Every company that sells online wants frictionless commerce. But what does that actually look like in practice? Most businesses have already figured out the #1 rule of cutting out friction in their physical supply chain: all of its parts need to talk to each other, and somebody needs to own it.
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Far fewer have figured that out for their digital supply chains. And somewhere in that pile of disconnected projects, data and commerce stopped talking. The most expensive relationship in your business needs work. This is their standing appointment. This is Data vs. Commerce.
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Each week, hosts Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie sit down with the people who own the data, run the platforms, and pay the price when those two stop playing nice.
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If you're responsible for any part of how products get from a database to a doorstep, this is your show. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Every live agentic checkout still has a human in the loop | Paul Drecksler, Founder and Editor, Shopifreaks | Ep. 20
Agentic commerce got pitched as a personal shopper that takes your request and spends your money without checking back. What shipped is a discovery tool that puts a shortlist on your screen and waits for you to approve the purchase.
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Matt Johnson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-d-johnson/) and Floyd Blaikie (https://www.linkedin.com/in/floyd-blaikie/) of Pivotree (https://www.pivotree.com) sat down with Paul Drecksler (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-drecksler/), founder and editor of the Shopifreaks newsletter, to agree on a definition. Paul took the commerce side. His definition is the strict one: the whole transaction runs autonomously, from discovery to purchase, without re-engaging the user.
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Then he explained why no live tool meets it. Chargeback and return liability sits with the merchant, courts are treating agents as tools rather than people, and shoppers enjoy the treasure hunt. Floyd asked who gets in trouble when the wrong dishwasher shows up. Matt made the case for B2B replenishment leading the way, and Paul pushed back that B2B platforms are decades behind retail.
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👤 Guest Bio
Paul Drecksler (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-drecksler/) founded Shopifreaks in January 2021. It's a weekly newsletter that recaps e-commerce, B2B, D2C and advertising news for merchants and operators, and it's closing in on its 300th edition. He reads thousands of articles a week so subscribers don't have to. He also consults through Ideas Focused, which includes B2B client work, and he's a longtime traveler who has lived and worked across Latin America. He took the commerce side.
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📌 What We Cover
Paul's strict definition of agentic commerce: discovery, product choice and payment all happen autonomously, based on the user's first input.
Why discovery today is "glorified search," and why embedded one-click checkout isn't new.
Amazon's set-your-price auto-buy and Floyd's Subscribe & Save test: are these pre-approved clicks or agentic commerce?
The B2B case: bills of materials and replenishment suit agents, but catalogs still live in sales reps' heads, PDFs and spreadsheets.
Who absorbs the cost when an agent buys the wrong dishwasher, and why chargebacks and returns land on the merchant.
Amazon vs. Perplexity, and the legal definition forming around agents as tools.
Why Paul still does his own follow-up research when output accuracy sits below 99.9.
Paul's mom, a Facebook group colorizing her photos, and what mainstream adoption looks like.
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🔗 Resources Mentioned
Shopifreaks (https://shopifreaks.com)
Pivotree integration services (https://www.pivotree.com/integration)
Heather Hershey, IDC
Zack Kass
Google's Universal Commerce Protocol
ChatGPT Instant Checkout
Amazon Alexa and Subscribe & Save
Amazon v. Perplexity
Meta's Muse shopping agent
T.J. Maxx
30 Sept 2026
Why only 5% of distributors call e-commerce their top channel | Ep. 19
Distributors think their customers want reps who know the catalog. Their customers mostly want to know where their stuff is.
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Floyd Blaikie (https://www.linkedin.com/in/floyd-blaikie/) brings Matt Johnson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-d-johnson/) a report she got lost in the morning they recorded. It's the State of Sales in Distribution 2026 from Phocas (https://www.phocassoftware.com/), built on a survey of 100 distributors. Floyd reads the numbers. Matt, who leads go-to-market for distribution at Pivotree (https://www.pivotree.com), explains why they look the way they do.
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This is a hosts-only episode, so nobody takes a side. The friction comes from the data itself. Then Matt admits that his own sales agent hallucinated on unmaintained data, and his step one for distributors has nothing to do with buying AI.
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📌 What We Cover
Why 34% of distributors don't measure new business win rate, and 39% don't track or don't know their forecast accuracy
Why the data used by the most people inside a distributor gets dirty the fastest
75% of distributors prize rep product knowledge, while about 5% say their customers want technical expertise
What happens when product knowledge lives in reps' heads instead of the product database
Why electrical buyers care about fast quotes and "where's my order?" more than discovery
55% of distributors call field sales their top channel and 5% say e-commerce, which Matt reads as being in the retention business more than the growth business
Every distributor with no plans to adopt AI has a sales team under 20 reps
Matt's step one: get the people who maintain the data into the strategic meetings
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🔗 Resources Mentioned
State of Sales in Distribution 2026 (https://www.phocassoftware.com/resources/ebooks/state-of-sales-in-distribution-report/preview), from Phocas (https://www.phocassoftware.com/)
Data vs. Commerce Episode 6 with Tromml
Amazon Business
Pivotree (https://www.pivotree.com)
23 Sept 2026
The sell sheet that turned into a product data audit | David Feinleib, Founder and CEO, It'sRapid | Ep. 18
Sell sheets, spec sheets and price books are the collateral B2B salespeople say they can't work without, and they go out of date the moment the catalog changes. Some manufacturers can only refresh a price book every 12 to 18 months.
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Matt Johnson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-d-johnson/) and Floyd Blaikie (https://www.linkedin.com/in/floyd-blaikie/) of Pivotree (https://www.pivotree.com) sat down with David Feinleib (https://www.linkedin.com/in/feinleib/), founder and CEO of It'sRapid, which generates marketing collateral straight from PIM data. David took the data side. His argument: when you produce thousands of documents from product data, every missing spec or diagram turns into a gap on the page. One customer told him it felt like an audit for their data.
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Matt pushed on governance and why stale data gets shipped anyway. Floyd asked whether the gaps turn into finger pointing. David recast the fight as data versus design, the left brain and right brain of every sell sheet.
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👤 Guest Bio
David Feinleib (https://www.linkedin.com/in/feinleib/) is founder and CEO of It'sRapid, a Palo Alto company that turns product data from PIM and DAM systems into sell sheets, price books, product images and retail media ads. Before It'sRapid he founded Content Analytics, an ecommerce analytics and product content platform that Syndigo acquired in 2019. He's a former general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, led product management teams at Microsoft, and wrote Why Startups Fail. He took the data side on this episode.
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📌 What We Cover
Why a customer told David, "I didn't realize I bought an audit tool," and what the gaps on the page revealed about their product data
Price books that can only be updated every 12 to 18 months because the data keeps changing on the team
The legacy workflow: custom scripts pushing data into templates, then sign off from marketing and legal
Regenerating 10,000 pieces of collateral after a logo change, and what happens when one field flows through to 10,000 sheets
Matt's case that the problem often happens in governance: letting stale data in and shipping it anyway
Webhooks as the ideal state, where a data change triggers regenerated sheets automatically
Data and design as David's version of data vs. commerce, and the client who went from one region to seven or eight
Whether print is dead, tested against a printed birthday card versus an e-card
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🔗 Resources Mentioned
It'sRapid (https://itsrapid.ai) (David's email: dave@itsrapid.ai (mailto:dave@itsrapid.ai))
Pivotree (https://www.pivotree.com) Intelligent Managed Services for Stibo STEP customers, including the free Intelligent Health Check
Stibo Systems STEP
Data vs. Commerce Episode 6 (field sales and AI)
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