What If the Future of Retail Isn’t Online? — with Bryan Weisberg

The biggest lie in modern commerce is that “retail is dead.” Most shopping still happens in physical stores, and that gap is exactly where opportunity lives if you know how to use it.

We’re joined by Bryan Weisberg, founder and CEO of MerchWise AI and author of The Future of Main Street. Brian has spent more than 40 years building businesses where technology is heading next, from early e-commerce and multi-merchant marketplace platforms to launching a fast-growing brick and mortar gift store. He shares why the world keeps underestimating Main Street, why the “everything moves online” narrative is incomplete, and why independent retailers aren’t losing because they’re inferior, they’re losing because they’re forced to operate manually while everyone else runs on software.

We get concrete about what breaks first: product onboarding, website content, and online merchandising. Bryan explains how copy-pasting manufacturer descriptions creates duplicate content that crushes retail SEO, how “store voice” makes AI-generated product descriptions and metadata actually sound human, and how social merchandising can bring your in-store experience to your website. We also unpack ROPO research online purchase offline, plus the three must-have buying paths today: buy online ship, buy online pick up in store, and research online then purchase in-store.

If you run a small or mid-sized retail business and want a clear 90-day plan to modernize without losing what makes your store special, this is for you. Subscribe, share this with a store owner who needs it, and leave a review with the one change you’re making first.

Ready to scale your Amazon business? Click here to book a strategy call.  https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man Podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income stream in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Schomer and Ken Wilson.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man podcast. On today's episode, we are joined by Brian Weisberg, founder and CEO of MerchWise AI, the author of The Future of Main Street, and a retail technology entrepreneur who has spent more than 40 years building businesses at the edge of what was coming next. Brian helped build an early multi-merchant e-commerce platform in the 1990s, launched Thousand Oaks Barrel Co., helped pioneer the home barrel aging category, and opened a 4,000 square foot gift store with his wife in just 60 days.

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Today, Brian is focused on giving independent retailers the ideas and tools to stop operating from weakness and start competing from strength. Very excited to have Brian on the show. Brian, welcome. Thank you so much. I uh I'm really happy to be here. Absolutely. So as I was preparing for this interview, I was doing some research, and what I found is your career has been all over. It's been music and multimedia and gaming in early e-commerce, manufacturing, physical retail, and now AI. One common thread was you tend to be a disruptor or tend to, this is my words, um, tend to be looking around the corner at what's next. And so what are some of the common threads that you've seen as you've engaged in each one of these different industries?

SPEAKER_02 3:07

Well, first off, I will say that I probably have missed more than I've I've hit. Uh um I have hit some uh spot on, and most of that time I happen to be at the right place at the right time. Um I don't want to say that, boy, I'm a visionary. Uh that's not at all the case. I just happened uh, you know, in the early days of multimedia, I was living in San Francisco, and the place that I was hanging out was right in uh it was South Park, which is was the the core

Learning To Spot What’s Next

SPEAKER_02 3:44

of where all that started. And everybody around me is is doing all of these really cool things, and I'm like looking at them going, I can do that. I'm gonna do something really cool myself. And so uh um it's just being at the right place at the right time. And I I think uh you know, a mantra that I think I live by is just listen, be aware of what's going around and and what's new and what are people um what are people kind of chattering about and see, wow, is this something that I'd like to get into? And you know, sometimes it is, and sometimes you miss the boat.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

And it it seems like early in your career you placed your your eggs in the e-commerce basket. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Um yes. I mean, it was not on purpose. I happened to be working at uh well, my my very first e-commerce experience was around 93-94, where I worked at a company called Island Graphics, and we had built a website and we're selling our software um on through the website, and there was a whole uh uh warehouse where guys were fulfilling the software and doing all of that, and I looked at that and said, Oh my gosh, this is really cool, and I just kind of wanted to be a part of it. And then uh by doing that, it kind of got myself into um into gaming, uh kind of through a series of uh of events. And in the gaming world, I started working at Sega, and I was kind of put on this project called Heat. It was the first multiplayer uh gaming platform on the internet, which obviously had uh an e-commerce component to it, so uh I was deep into that, and then by the time e-commerce as we know it really kicked off around 94, 95, I had already had a couple years of e-commerce experience. And um and then when that boom just happened, I happened to be at the right place at the right time again because uh I was working for a company called StyleClick, and we were managing and building websites for apparel companies. And apparel companies are an interesting breed of business because they don't really make anything, they're really marketing companies. They design stuff, somebody else makes it, and they go sell it. And a good apparel company sells a lot of it, and somebody else is who's great makes it. So, what I realized is that apparel companies could not participate in e-commerce because they didn't have any physical merchandise. And the kind of companies that we started working with, which were uh the Tommy Hill figures uh of the world and and Spiega shoes and uh Steve Madden shoes, um, they didn't sell the products themselves. So they were licensing, a lot of those companies were licensing their names for uh to other companies to make belts and hats and and other items. So I realized that, wow, we need to have a different type of c platform in order to support the apparel company. So we developed uh StyleClick, and it it was the first you know the first uh uh marketplace, basically. Um it allowed multiple merchants of record to sell under one brand. And um that experience just kind of you know, we got really big really fast. We took over uh the first website for the NFL, the PGA Tour, um NASCAR, and you know, all these great brands that had uh lots of people licensing their names, but they didn't sell anything. And so uh that was kind of my my jump into it. And at that time, Amazon was still just selling uh you know some books and and starting uh on records. So it was long before Amazon had ever decided to become a platform.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Wow, wow, and if you look at that model, the multi-merchant model, if we look at most of e-commerce today, um, you know, listeners of the show are selling on Amazon, they're selling on Etsy, selling on Groupon, Walmart.com. It seems like uh a lot of there's a ton of opportunity there. And and so that's neat that you were one of the pioneers in in the space. What uh what happened to that company? Um good question.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

So um we kind of went through this massive growing growth period, and then uh Barry Diller, who had a ton of the properties that he was managing, he basically said, Well, why am I gonna let these guys do it? I'll just buy the company. So he acquired the company and uh folded it into some of his other businesses, and um they were moving to the East Coast. I was in San Francisco at the time, or in LA at the time, and uh uh I didn't want to uh move and I just moved on to other things.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

All right, that's awesome. That's awesome. So at any point of

Building A Marketplace Before Amazon

SPEAKER_01 8:59

that journey did you question whether you were in the right industry? And it kind of what I'm getting to is how do you distinguish from being early from being wrong? Um, and and so like what what was your mindset at that point in time? Did you just wholeheartedly believe in e-commerce? Was it the people you were surrounded with? What what led to that that gumption to stay in that industry?

SPEAKER_03 9:27

Um good question.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Uh you know, uh so by the late 90s, I already felt like I was the the industry was I was late, or not late in the industry, but the industry had already matured, right? And um uh you know, you have these periods where um you know that you're at the very beginning, but then once you've been doing it for a year or two, it's not the beginning anymore. You know, and so you had the the end of the first phase, which uh which ended in in and around 2000 to 2003, and that's at least in my experience. And so here's something that's really interesting. Um, in all of that, I I did a number of jobs where I worked for a company called Sierra Online. And Sierra Online had a very early CD-ROM product that you could um uh uh you could build your your websites with. Okay um so I had already built many websites. Uh uh Sierra Online had this product, so I I was watching these what we'll just call this very primitive uh web development tools happen. And when I started my my company in 9099, 1000x barrel, we went and you started using an open source platform. And by early 2000, 2001, these big platform companies like Blue Martini, Commerce One, Ariba, they had all kind of fallen apart. So there was plenty of technology out there to build e-commerce sites, but then you get these little guys in in 2006, I believe, who's who think, wow, there's not a good e-commerce platform for e-commerce. We're gonna build one and we're gonna call it Shopify. Okay. So in their mind, and I listened to podcasts with the the gentleman who started it talking, in his mind in 2006, um there was nothing out there. Well, in my mind, you know, I've already been doing that for eight, nine, ten years almost, and uh, you know, it had been around. There's plenty of technology. Um uh it just wasn't packaged the way these guys did it. And they did it brilliantly because they made everybody feel, oh, I can just log on, type a couple things in, go through a couple questionnaires, and all of a sudden I'm gonna have an e-commerce site. And the thing that I think that they did the best was that they created the seamless experience of the credit card processing. Because before that, you had to hook up PayPal or you know any number of other systems that were out there. And if you weren't really technically minded, that was uh a difficult thing to do. And so they just took that little tiny nugget, that one little problem, and built what's now you know a gigantic business around that little nugget.

SPEAKER_03 12:42

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

And continue to do so. I one thing I've noticed in the space is a couple years ago, people would say, Do you have a D2C website, direct-to-consumer website? These days is very common for some someone to say, Do you have a Shopify website? I mean, it there's just an implicit assumption that if you're you are online um and selling from your website, that it is Shopify.

SPEAKER_02 13:07

And if you look at They're they're the Kleenex, yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Yeah, absolutely. And so um, so you know, continuing on this vein of of uh e-commerce and e-commerce trending in the right direction, uh Stat, I've heard you you bring up before is is roughly 84% of US retail sales still happen outside of e-commerce. Why does that narrative um why does is there a narrative that physical retail is dying? And why does that narrative remain so powerful?

SPEAKER_02 13:44

Um good question. Um in the early 1990s, I was we working for a brief amount of time at uh at uh McGraw Hill Home Interactive, who was a CD-ROM gaming company. And we had a guy who was uh uh a future futurist guy who was looking in the future. And I remember him having a meeting saying e-commerce is gonna hit ten million dollars this year. And they by ten in you know five,

Why Physical Retail Still Dominates

SPEAKER_02 14:18

ten years, it's gonna be a hundred million dollars or you know, something like that, which seemed like enormous amounts of money and enormous growth. In retrospect, it was nothing. So the the real question is why is that number so important? Um so when I opened up our our brick and mortar store, um the narrative had been that retail was was dying. And where I live, uh outside of Washington, DC, um retail stores were going well, COVID, during COVID, retail stores were going out of business left and right. And so I never wanted to open up a brick and mortar store. That was not in my future. However, uh from my my barrel company, we had a product that a particular retail store in our neighborhood um was uh was selling. My wife kind of managed that relationship and uh they decided to go, they were closing when going out of business, and so we decided to we attempted to buy the business, but couldn't do it for a number of reasons. But so we just opened up our own store. So as I started researching, um start you know, I was asking the same question you did. Why why does why do people think retail's going out of business? Because we still shop at plenty of retail stores all the time. We still shop online, but we shop in a lot of retail stores. And that's when I started coming across these numbers. Um uh yes, 84% is still done offline. And the question is, why is it why is that number um still so big? And what's gonna happen in the future? In the future, what we're finding out is that we're losing a couple points a year of sales to online, uh, the online uh uh world, but we're losing it at a much, much slower rate than we were losing before. Um and so as I'm looking at it, I'm thinking as a as an entrepreneur, I'm thinking, wow, that's a really interesting opportunity because if all this I've been so my head has been so deep into e-commerce all these years, why don't I think about the brick and mortar world? Because everybody is uh uh is focusing on e-commerce. In fact, you go to any of these Amazon conventions and you got 50 companies developing software for uh uh for Amazon sellers. You go to uh you go to the Atlanta market or the Dallas market, and you've got zero companies developing software for retailers, and and and you just realize, wow, that is the opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

That is really interesting. And I feel like you, when the industry is zigging, you are zagging. Um and so but I think that's a really really sharp observation that a majority of of retail is still happening in brick and mortar, and there's an absence of people servicing that market, and and that I I think that's a very c compelling case.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Um so your thesis the technology squirrel is going on, right? Squirrel's over there and this sees a shiny object, and everybody, uh all the other squirrels are looking to the shiny object, and nobody's bothering to look at all the acorns are over here.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Yeah, yeah. That's a really that's a really good observation. Um, so your your thesis is is that independent retailers are are not losing because they're inferior. Uh, they're losing because they're operating with the wrong playbook. So what are the three most damaging parts of that old playbook? And how have you done things differently at your own uh retail store?

SPEAKER_02 19:24

Okay, so um when I opened the store, uh we reached out to a number of other retailers to figure out what platforms they were using and what technology they were using. Uh most of the comp the people we spoke to were using LightSpeed. Um a handful were using Shopify. Um uh and so we decided, after researching both, that okay, we're gonna go with LightSpeed. It's uh a little bit more robust at the at the time for uh a big retail store. Um and uh anyway, so we get we get light speed. Then as we opened up the store, I realized that every single component of the life cycle of that product was all manual. And I've not been in a manual world for 30 years. Uh I live in my head in a digital world. So everything from your onboarding, your website is is basically manual. You're you're manually literally uploading every single thing. And then how you merchandise in your store, uh, the merchandising component is all manual. Um so everything was was manual. So the the three big components is literally onboarding uh your website and so and what we what I call social merchandising. Uh and these are all uh you know the the downfalls that that brick and mortar has. And let me kind of get into them a little bit more because if somebody's not familiar with all of this, I'll explain. So when what a retail store does is you go out to market and you are you you you walk around, you know, uh enormous, you know, multi-million square foot set of buildings in in Atlanta or or Dallas or in in

The Manual Work Hurting Retailers

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Vegas, and you find products that you think are gonna be interesting for your store. Well, first thing is you see a product, you ask the rep and say, hey, well, what who's selling this product near me? Right? If you're selling on online, you're gonna say, you're gonna look on Amazon, see what the product sells for, you're gonna you know get an idea how many sellers there are. Well, a retail store has none of that. Um once you decide to buy something, um, you get a piece of paper that says, oh, here's the purchase order. Uh it'll ship out two or three weeks. Two or three weeks goes by, you get the product comes in, and somebody manually has to put that into your POS system. Uh nothing is automated. Once it gets in the POS system, now you got to go and you gotta try to figure out, okay, I gotta develop uh, I gotta write stuff in here, a description, my my H1, your product name, I gotta put metadata in, all that kind of stuff. And to go and figure out all of that, that's about 20 to 30 minutes per product. So if you figure that an average retail store has about a thousand uh a thousand plus products that they're bringing in every year, you're talking about twenty thousand uh uh uh minutes of uh of work just inputting data, right? That product isn't selling at that point, that's just data input. It's an enormous amount. And so uh that's where the whole idea from Virtuise uh new company uh came in is that there's this is a com this is an entire industry that is fully uh manual. Um websites, the website, all the content on that website, now when you're when you're a say a Shopify seller and you've got uh you know twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty products, you have a lot of time to uh to plug that kind of information and optimize your listing. When you're a retail store that's that's bringing in a thousand items uh a year or more, you don't have a staff of people to uh to do that. So what's historically happened is you go to the manufacturer's website, you grab whatever they have, and that manufacturer's not talking to the consumer, the manufacturer is talking to the retailer. Here's what you need to know in order to sell this product. So that retail store has to develop out all the content themselves. Now, here's kind of where a big website problem happens, and we'll just call it the the Shopify product problem because uh just use the Shopify as the name for all websites. So If a retailer goes and grabs the content from the um manufacturer site, they have this, and then the other another retailer does the same thing. Everybody has the exact same content on their site. So now how does how does Google figure out which one should it show? Well, it's going to show the most trusted. Who's the most trusted? The person that's been there the longest, that has the highest quality uh content on their site. And so you're literally running doing all this work and you're getting very, very little benefit from it. Um the third thing is just the whole merchandising. You merchandise your store in a in in a physical world, but what do you do online? Well, you just put a picture put some pictures of a product online and that's it. Well, that's not merchandising. And if the store if your online store is supposed to be the second storefront of your retail space, you've completely neglected it.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

So let's dive into merchwise AI a little bit more. So who are is your customer avatar? Like who benefits most from using this service?

SPEAKER_02 25:37

So small to mid-sized businesses.

SPEAKER_03 25:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

Um, you know, generally retail stores that are doing a million to five or ten million dollars a year in sales. Um uh and it's in those stores, they have a number of employees. It's not just the mom and pop doing it themselves, it's a number of employees in there uh they have somebody who's focused on the onboarding. Uh they don't necessarily have somebody focus on the website because they don't do a whole lot of sales on the website. But uh they're kind of, you know, it they got a lot going on, but not enough to focus on that e-commerce component of their business. But most of them, and most of the ones I know, they do have a website. It's just uh it's just the uh uh you know the it's put on the back shelf, the back burner for a while until they can figure out what to do with it. So hence merch wise.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

I got it. I got it. Now as we sit here talking in August 2026, uh there's been a huge shift in AI. Um, I would say uh if this has been my experience a year to a year and a half ago, someone may send you an email and you you may say, This is AI generated content. They didn't even take the time to write up their own email. Um and it would look at it in a negative way. Um I think there's been a shift over in my experience the last three to six months where there's an expectation that you are using AI. For instance, if a if one of my team members comes to me with a question and they haven't tried to solve that problem with AI, I that's where I say, you know, go ask quad, like work through this problem with quad. And there are and I think there's been a shift in AI generated content, uh, in and especially copy. Like there's huge advantages of it. It does a really good job at at communicating well to your end customer.

MerchWise AI And The Store Voice

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Um, and so on the image side of things, uh, I would also say that I've seen some really impressive stuff with with AI images on video for the first time in 2026. I when I watch a video, I have to ask myself, is this real? Um, and it seems like there are some people that still um feel uh not trusting of AI video, and I'm not entirely sure why. Um, and so uh what what's your experience been on the receptiveness of of AI within the the brick and mortar retail space?

SPEAKER_02 28:25

And so I I don't think too many people are using AI. Okay. Uh you ask most retailers, they'll say yes they are, but they're not really using it to solve business processes. And so AI is kind of a a a big term, right? And uh and the real trick is how do you get how do you let the system do all a whole bunch of work for you, but you want that work to be in what we call your voice. Okay. So one of the things that we do with merchwise, and you're kind of uh you know, touching on this subject, when you get when you set up merchwise, we ask the store a whole series of questions. And what you know, we learn a is a store uh sell to kind of a beach community type of customer. Um do you have a high-end customer, uh average customer? What is the who is the customer and and what the store owner, what is that what is the experience of that store? So we create what we call the the store's voice. So with that voice, we're going to uh develop the content for your website in that store's voice. So if you have a product, let's just say a canvas bag, if you are uh in Michigan, around the Great Lakes, that bake that bag is for the for lake life, right? If you're down in uh in the outer banks, well, that's a beach bag. Uh if you're in Texas, that's a pool bag. Um so you want to be selling that product based on how your customer uh would utilize that product. It's not, you know, product is only as good as how people what people do with it and how it fits into their life. So merchwise grabs that voice, and then what we do is when you put a product into your POS system, it goes in, you open it up in MerchWise, and then we automate every bit, every component of that product. So the the name of the product, uh, the description, um, we do all the metadata, uh, we look at all the image and we write alt text for the images, and it all does it in a certain speak, that is the the voice of that store. So we're trying to capture that experience of that retail store and carry that to the internet because uh there's a whole nother component of this that we're just launching uh in the next few days, which is our our concept of what we call social merchandising. So I'll explain social merchandising. Um, when you walk into a store, somebody who's extremely talented at making things look great has made the store look beautiful. They've made a beautiful display. You know, you think back to the days of Macy's where you walk by the window, and I mean that it was incredible. It was wonderland, right? So some people are great at that in retail. And it doesn't matter what kind of a store. We have a gift shop, but you could have a bicycle shop or whatever, and some every store has a certain look and feel. Now, that look and feel inside the store and the way that the customers interact with the store, uh in the brick and mortar world, that's a personal one-to-one thing. Online, that dies. So imagine if all that social media that you do, if you could take that social media and load that into MerchWise. Now you go and you're grabbing, you're taking that experience, that store experience, and you're moving that to the internet. Now, it doesn't happen overnight because you've got thousands of items on your on your website. But over six months or a year, when that website gets just filled with that, the experience of that store, it creates, it's going to create a totally different kind of experience uh in retail. What's even more important is what I call the rock star effect. When you start seeing somebody uh on the internet a lot, they become a rock star. And my wife, we my wife is the face of our store. And I tell you, we can't go out to restaurants without a half a dozen people saying, Oh, look, it's Mona Miami going into, oh, I bought this in your in the store, and I saw your video the other day. I just love that. So that's the experience that retail ultimately will be moving to. And in order to not have to worry about competing with Amazon, retailers need to build an experience that Amazon can't create. And Amazon will never be able to do that. It doesn't capture that local thing, and you don't see the people in

Social Merchandising And The Local Edge

SPEAKER_02 33:43

that store out in restaurants or or at the movie theater and and say, hey, that's the person I saw in the video. And that ex that experience is just so important. Uh, and that's ultimately what we're what we're bringing to the retailer.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

That's outstanding. That's really good to hear. And and that seems that technology and what you're able to do uh to help those brick and mortar retailers uh makes a ton of sense. And and um I'm glad that there's uh somebody out there to to to serve them. So I personally, you know, love going shopping, like like going to the store. There are certain stores that you just um you you just can't help but but go to. Now, if I'm ordering mousetraps, I can get those on Amazon. It's a commodity type product, but um, especially for those um really neat stores that sell cool products and and it it's an experience. And so, well, that's really really neat. Um I want to talk a little bit about research online purchase offline. And this has been a trend. Um, I've heard you talk about it. Can you talk what is this and how do you think brick and mortar retailers can leverage this?

SPEAKER_02 35:03

Okay, so the new term in the industry is called ropo, research online purchase offline. And it's basically come to be called the ropo effect. Now, think about um think about your experience. If if you are deciding, uh, you say to your wife, uh, hey, let's go to a new restaurant, what's the first thing you do? You pop open your phone, you go online, hey, you know, new restaurants near me, and you do all the research, then you get in your car and drive. When was the last time you got in your car and drove and said, We're gonna go find a restaurant? Yeah, absolutely. Ten years maybe? Yeah, long time. Right? So so what we're finding is that about 65%, and there's different studies that that have different numbers, but about 50, 60 to 65 percent of shoppers who shop even locally, um, do research online and then purchase in the retail store. When I I like uh I like building stuff, uh so I I love going online to Lowe's or Home Depot, seeing if they got all the stuff that I need, and then I drive down to the store, pick it up, put it in the back of my car, go home and start my project, right? That's ropo. And what retailers don't realize is that if you don't have a great website that speaks to your customers the same way that experience in your store is, you're missing out on opportunity because that store down the street, if they have a better website or they have the same type of product, they're gonna be going there. And one of the things that I I've been telling a lot of retailers lately is that you know, I a lot of people kind of take their, I don't know, their top 20 or 30 products and they put them on their website. Well, that's great. But if they're going and looking for uh for something that, you know, a gift for a guy, and you don't have gift for guys on on your site, but the other store does, they're gonna get in the car

ROPO And The New Buying Journey

SPEAKER_02 37:09

and go to the guy down the street. So it's important to realize that that web experience has got to become uh close to or equal to that experience in your store.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Yeah. What I'm hearing is is that there's it's not one or the other. It's not it's not you're an e-commerce company with a website or you're a brick and mortar retailer. As you do business in today's age, you need to have both. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_02 37:42

Absolutely. I mean, think think about it. There's three kind of three transactions that happen. There is the the ropo, research online, purchase offline. Okay. Uh you could research online, purchase online, or you can research online, buy online, but pick it up in the store. Okay. That you have to have all three of those uh options available to people because you can easily lose a sale by not having all three.

SPEAKER_03 38:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Um that is yeah, I I it I would if I think of brick and mortar retailers, um it seems like, oh, it's only the big ones that have all three avenues really well defined. Your Lowe's is your Home Depots, things like that. And so um, I I really like that. Now, let me ask you this if you were advising, say, a $1 million to $10 million e-commerce or retail owner today, what would you tell them to fix in the next 90 days before investing in another channel ad platform or AI tool?

SPEAKER_03 38:55

So again, the the the same three things.

SPEAKER_02 39:02

Update and make sure that that the quality of content on your website is top-notch. Okay. Um images. One of the things that that a lot of retailers have done is they followed Amazon. Okay. The Amazon experience and a retail experience, it's two different shopping experiences, and you have to realize that. Um in my book, I I have I divide that out uh pretty nicely in a nice in a nice chart. But people are shopping on Amazon because they already know what they want. People are coming in their store because they're trying to explore and figure out what they want. So you don't show products with a white background on your website because there's no context for that product. You show the the product that in in use and in a use it that in a way that your customer would see themselves using it. And you can have that white background product on picture on your website, but it is all about the lifestyle and that lifestyle based around your customer, not just a general lifestyle picture and you know, AI thrown together type of deal, but not that you can't use AI to do it, but uh you want to make sure that that those pictures are speaking to your customer. Okay, and that's one of the components built into merchwise. Um you load up picture in uh and then you using the using that cut that store's voice, you can have it go and develop you know different lifestyle pictures that are similar to the type of lifestyle that your customers would have. So it can generate pictures um uh for you within our application. Uh and so that's the the the one thing. The the other thing that you have to have is you've got to be able to fix that that

The 90-Day Fixes That Matter

SPEAKER_02 40:59

the um your ability to purchase online, uh purchase online, pick it up in the store, and then uh shopping in the store. That all three of those components are critical. And it's funny because if you just sit at the front of Home Depot or Lowe's on any given day, the sheer number of people who are coming in and just picking stuff up that that they've right. I didn't realize that until recently. Um you go into let's just say Chipotle, how many people place the order? And Starbucks as well, you place the order online, you go pick it up in the store. These things are happening in certain areas of retail, but the average retailer isn't even thinking about that experience.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

Yeah, yeah. That is, um, I think that's a a really, really good point. And I think it's for the small and medium retailers to take a page out of the book of the big boys and and what's working, it definitely makes sense. And uh yeah, no, I I I really like that. And then in terms of setting up an in-store pickup, not that not that difficult. Not that not a ton of heavy lifting there. And so um, no, I I think that's some really good points. So um before we Brian, this has been an outstanding podcast. I think we could sit here and talk all day long. I've certainly enjoyed it. Uh before we wrap things up, uh, we have something called the Fire Round. It's four questions we ask every guest at the end of the show. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's do it. All right. What's your favorite book? Crossing the Chasm.

SPEAKER_02 42:40

All right. Are you familiar with it? No, I'm not. What's it about? Crossing the Chasm was the first big technology book. Okay. And uh I I think it came out in around the early 90s, but uh it uh it's it's phenomenal. It's a phenomenal read, and everything technology-wise that happened was happening in the 90s, nothing has changed. It's phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01 43:07

Okay. Very good.

SPEAKER_02 43:08

Products have, but not the not the concepts.

SPEAKER_03 43:11

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 43:13

What are your hobbies? Building products, designing products, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 43:18

What do you what is one thing you do not miss about working for the man?

SPEAKER_02 43:24

Um, well, uh, I do work for the man. My customers are the man. Um my wife is the man, the dog is the man. Uh, but uh, you know, I I don't I think that working for myself, um, you know, I don't miss working for anybody else. But the thing I do miss about working for other people is I do I really enjoyed the dynamic of the brainstorming dynamic when you're in with in a room with a bunch of smart people uh in a technology business, and you're you're you're figuring out how to solve big problems. The downside of that is that I don't get to make the final decision all the time. And you know, I I think that my decision-making skills are a lot better than most uh because uh you know I I don't get attached to my ideas because they're my ideas.

SPEAKER_01 44:25

Very good. Very good. And final question: what do you think sets apart successful e-commerce entrepreneurs? Let me reword that. What do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who fail, give up, or never get started?

Fire Round And Closing Links

SPEAKER_02 44:42

Well, it's uh kind of goes out the last thing I just said. You can never fall in love with your idea. Um you know, you have to you have to court it, you have to date the idea, and down the road you might realize that you want to marry it. But um uh don't fall in love with it because uh the market changes in in so many you know so quickly that you want to make sure that as these changes happen, you're in there. And and you want to always, you know, it all goes back to what I think I said at the beginning, which is you want to listen, listen, listen to your customer because the customer is going to tell you how to be successful, right? Um you know, we don't know how to be successful on our own, or else every decision we make would be 100% right. But the customer's coming in and they're telling us all these little things. They don't really know what they're telling us, but they're telling us what they like, what they don't like. And the more we listen and we analyze and we keep analyzing, uh, the more opportunity we we have to be successful.

SPEAKER_01 45:47

Very good. Well put. Brian, thank you so much for your time today. If people are interested in getting in touch with you or signing up for MerchWise, what is the best way to do it?

SPEAKER_02 45:58

Okay, uh, you can go to merchwiseai.com. Um we have a little trial subscription that kind of gets you uh up and running there. Um if you're interested in our book, uh it's The Future of Main Street, and it's the future of Main Street.com. It kind of talks about uh uh uh future of Main Street and where retail's going and how AI and technology is changing uh the overall landscape of it. Um you can find us on uh Brian Weisberg on LinkedIn and uh um and you can find me on Facebook.

SPEAKER_01 46:35

All right. That sounds great. Well, we will post links to all that in the show notes. Brian, thank you so much for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch.

SPEAKER_02 46:43

Thank you. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.