It's the end of the year, and the end of an era. In this special episode of the Commerce Tomorrow podcast, Kelly and Dirk reflect on the transformative changes in commerce and at commercetools throughout 2024. They share their favorite moments, discuss industry highlights, and provide a sneak peek into what’s next for the commerce world in 2025. Tune in for insights, laughs, and a heartfelt farewell to this chapter of the podcast.
Special edition! commercetools announced Compilations, a new semi-annual showcase featuring over 50 product and feature updates, reinforcing the company's commitment to delivering constant innovation, faster time to market, and improved customer experiences for both end users and commercetools Platform customers. Dirk and Kelly discuss the Fall 2024 Compilations announcement, the impact these features drive, as well as what’s ahead for commercetools in the coming months and the next Compilations...
Is shopping entertainment? Evan Moore, Senior Vice President, NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships, answers the question. NBCUniversal uses composable commerce to enable seamless shopping experiences but their unique approach to commerce is also leveraging moments of inspiration (built with their audiences) to the benefit of the brand partners they work with. Evan recounts a key moment when instead of moving an existing audience to a new ecommerce destination, they pivoted to bring the commer...
From airport terminals to what happens when you run along the Hudson river, commercetools has some big news to share. Like Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! (if you know, you know), we’re at it again with MACH MACH MACH. Post MACH Three in NYC, commercetools announces a new CEO and a partnership with Microsoft/Azure. Needless to say, commercetools is not slowing down. For our valued listeners, we’ll discuss best practices for a digital commerce project implementation and what signs to look for that your p...
Imagine a world where everyone uses AR enabled by AI—what will shopping look like? Will we all have our own AI shopping assistants? Back again by popular demand, Dirk and Kelly find time in between their travels to explore "The Future of Shopping." With AI rapidly evolving into mainstream use, they discuss its significant impact on digital commerce, retail shopping and consumer behavior. 01:10: Anecdotes from the road 02:38: Reviewing ContentCon & going deeper on content management 08:38: Future...
Back by popular demand, we are back with another 1:1 episode where we're going deep on the topic of simplification. Dirk starts by talking through the founding of the commercetools product and original architecture goals, why MACH is mistakenly labeled as "complex" (hint: selection bias at play), how the buyers of commercetools have changed over the years, opinionated vs. unopinionated, the many ways we at commercetools are making our product and composable more generally easier, and where comme...
Dirk and Kelly dive into all things B2B commerce with Andy Hoar, one of the world’s foremost experts in B2B commerce. From a modern definition of B2B, to the state of B2B commerce, this episode covers composability in the B2B context, what’s next from Paradigm B2B and a sneak peek into an upcoming digital maturity report from commercetools and Master B2B. https://www.paradigmb2b.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyhoar/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dirkhoerig/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellygo...
Recorded live and in-person from commercetools’ Elevate - The Global Commerce Summit in Miami Beach, FL, we welcome Paul Hornby, Director of Digital Commerce Experience at The Very Group which boasts a heritage dating back to the late 1800s. Paul speaks of his journey towards composable commerce.
Step inside commercetools with Dirk and Kelly as they sit down with commercetools’ own CFO, Dan Murphy. This is an enlightening discussion around company efficiencies, key metrics to judge the health of a SaaS business, and what metrics to look for at various stages of company growth. Are your customers renewing? What does it cost to acquire a customer? Are the company goals aligned with its employees? How efficient is the sales organization? Is revenue growth the end all be all? Tune in to gain...
From a technology-standpoint, MACH is fantastic. However, the commercial-side of MACH can be cumbersome. Live from MACH Haus in New York, Kelly and Piyush Patel (Chief Strategic Business Development Officer of Algolia) go deep on the various industry initiatives to simplify the commercial-side of MACH. We discuss white labeling, BPO, cloud marketplaces, what the MACH Alliance has/can do, and more. 00:35 Welcome to NRF 2024, MACH Haus 02:17 What is NRF? 03:03 How does NRF differ from Shoptalk? 03...
That’s a wrap for 2023! In this jam packed episode, Dirk & Kelly discuss their recent trips, recap Black Friday / Cyber Monday, AI innovations at commercetools and across the industry, the changing competitive landscape, the economy and its impact to the tech ecosystem, when someone is going to do a PE roll-up of MACH Alliance ISV members, strategic initiatives for 2024, and upcoming conferences. 00:00:53: Where in the world is Dirk? 00:11:00: AI update 00:23:24: How’s the overall economy doing?...
Hosts Dirk Hoerig and Kelly Goetsch welcome Maia Benson, Managing Director of Forum Ventures. The discussion traces Maia's e-commerce and logistics journey, spotlighting her pivotal role at Shopify and the challenges of building the self-embedded shipping network. They cover the Flexport acquisition, challenges in fulfillment systems, and the industry's dynamic nature amid Gen AI impacts. Maia also leads us through funding landscape trends and the startup thresholds needed to be fundable. Timest...
Greg Alvo, Founder/CEO of Ordergroove on Subscriptions by Commerce Tomorrow
In this episode, Kelly Goetsch and Dirk Hoerig speak with Phillip Jackson and Brian Lange, founders of the media company, Future Commerce. Tune is as this roundtable provides cultural insight on the future of commerce. Is commerce simply technology that we adopt or is the future of commerce a bigger, more abstract idea - and, what does human nature and culture have to do with it? Additionally, we’ll get Phillip and Brian’s hot takes on AR, VR, Conversational commerce, AI and more! You can hear P...
Mu Ventures runs a $10m fund focused on seed and pre-seed rounds. In this episode, we discuss the role of venture capital(VC) in tech, key terms in the VC space, the value VC offers to startups and to end-consumers, and the mechanics of how fundraises work. We also get Mu's investment thesis, Gary's outlook on the fundraising market, and what Gary looks for when evaluating CEOs for his portfolio companies. 00:55: Personal background 03:58: What is a VC? Where do they add value? 07:50: Define key...
Tercera is the leading growth private equity firm in the composable space, providing growth capital to systems integrators (including Orium). Think of Tercera as a VC but exclusively for growing SIs. In this episode, Bill and Michelle explain what they look for when making investments in SIs, how investment banking differs from private equity, consolidation within the SI ecosystem and more. Jason provides great context on the role that SIs play, why they took on growth equity from Tercera, and h...
In this episode, Kelly and Dirk go deep on everyone's new favorite topic - AI. They discuss why this moment in AI is fundamentally different than what we've seen in the past, explain the underlying technology that powers AI, discuss whether AI is actually "self-aware" (and what that means), where we are in the tech adoption hype cycle, how we at commercetools are looking at AI, how AI impacts the products we offer at commercetools, how AI impacts hiring, and how AI is already and will even furth...
By popular demand - Dirk and Kelly are back with another 1:1 episode! As they wrap a commercetools-offsite, they talk about the overall economy, what's happening with other commerce vendors, deep dive on the recent Shopify news, recap Shoptalk and look forward to MACH TWO, recap Algolia's news, discuss the future of AI + commerce, and provide some commercetools updates. 1:14: commercetools off-site recap 9:30: MACH / composable adoption 18:53: Shoptalk US / EU recap 27:21: Macroeconomic outlook ...
What drives a teenager to build a commerce platform? While many software vendors went bankrupt at the time of the dotcom bubble burst, brothers Sebastian and Stefan Hamann built Shopware and have gone to on to thrive in a very competitive market. From early beginnings to a hundred million in funding, the importance of remembering the shopper ALWAYS, to what it’s like to work with his brother for over 20 years, Sebastian discusses it all! Timestamps: Personal intro / background | 1:17 What drives...
In this episode, Kelly Goetsch speaks with Darrell Rosenstein of the Rosenstein Group. Learn from one of the first ever LinkedIn users who literally went from index cards - yes index cards - to founding the Rosenstein Group, a leader in martech-related executive search. This episode features an overview of how the executive staffing industry works, how to stand out in this hiring market, how to prevent your top employees from being poached, who makes the best CEO, and how the types of people tha...
In this episode, Dirk Hoerig speaks with Gary Survis, Operating Partner at Insight Partners. Gary has learned that years of experience (whether it be marketing, owning & selling companies, being a CMO, operating partner) equates to various accumulated tools to put in your toolbelt. The learning never stops - nor does the selection of tools - confidence and trust being among them. Gary explains why marketing is a science and an art, why generative AI is going to disrupt and change marketing forev...
In this special episode, Kelly sits down with Mike Sharp to discuss all things product management. They discuss the scope of "product," Mike's view on the commerce space (having joined commercetools from telecom space), and the future of MACH
In the first episode of 2023, Dirk and Kelly review Kelly's 2023 predictions: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/23-predictions-2023-kelly-goetsch/. They discuss emerging competitors to commercetools, Shopify's "Components" announcement, the emerging role of DXC, AI, ChatGPT, and more.
Pipe17, a new member of the MACH Alliance, is pioneering the entirely new Order Routing category, which connects and routes various back-office systems and allows for intelligent routing of order-related data, thereby replacing legacy-style Order Management Systems. With the many parallels to what's happening in the commerce platform space, it's a fascinating listen!
In this episode of the CommerceTomorrow podcast, Dirk and Kelly sit down with Microsoft's GM of Retail and Consumer Goods, Sid Jatia, to talk through Microsoft's turnaround, Azure's approach to retail and consumer goods, Microsoft's various commerce offerings, Microsoft's in-store offerings for retailers, and the future of commerce, retail and consumer goods at Microsoft
In this wide-ranging episode, Dirk and Kelly sit down with Chris to discuss the Jamstack revolution that's sweeping commerce, MACH and Chris's involvement as an executive board member, Netlify and how it differentiates itself in the market, the emerging Digital Experience Composition space, and more.
In this episode, Dirk and Kelly try a new format and discuss the economy, the MACH startup ecosystem, thew 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle and more. If you like this episode, please let us know and we'll do more of these on occasion!
As Chief Growth & Innovation Officer of Saadia Group (New York & Co, Lord & Taylor, Fashion to Figure, etc), and the great-grandson of retail pioneer and legend Lane Bryant, Nick is a wealth of knowledge on the state of retail and technology. In this wide-ranging interview, Nick walks us through his career and the changes he's seen as well as talks through his views on current and future business and tech trends.
Tekton is a family-owned hand tool company that questioned conventional assumptions in its industry by building a direct-to-consumer channel. It sees benefits in running a vertically integrated model that goes from making wrenches all the way to fulfilling orders. In this episode, Dirk and Kelly speak with brothers John (CEO) and Jeff (CMO) on why and how they built out a new channel, without hiring outside help. They went full MACH using an in-house tech team out of Grand Rapids Michigan.
Having spent time at Circuit City, 360Commerce, Oracle Retail, Infor and now AWS, David Dorf is among the preeminent experts in our domain on POS and its ongoing evolution. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss where the POS market is heading, his work establishing retail standards through the NRF, Amazon.com and AWS, and the great work he and AWS are doing through the MACH Alliance.
