The Front Door of Your Store Is Changing

Hi there,

I'm fresh back from Shoptalk, and if there's one thing I took away from the chaos of the show floor, it's this:

The front door of your store is changing.

Commerce is shifting quickly. We are moving away from search-driven, website-centric funnels and heading straight into discovery-driven, creator-led, AI-mediated ecosystems. If you want to win this year, you have to adapt.

Here are my top 6 takeaways from this week.

1. TikTok is a discovery engine - not a search engine

TikTok and Amazon serve fundamentally different roles. Amazon is where people go when they already know what they want. TikTok is where they find out they want it in the first place.

And who is driving that discovery? Creators.

Trust is heavily creator-led right now. 58% of consumers trust brands they discover via TikTok. But here is the part that really stuck with me: 67% of creators are nano creators. Authenticity is beating scale every single time. The brands winning on TikTok aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the most genuine creator relationships.

2. TikTok Shop is a real growth channel - treat it like one

Stop treating TikTok Shop as an experiment. It deserves a real seat at the table.

If you want to win here, here is what I heard from the brands actually doing it:

Dedicate resources. Put at least 1 full-time hire on it. You can't manage a growth channel on the side of someone's desk.

Start focused. Launch with 3-5 SKUs max. Resist the urge to throw your whole catalog at it.

Incentivize properly. A 17-25% commission is the sweet spot for creators.

Enable your creators. Giving them visibility into inventory and commissions directly improves performance. When creators can see what's in stock and what they're earning, they show up differently.

3. Lead with "audience math"

The best brands at Shoptalk were leading with where their audience is and how they behave - not with where they want their audience to be.

TikTok shouldn't just drive native conversions on TikTok Shop. It should drive incremental demand across all your other channels too. The key idea here is incremental audience expansion, not channel cannibalization.

Think about it differently: you're not pulling customers away from your DTC site. You're reaching people who never would have found you otherwise.

4. Omnichannel isn't optional (I kno, I know - but hear me out)

I might be the self-proclaimed queen of omnichannel, but I'm not the only one saying this anymore. The entire industry is catching up.

You have to meet customers wherever they want to shop, because the front door of your store isn't just your website anymore. Discovery is happening on social, through creators, and increasingly through AI. If you're not showing up in those moments, someone else is.

5. AI + agents are reshaping commerce - right now

There was a massive presence from AI players like Sierra at Shoptalk, and the energy around agentic commerce was impossible to ignore.

The key mindset shift every brand needs to make: efficiency and effectiveness are NOT a tradeoff with AI. You don't have to choose between moving fast and doing it well.

The emerging focus areas I'm watching closely:

Agentic commerce readiness - Are your systems ready to be acted upon by AI agents, not just browsed by humans?

Structured, high-quality product data - This is the foundation everything else is built on. Garbage in, garbage out.

Your data isn't just something you collect anymore. It's something you interact with, activate, and deploy.

6. Content and discoverability are the new infrastructure

This one might be the most underrated takeaway from the whole week.

Content is now foundational, not just for marketing, but for AI agents, discovery, and conversion. We are looking at entirely new paradigms:

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) - optimizing for AI-powered answer engines

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) - optimizing for generative AI discovery layers

SEO is not dead. But it is no longer enough. Brands must optimize for how AI surfaces and recommends products, not just how Google ranks pages.

The core theme across everything

We are no longer waiting for customers to search for us.

We have to be discovered.

Commerce is shifting from search-driven, website-centric funnels to discovery-driven, creator-led, AI-mediated ecosystems. The brands that get ahead of this shift now will be the ones setting the pace in 2026 and beyond.

Talk soon,

Kait