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In a testament to the fact that no one cares about your website relaunch, I redesigned the Add To Cart website this week and launched it live. Nothing blew up. No one threw me a parade. However, you can now find your favourite topics by tag, get the full transcripts, and use enhanced search to find episodes you might like. It made me happy.

CHEERS, BUSHY

P.S. We're at nearly 200 registrations for next Friday's masterclass with StudioHawk, which is an Add To Cart record. Grab a seat here if you haven't already.

01

Struggling to get hold of anyone at your email agency this week? It's because they're all over on a junket at K:BOS, watching Boston, stuffing themselves with seafood and watching the new generation of email tech get unveiled.

The big announcements: Klaviyo is now headless. I thought headless had been retired but this is the new, sexier version of it, where more than 260 Klaviyo MCP tools and capabilities are directly available from Claude, ChatGPT or whatever AI environment you are operating out of. You can send emails, interrogate data and find your best customers using your Klaviyo data, without opening Klaviyo at all. They also moved Marketing Analytics into a new part of the platform called Personalisation, pitched as the layer that predicts what a customer will do next. It now runs audience optimisation, product recommendations, discount decisioning, send time and channel affinity off the same data platform.

There shouldn't be any surprises here since Klaviyo's shift from an email platform to a B2C CRM. Just like Shopify's power is in its product data, Klaviyo's power is in its customer data, not necessarily its front end. Time is ticking for any platform that doesn't have an MCP you can query from your own integrated AI setup. It won't be a nice-to-have soon.

02

Another week, another Meta agent. This one is called Muse and is very much targeted at consumers, letting them do household tasks such as booking a restaurant, making purchases and monitoring devices to ensure our kids don't go down the manosphere rabbit hole. Just joking, they wouldn't stop that.

But where it gets interesting for us is that Shopify has already connected. In Shopify's own words, if you're a Shopify merchant, your products are already live in Muse. Ask Muse to shop and it searches the Shopify Catalog for the best matches, and customers can complete the purchase in the Muse app with Shop Pay. No setup required. Muse itself is US-only for now.

What's interesting about this is that Shopify merchants never opted in, didn't build anything, and now your products are live inside a brand new sales channel that appeared overnight. I think it's mainly a good thing, but it does speak to all the places your product can pop up now, even without your knowledge.

There's no point in getting mad. Just get your kids rich. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein has a new kids' book out called We Can Be Entrepreneurs. It's a better retirement plan than being an ecommerce founder.

03

I do love how the Australian government continues to be the annoying mosquito on Mark Zuckerberg's great adventure for world domination. As you've probably heard by now, they've released draft Digital Duty of Care legislation for consultation, and inside it sits My Feed, My Way. Effectively, it gives Australians over 16 a choice between an algorithmically curated feed and one that only shows content from the accounts they have followed or subscribed to.

On the one hand, it will be great for brands with dedicated followers, ensuring their content gets a chance to be delivered (my school will be happy because I'll finally see their updates). On the other hand, it will be harder to be discovered organically. However, I've long given up on Meta for organic reach. It is all pay-to-play now.

I really love Jess Hatzis's view on this: it's another signal of the importance of owning your own community. With the level of algorithmic change, AI disruption and government interference, you can't have a business relying on organic social anymore. That's not negotiable.

04

ASOS was once known as affordable fashion for everything. Now they've come out saying their ability to offer everything is actually working against them, and that the next battleground for fashion is guidance, not choice. Their research shows 69% of consumers find shopping for clothes overwhelming, 64% believe the fashion industry offers too much choice and not enough guidance, and 33% have abandoned a purchase because they couldn't picture themselves wearing the thing. So they're focusing on edits, AI styling and a Buy The Look feature rather than relying on range to win.

We're seeing a lot of focus on reducing consumers’ cognitive load at the moment. This week, Costco credited its personalised recommendation carousels with close to $1 billion in digital sales across two quarters. The question isn't how to reduce the amount of product. How can you only show what's relevant and hide the rest?

While we're here…

I'm a firm believer that to succeed in today's ecom, you need unique products, but it feels like in Australia you're not protected if you are truly unique. This week, Khaos matched Universal Store's $90 price on a skirt that looked a lot like her own $160 Billie skirt, and founder Bessie Joseph turned it into the best four days of trade since she launched. Great outcome, and she still gave up $70 of margin to defend her own design.

And one of my all-time faves and Add To Cart friends of the show, JAM the label, sadly announced they're closing after almost eight years. Emma and Molly said adaptive fashion in Australia just isn't where it needs to be for a small business to be financially viable, and that it's tough for a small business to carry a whole clothing category and educate a market at the same time. I do believe we need to do more to protect those who have truly unique designs and ideas in a time of constant efficiency, automation and copying by those with deep pockets.

05

This week, Sephora announced it's entering its TikTok Shop era with the launch of Drop Shop on 19 September in the US. But it isn't a lazy launch. They're running monthly curated drops from partner brands, with creator content and TikTok LIVE events featuring founders and celebrity hosts, and products that stay exclusive to Drop Shop for a window before they reach Sephora.com, stores and other retail partners.

It's a really smart move because for TikTok Shop to work, you need to create events and you need to create an occasion from it, not just launch products. This one made the cut this week because I've heard from three different sources that TikTok Shop isn't far away in Australia and could be early next year. Of course, we've heard this talk track before, so don't wave your pitchforks at me if it doesn't happen but the noise is certainly rumbling again.

ATC PLAYBOOK #661

It’s not unusual to raise your prices. So why does it always feel so uncomfortable?

We’d all love to raise our prices constantly. Freight is going up, COGS continue to rise, it costs a lot to hire people. But raising prices feels like the one lever that punishes you for pulling it, so it often gets left alone until the margin is already gone.

Across Add To Cart’s archive the pattern is pretty consistent. The cost itself is rarely what upsets people. Being surprised by it is. So the job is not really working out the number. It is working out whether the cost is permanent, deciding how to show it, and then treating price as something you run all year rather than an event you survive once.

Today's Playbook is anchored by Bec Williams, CEO at Seed & Sprout, the Byron Bay sustainable lifestyle brand that has gone from a warehouse full of unsold bread boxes to $30 million in revenue in about four years. When the AusPost fuel surcharge dropped, she already had the scenarios written.

Examples from this Playbook

🌱 Bec from Seed & Sprout had the scenarios written before she needed them, so when the surcharge landed, she was explaining a decision rather than reacting to one. Customers came back with "if it costs $2 more for my order, then I'm in it with you".

💅 Anna from Kester Black was charging $5 shipping while the rest of the market charged $8. Check what the norm actually is before you cut your own margin to meet a standard nobody set.

🔍 Aaron from ShopGrok points out that the ACCC has pinged retailers over how price changes are presented. Get the mechanics right, not just the number.

🍺 Andy from Heaps Normal has absorbed ingredient increases more than once rather than passing them on. Working out whether a cost is permanent before you decide how to show it is most of the job.