi: Yeah, there's a little bit of 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 they went to. It's a little children's shop in New York called My Little Sunshine. And they have this vintage airplane in the corner where kids come and get their first haircut. If you go in there, there's a haircut for your little kids. So people come in making an experience that could otherwise be somewhat scary for your kids, just much more pleasant. and that's kind of what I'm seeing a lot on 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 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 brand kind of leaning towards that right like um down to businesses that say hey like we'll we'll give you a whiskey as part of testing up the boots and that's part of our hospitality right but a lot more experiential um i think opportunity to bring that nostalgia and like unique relationship into a in-person setting that's uh something that we are always harping on is i think when people think of experiential, like it's, it's almost been reduced to just putting a cafe in the store.

10:04Which is kind of, I think, sort of sad. When I was growing up, it was FAO Schwartz. Like, let me,

10:10Ellen Linardi: right. Yes. Run around and get lost there. What happened to Spectacle? But, and I love how you put it there. I really think that that's, we are seeing a trend back toward that and tactile, right. And, and that's where, you know, something that comes to mind is I was in Columbus a few months ago and there is a tiny store in the 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.

10:53And it sort of runs the gamut from, you know, 70s and 80s toys all the way to today. And it's, you know, spanning generations. I think it can be done. So it just requires a lot of thought and intentionality to your point.

11:07Ellen Linardi: 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 all this changes in the market that honestly, if your favorite thing is to collect little toys and funky things in order to be able to sell and distribute that curation period. We want to be able to bring technology to allow merchants to spend more time doing what they love and less time fussing around with the technology.

11:43Ellen Linardi: It should just work. The workflow matters. Your efficiency, where you're spending your time. How quickly can you get to a task? All of that matter 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 about how we think about our product. And grounded on that is the reality that every business have their workflow. Every business is going to have something a little bit unique. And especially when you're running their operational interface, so, so, so important just to be respectful of that.

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13:36Not vibes, not dashboards, but actual momentum. So you can see what's rising, what's peaking and what's already on its way out. Plus members get priority access and preferred pricing for future commerce events, salons, and summits where ideas leave the group chat and enter the real world. Future commerce plus is for people who don't need more answers. They just need better ones. So join us today at futurecommerce.com slash plus and get vision for your business futurecommerce.com slash plus join us today at futurecommerce.com slash plus now let's get back to the show 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 um we have to fuss like you said it's always a challenge it can be in the way um instead we we want to have opportunities to to create friction that's good where it's relational and and and sort of helpful and life-giving um and i think one of the things that's really interesting about this coming moment and we found this in a study we did uh last year that 40 percent of shoppers sort of expect to use ai as a concierge.

15:02And what's interesting about this is people are using AI on the go. They have it on their phones. They're actively 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?

15:41Ellen Linardi: I think it starts with two front. It starts before they show up and to make sure that I think your store, your retail, your business is actually searchable, available, right? Like I think as part of the addition, one of the things that we're sharing is the fact that the retail stores and location are all actually going to be searchable and accessible through AI on the UCP side, 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.

16:19Ellen Linardi: I think the second thing is then, you know, to your point of how do you interact with it, Like there'll be information that AI have 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 for the experience side, the efficiency. So, you know, not letting your customer sit there for 10 minutes while you go to the back of the room to go find their items, 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 a customized boots, right?

16:58Ellen Linardi: Tekova has this challenge on like, you got to run to the back room and go find the boots that's right for your buyer, what they're looking for. And they might have found it on AI, right? They're like, hey, there's this awesome book place. Historically, they have to wait like five, 10 minutes to go to the back before they can try it. Now, what I think we're seeing businesses do is like creating capability that allow for your associate to quickly communicate them back office. And say, hey, bring me up this size, this color, this particular style. And then from some of our merchants, we see them cut down from five to ten minutes between the time you call up what you wanted to try to down to like one minute, 40 seconds.

17:37Ellen Linardi: And that kind of efficiency, maximizing the time in person because it's so hard, because it's so valuable, is just really, really key for your in-store experience. 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?

18:30And like, what do you think is most interesting for folks right now as they're adopting POS? Because I think that, especially right now, as people might be in budget planning season or looking at making a change for next year.

18:45Ellen Linardi: Workflow is key. It's almost everything, right? Because, you know, one of the things that I've learned over the years, just serving small businesses, not a single one is created exactly the same as the other, right? 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 suggestion 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.

19:26Ellen Linardi: So we have this thing called Smart Grid, which allows you to customize the quick button, the searches. Like for a boutique store, it might be surfacing the latest set of catalogs so your associate can easily access it. For a drugstore, it might be to ask for your date of birth, to be able to quickly enter when you were born in order to be able to sell you what you're looking for. We've used it at our pop-ups. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. So I think Smart Gris is incredibly powerful because it's an acknowledgement of different workflow that exists for our merchants, right? And so one of the things that we see folks do is, you know, try to customize those flows to make it right for them.

20:11Ellen Linardi: 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 business evolved, right? Like maybe today you didn't have discount and you find out that like, dude, like giving that 15 % discount after your first visit is just key and you want to 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 measure the number of tap that different associates are using on the smart grid and now provide a recommendation of how businesses should improve their stuff.

20:51Ellen Linardi: And so we are seeing 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 make it easier for merchants to recognize and identify places where inefficiency is actually happening? Because they tend to creep up on you. Yeah. I think, too, like anything, 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?

21:38It's that's not probably the time to be making a lot of changes. But looking into next year, I think that's the time to really look at, OK, what's working, what's not working? Where can we measure? You know, where can we look to find improvements in prep for this? You know, we're thinking about sort of the psychology like we I think of Shopify and I follow Harley and Toby on Twitter. Who can't? Right. I think you all is very cerebral. You all lead with thought leadership a lot. And 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.

22:28So, 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.

22:40Ellen Linardi: Yeah. And how are you putting that into practice and thought leadership? There's three questions for you. So we'll start with kind of what's new, right? And you're going to hear a similar theme around uninterrupted personal and customer service and ways for the platform to actually keep enabling that. So especially in the season of busy selling and things like that, like really optimizing this year for uninterrupted selling. So whether you're on the counter, on the go, a 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?

23:19Ellen Linardi: 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, be able to close out the sales right there on the floor. So really facilitating and making that easy for everybody to be able to accomplish that. I think it's going to be key here. The second thing I would say is, you know, knowing who you're actually selling for and knowing who your customers are to be able to then establish a relationship has always been a challenge of retail.

23:57Ellen Linardi: I used to say like one of the biggest challenge 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 addition is how do we make it easier for the buyer and merchant to actually establish a relationship, right? Removing those friction increase the ability and to enhance that, like it really increased the ability for those relationships to be formed. And then to carry along, whether it's through an email offer 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.

24:43Ellen Linardi: 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, as the relationship forming motion. Quick question for all the brand operators out there listening. Do you know what it's like to order from your store on a Black Friday? Not the version that you see behind the dashboard, but the real one that happens after the checkout. The one that happens in confirmation emails and the shipping wait time and after the customer opens their order. That one. Because BFCM only comes once a year and that's the truest test of your actual customer experience.

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25:57And future commerce listeners get first dibs. Go grab your seat right now at shipfusion.com slash secret shop. That's shipfusion.com slash secret shop. For BFCM this holiday season, let Ship Fusion secret shop your brand for free at shipfusion.com slash secret shop. I think it's really interesting. 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 interact, the customer that interact, that's a more human engagement and a deeper moment of relationship building than any online transaction ever has been.

26:47And so I think what's really interesting about what you're saying is because people do spend a lot of their lives online and in a digital context, having a digital relationship is an important part of being able to continue to build upon that in-person moment. And so I'm curious, as Shopify starts to continue to improve the experience for the store associate, give them more data, give them more tools, make it easier, how are you coaching or are you providing guidance, thought, leadership, as Philip 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.

27:47Because 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 online. Yeah, what's the point? Yeah, 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 yeah i i think um

28:15Ellen Linardi: you know to philip your question on like you know thought leadership and what it is that like shockify sees and and do differently is this idea of like the continuous relationship um an experience of a buyer online and offline right and so if we think about like a store that has a online. I go in my browser and 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 identify it. So this whole idea and concept of like a cart actually followed me to a store experience, right? This concept of like abandoned cart and being able to see actually what did Ellen browse?

28:53Ellen Linardi: What was Ellen interested in, right? The ability for associate to actually have that data and information to know what me as a buyer was browsing online and be able to kind of carry on from that and be able to provide a recommendation. 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 going to like look at like makeup or stores, makeup or like bags and shoes on a different section. The ability for one associate to then like share a card with somebody else, another team member of mine to be able to finish that experience.

29:27Ellen Linardi: So it's, I would say like the, I don't know if it's novel film, 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, 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 associate on floor one, three or seven. 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 that is where brands and businesses and an ability to like leverage the technology and the data and the information to actually create that in a way that like make it easy.

30:15Ellen Linardi: I can just like share a card. I can see your abandoned card. I identify who you are. The same centralized, I think, information is part of what makes Shopify commerce actually really, really powerful. The minute your information, your data, and everything sits in multiple disjointed systems, 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 especially for larger merchants, this is not a problem that has never been solved before. A lot of the things that we're talking about has been the hypothesis of what a lot of large businesses have been trying to do for years and years and years.

30:54Ellen Linardi: The question is, how hard or how easy is it for you to do it? How many different backend system integration? How many different developer units to hire in-house? How much time does it take to do all of those? And it's really an extraction and removing a lot of complexity because fundamentally, it's a single catalog. It's a single customer identity. is a single customer journey that is accessible regardless whether you're online or offline. I mean, 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.

31:31Ellen Linardi: And I think historically has always been accomplished by piecemealing different pieces together, right? Trying to make it work. And therefore impossible for small business 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. And I think that that's 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.

32:11That's in Q2, 2026. I'm sure the recent numbers, you could probably, again, you can come back at me, but you have, just looking at the list of brands, Canada Goose, Guess, David's Bridal.

32:29What 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.

33:06Ellen Linardi: Yep, absolutely. What enterprise fundamentally does is it exposed the friction that the platform has when it reaches a certain level of complexity. And so in a lot of ways, what they do is they raise our bar on reliability. It raises the bar on accuracy or handoff on customization. This helps us actually understand the things that needs to be enhanced on the platform and then places where it should just be extensible. For example, one of the things that we do is quick device activation. Just scan a QR code to go activate your next devices because the ability for an enterprise business to be able to just be able to light up multiple different devices during the high selling mode without having to send email and password and login and all those stuff are really important.

33:54Ellen Linardi: We take that capability, put it back in the platform, and then make it available for all the merchants afterwards. it seems essential to have that tool set 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.

34:37So can you give us a little bit of a window into how you're able to do that?

34:42Ellen Linardi: Yeah, I think the holiday season is a chance to establish a lot of new relationship with buyers. And then as we look forward to like January and post-holiday shopping session, to be able to follow up with them and actually bring them, offer opportunity, inform them with what else your stores are doing is 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 recommendation, based on template, just ensure that they don't simply create a list without engaging with the customer afterwards, right?

35:26Ellen Linardi: 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 this businesses. We'll get back into today's show in just a minute, but I want to talk about a major shift in how we search online. AI platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini have completely rewired consumer behavior and expectations. We don't type rigid, fragmented keywords anymore. We describe what we need in natural language, and we expect intuitive, context-aware answers in return. Naturally, I think that expectation is carried straight over into how we shop through e-commerce.

36:10And shoppers now expect e-commerce search to work the exact same way that they speak. And with holiday shopping here, it's only natural that the absolute make or break this season for retailers is if your site is still stuck on basic keyword matching, you're going to lose high intent cards during the most critical weeks of the year. So that's where Salesforce B2C Commerce comes in with a Gentic Commerce search. Instead of forcing teams to manage thousands of manual merchandising rules, it uses AI to interpret your true shopper's intent and it guides buyers directly to the products that they're actually looking for.

36:48Salesforce breaks all of this down in how you can navigate this shift in an on-demand webinar. You can watch it for free on demand at futurecommerce.com slash Salesforce. Go beyond keywords with Agente Commerce Search and discover how to do that with this on-demand webinar at futurecommerce.com slash Salesforce. Thank you so much to Salesforce for partnering with us in this season of Future Commerce. 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?

37:33The nature of the job is, that's changed a little bit over the last few years, especially post-pandemic. We did some research recently uh and ellen we were looking at um we got this data set of 600 000 customer reviews from uh i think it was it was a little over a dozen celebrity founded brands um and uh we found that even if there's a notable name behind a brand that it's it it's still all the things that you might expect that drive people back to a repeat purchase it's product quality it's it's customer experience, right? It's how fast did the product arrive? Was it, you know, what I expected it to be?

38:16It's what it's the product reviews. It's what other people said about the product and their experience with it. And so I hype hype doesn't sustain it. It's all the things that you might expect. The 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?

38:46Ellen Linardi: I think a couple of things that's maybe worth mentioning is we are definitely seeing a lot more creative point of view being demonstrated and communicated in like physical retail. Like Tucker Nuck was a really interesting merchant who created their store 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 a$100 more spent when people come in store than they do online. And that's amazing. Wow, yeah. Like I think to really think about the physical store as an opportunity to communicate a point of view and an experience.

39:22Ellen Linardi: 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 what else your stores can offer to them and bring them back. But yeah, the basic never change, right? So making sure that expectation when people show up can actually be met and not exceed. well yeah and on that note then uh and i and i love where your mind's at but like if you we fast forward five years and an agent can buy anything on our behalf and yeah uh according to data that meta put out recently was that 25 percent of the use cases for muse right now are shopping uh that's what i that's what i hear yeah that's that's i have a hard time believing Philip's very skeptical.

40:21Don't quote me on that. I am also skeptical. But what does the store evolve into? You know, we kind of already see some of this motion. But where do you see kind of endgame of physical retail?

40:37Ellen Linardi: Yeah. I mean, honestly, a lot of us are all projected, 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 is that you just have to meet the buyers where they are, right? And that buyer expectation continued to evolve, but to make that easy, right? Maybe I can browse online and say, I'm going to come in and there's this 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 outfit and say, I'm going to go in store and I'm going to try it out.

41:15Ellen Linardi: And by the time I show up, the stuff is waiting for me and I get to maximize my time in store. And so I think it just continues to evolve to say like, buyers are not forgiving with wasted time. And time in store are 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 going to really shift in the next five years of what we actually want. The technology is going to allow the friction to be eliminated. And really from a platform, a software perspective, what we're trying to do is to make that possible and to enable that for everybody.

41:54That's what we're all about. What a great way to end it. I think we have talked for so long, Brian, about the elimination of friction, the introduction of good friction, or what we qualify as friction. Is it even friction? I don't know if it is. It's elation. 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 want to slow down with a good book, right? It's a, I like a physical tactile book. I could, you know, like Billy Evans, I could three X chemistry videos on YouTube. I could do that. That's probably not, you know, probably not good for anybody.

42:35We can work down content. Sometimes you want to slow down. And I think that that's a great perspective, Alan, on where maybe we're headed is like, yeah, that's, 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.

42:56Ellen Linardi: Thank you for having me. Yeah. And thank you all for listening and watching this episode of Future Commerce. You find more episodes of this podcast at futurecommerce.com. And if you want to 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 10th. 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 vision summit.

43:30And you can save a little bit between now and Black Friday. Go and save a couple hundred bucks 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.