Hello everyone, and welcome back!
As you may know if you follow this newsletter closely (which you should), I just got back from my much-needed vacation. Between consuming an unbelievable amount of pita gyros, spending a lot of time basking in the Greek sun (who would have thought I’d become the kind of person who enjoys the beach), and getting stung by some Lovecraftian monster and having to take antibiotics for it, I also managed to catch up on some interesting commerce-adjacent stuff.
Hope you enjoy the read! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go readjust to the fact that I have to work for a living.
The things that matter
Source: Elena Verna
Everyone is performing AI transformation, and it's drowning out the real wins
Most people can't say what an AI agent actually does, yet present modest wins (summarizing Slack, drafting emails) as life-changing.
The theater runs on incentives: social media rewards shock value, marketing sells uncertainty as certainty, and investor pressure pushes employees to claim "invisible AI teams" they can't show.
The alternative: share real results, admit prototype stages, celebrate twenty minutes saved, and treat AI as something that needs constant monitoring, not set-and-forget.
Our take: When it comes to AI in commerce, on-stage and off-stage conversations are very different. In the last few weeks, we’ve talked to operators who have been psychologically coerced into running GEO programs they don’t fully understand, and digital teams forgetting about their shiny new internal tools faster than they build them. People are struggling and afraid to admit it. If you’re leading a commerce org right now, it’s time to put a clear, pragmatic, measurable strategy in place—otherwise you’re just doing a whole lot of wheel spinning.
Source: Marketing Operators
How (not) to A/B test your landing pages in Meta
Funnel congruency is everything: a landing page only performs against the ads it was built for, so a strong page behind mismatched creative reads as a losing page.
Meta scans your landing page, PDP, and offer to decide who sees your ads, so splitting existing traffic to a very different offer (a $39/month funnel against an $88/quarter one) can crater conversion and hand you a false negative.
Genuinely new landers, offers, or templates perform better launched as separate funnels than A/B tested; upper-funnel metrics and low-precision "canary" reads beat waiting for statistical significance on thin traffic.
Our take: The congruency point is the one we'd underline twice. The lever most brands miss isn't the page or the creative in isolation, but the alignment between them. When the ad promises one thing and the page delivers another, the test is dead on arrival, and you learn nothing about the page itself because the creative already broke it. Fix the handoff before you touch the layout. (This goes for CRM tests too, by the way.)
Source: Vercel
Vercel and Shopify are rebuilding Hydrogen to run anywhere
The new Hydrogen is open source and runtime-agnostic: it runs on Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, or a custom setup, dropping the framework lock-in the original was built around.
It ships in three layers: shared core utilities, prebuilt React client components, and framework-agnostic server guidance and templates instead of proprietary code.
Vercel is folding its own storefront, vercel.shop, into Hydrogen, which will become the reference implementation once it stabilizes.
Our take: What a curveball from Shopify and Vercel, and yet it makes a lot of sense. Coupling Hydrogen tightly to one framework (Remix) and then acquiring that framework were big bold hairy bets that didn't pay off, and unwinding them is way overdue. Also, by folding Vercel’s commerce offering into Hydrogen, Shopify is de facto establishing itself as the solution for headless commerce. That said, as Alberto recently wrote on our blog, the use case for Hydrogen is still pretty narrow, so don’t get too excited.
What we’ve been up to
This time of the year is always a little crazy!
In late May, the whole team decamped to the Abruzzo coast for our annual retreat, which this year doubled as Nebulab's fifteenth birthday. We spent the week on the Costa dei Trabocchi, eating an indecent amount of seafood served straight off the trabocchi (the improbable wooden fishing platforms on stilts that jut out over the Adriatic), settling scores in a beach volley tournament, and getting very lost on an orienteering course.
Then June turned into conference season. We were at Shoptalk in Barcelona (June 9–11), where AI dominated the agenda (duh!), and we closed the month at K:LDN, Klaviyo's flagship London event at Tobacco Dock.
As Klaviyo partners, we were watching the roadmap, and there was a lot to watch:
Composer, their new AI marketing agent, entered public beta (it takes a spotted opportunity all the way to a launch-ready campaign on your real account data, with a human still approving the send)
Social Marketing hit general availability, turning Instagram followers into owned subscribers
Customer Agent now replies in 100+ languages out of the box. 475+ features shipped in a year is a serious pace.
The day closed with a fireside chat with Tinie Tempah—not a sentence I ever expected to write in this newsletter, if I’m being honest.
Finally, we launched a brand-new Shopify storefront for VisionOttica, one of Italy's largest eyewear and optical retail chains. The team really pulled a magic trick with this one, taking it from design to a live store end-to-end in just two months, a record for us and a pace we genuinely didn't think was on the table for a build this size. We have much more coming down the pipeline for them, so stay tuned!
That’s it for today’s issue. As always, thank you so much for sticking with us, and see you very, very soon! 👋