It's been almost two months since the last Commerce Outsights, which is a few more issues than we meant to skip. The last few months have been a little crazy (two Symposiums, several client launches, and one more event on the way; more on all of it below), and the newsletter is what gave.
We're back with two stories that, it turns out, are about the same thing: AI standing in for people. Meta's new agent stands in for the shopper at checkout, and synthetic users stand in for the shopper in your research.
One of them might just work. The other one certainly doesn't.
The things that matter
Source: Musings Of A Wandering Mind
Meta gave its shopping agent a face, and a cut of the basket
Meta's Muse Charm is a keychain with a screen and a fingerprint sensor that carries Jolly, a customizable AI agent that books trains, answers emails, and buys things. It ships in December.
The Muse app reached the top of the App Store and has passed 2.5 million downloads. Meta plans to take a small fee on the transactions its agent completes.
OpenAI rolled back Instant Checkout by March, with about a dozen Shopify merchants live. Walmart's purchases inside ChatGPT converted at about a third of the rate of its own site.
An agent works for whoever owns it: once the owner earns a percentage of the basket, the shopper's interests and the platform's start to drift apart.
Our take: Scaman's sharpest point is her own correction: the agent works for whoever owns it, and Jolly is on commission. Where we'd push back is on brands losing their grip. Brands do two jobs, expressing identity and overcoming information asymmetry, and an agent can only take over the second. Meta proved it with this very launch: the moment the agent took over the shopping, it needed a name, a face, and a spot on your bag.
Source: Nielsen Norman Group
Synthetic users will tell you exactly what you want to hear
Synthetic users are AI-generated profiles that simulate a user group. Tools such as Synthetic Users generate the profiles and run simulated interviews with them in seconds.
Compared against three real studies, synthetic users claimed to finish every online course and praised discussion forums, while real users had dropped courses and found forums contrived.
Synthetic users treat every need as a priority, can't report actual behavior, and approve nearly every concept they're shown.
Their valid uses are desk research and hypothesis generation, never a replacement for research with real users.
Our take: This piece is from 2024, but synthetic research is having a moment, and we think it's BS. When Shopify launched SimGym in the Winter '26 Edition, we called it a missed opportunity: it predicts experiment outcomes from simulated shoppers, who inherit every flaw NN/g documented here. The better move was sitting right there: open native A/B testing to third-party tools and pool anonymized results across Shopify's merchant network, so brands learn from how real shoppers behaved. A sycophant with a persona is still a sycophant.
What we've been up to
Here's what kept us away.
In September, we hosted Commerce Symposium: This Is Water twice: on September 8 at The Standard High Line in New York, and on September 10 at The West Hollywood Edition in LA.
We spent two evenings with operators from brands like Away, Rainbow Shops, Cometeer, AJ Madison, and U Beauty, talking about what's actually working in AI, merchandising, personalization, and loyalty, drinking and eating a bit too much, and dancing to the one and only Zen Freeman. It was great.
First up, we launched a brand-new Shopify store for Sebago, the American boat shoe brand that Italy adopted as its own.
When they came to us, Sebago had a logo, a palette, and decades of gorgeous archive photography, but no rules for how any of it should behave on a screen.
Our designers got to do the fun part (visiting stores and studying shoe boxes, strictly for research purposes) and turned what they found into a proper design system and brand-new digital home.
Apparently we weren't the only ones who liked it. Five days after launch, the Ecommerce Design Awards named it Store of the Day!
The second is Dog Heroes. Their story starts with Rina, the founder's picky dog, who flat-out refused to eat kibble. So Marco started cooking for her, and that kitchen experiment became Italy's first fresh frozen dog food company. (Rina is still, by their own account, the brand’s head of quality control.)
We moved them from a custom WooCommerce setup they'd been building for almost a decade to Shopify Plus. A few highlights:
The ultimate Klaviyo integration. Rather than just relying on the data synced by the Klaviyo connector, we enrich customer profiles with dog and diet information, enabling Dog Heroes to create granular segments and truly personalized campaigns.
A custom account portal. Shopify’s Customer Accounts are okay, but they’re not good enough for a subscription brand. We built Dog Heroes a beautiful custom portal fully integrated with their apps, but still editable through Shopify’s Theme Editor. The architecture we adopted was particularly interesting, so expect a deep dive soon!
Want to learn more? Check out the case study!
We have a few more case studies coming up, but I think two is enough for one email. Stay tuned. 👀
Finally, remember the thing I was annoyingly vague about in August? Here it is.
It's called the AI opportunity audit, and it exists because of something I keep hearing from brands: everyone has a Claude or ChatGPT licence, a few people use it every day, and nobody can tell you how many hours it actually saves.
So we spend four weeks with your customer service, merchandising, operations, and finance teams. We survey everyone, interview the people who actually do the work, and run a half-day workshop to map the workflows that eat up their week. Then we score every opportunity by how much time it saves and how hard it is to get there.
At the end, you get a prioritized list of what to adopt off the shelf and what's worth building, and we stick around to build it until your own people can run it without us.
We're beta-testing it with a few existing clients right now. If you'd like to be one of the first brands through it, just hit reply!
News from our partners
Delivering the best commerce experiences means working with the best partners. Here's what they've done recently:
Shopify: launched Canvas, a visual workspace for building your store with Sidekick, and made Next Gen Events, its declarative replacement for webhooks, generally available.
Klaviyo: announced Klaviyo Headless, which opens the platform to AI agents through more than 260 MCP tools (mostly in preview for now).
Gorgias: brought its AI Agent to WhatsApp in beta and let it process refunds and returns over SMS once the shopper verifies their identity.
That's it for today's issue. As always, thank you so much for sticking with us, and see you very, very soon! 👋