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Missed the last issue?
One AI project saves $100,000 a year writing product descriptions. Another cuts $10 million out of inventory. You can only pick one. “Inventory,” Casey and I said. We didn’t hesitate. Of course. Everyone picks inventory, right? Mike’s point is what comes next: why do so many AI pitches in retail lead with product descriptions?
We Finally Got One Right!
Tom Verrilli made a deal with us before we’d asked him a single question.
We’d just welcomed him into the Retail Razor studio tent at RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, and I’d confessed that Casey and I have talked about live-streaming and live shopping since the beginning of our podcast, always asking why it wasn’t working here yet.
Casey added the painful part: we’ve failed a lot of our predictions because of it.
Tom told us to make bold ones now. So I reset ours on the spot: live shopping keeps working, thanks to Whatnot.
“Deal,” he said.
I’ve waited years for a guest who could take that deal.
Tom is Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, and he led product at Twitch before that. Sellers on Whatnot did more than $8 billion in sales last year, and they beat that number in the first half of this year. The wait for live shopping to hit the mainstream in the U.S. and North America may finally be over. It just took Whatnot to get us there!
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Legacy, with no shade intended.
A couple of minutes into his first answer, Tom called traditional e-commerce “legacy.” Casey almost had a heart attack and stopped him cold.
“Are we calling e-commerce legacy now?”
Tom meant static pages with static images, where every product gets the same listing page. No shade intended, he said, and the gray in his beard means he grew up on the old way too. Then he made the case that’s stuck with me since.
A traditional site knows what you bought, which is how you buy a vacuum cleaner and get shown another vacuum cleaner.
A social platform knows your watch time, who you follow, and your chat history.
Live commerce gets both at once.
The catch is speed. Inventory on Whatnot moves so fast that what sold today won’t predict what sells tomorrow. Most e-commerce sites run recommendations overnight. Whatnot has had to do it in real time from the start, and Tom says AI lets them go deep and fast at the same time.
AI personalization, built on people.
I’ve said for years that most retailers think they’re doing personalization and most shoppers would disagree.
Casey’s version from this episode: “you touch something orange, I touch something orange, and we all get sent on the same journey.”
Tom’s AI personalization starts with the seller. Most Whatnot sellers are selling to people who’ve bought from them before, so Whatnot personalizes on who you like to buy from as well as what you buy. The funny seller. The calm expert. The one who takes requests. The liquidator running a digital TJ Maxx, where you might wait two hours for a bargain. The one with a curated run of Birkin bags.
That’s the best part of a good store, online.
Why stores still win, and where live fits.
Tom’s numbers changed how I think about this. US retail was about $7.5 trillion last year, and as we’ve said before, 80% of it still happened in person. People go to stores when they know they want to buy but don’t know exactly what. You need food, but you don’t know what’s fresh. You need a wedding outfit, and you’re never going to search for “wedding outfit.”
Stores deliver curation, knowledge, and advice.
Live delivers the same thing at a scale no store can touch. A shoe store with 30 people in it would never close. On a livestream, 30 viewers is nothing.
Casey’s instinct was impulse buying. Tom calls it high-intent browsing. You come to buy, you’re with friends, you might find a bargain, and an auction is fun because you feel like you’re winning.
He also explained why today is 2005 for live shopping, and how a Pokémon card seller got live lobsters onto Whatnot. I’m leaving both for the episode. The lobster story starts at 17:03, and it’s the best two minutes of the conversation.
Where I landed.
Tom thinks live could reach 15 to 20% of all US retail. That’s a trillion-dollar industry.
My take: retailers who treat live shopping as a side experiment will spend the next few years catching up.
Tom expects every retailer to spend the next decade working out how much of its channel mix belongs to live. I’d start working it out now. Pick one category where your associates’ advice already sells product, and put it on a stream. If AI personalization is on your roadmap, start with who your customers like to buy from.
And for the record, my live shopping prediction this year is the same one I’ve made every year. This time I’ve got $8 billion in sales and a deal with Whatnot’s Chief Product Officer behind it.
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🎙️The full conversation is available now - The Retail Razor Show, Season 6, Episode 14, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
This is one of eight episodes we recorded live at RetailClub, and they’re landing across all four Retail Razor shows over the coming weeks. If you’re not subscribed here yet, now’s a good time.
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Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show
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