Research for people who ship.

AI Search Visibility: Getting Cited When ChatGPT and Perplexity Answer for You

AI assistants now front a growing share of product discovery. What generative-engine visibility rewards — citable claims, structured data and entity clarity.

5 Aug 2026

The EU AI Act in August 2026: A Compliance Checklist for Mid-Size Companies

High-risk obligations are landing now. What mid-market companies must do — inventory, classification, documentation, oversight — without a legal department.

3 Aug 2026

AI Catalogue Enrichment at Scale: From Supplier Chaos to Channel-Ready in Days

Vision models plus confidence-gated review turn raw supplier data into marketplace-grade listings — the architecture, accuracy economics and failure modes.

30 Jul 2026

What AI Support Agents Actually Cost — and Save — in 2026

A realistic cost model for AI customer support: per-resolution economics, hidden costs teams forget, and the thresholds where automation genuinely pays back.

28 Jul 2026

Agentic Commerce: What Happens When the AI Does the Buying

Shopping agents now browse, compare and check out on behalf of customers. What merchant infrastructure must change — feeds, APIs, trust signals and checkout.

22 Jul 2026

TikTok Shop in Europe: An Operator’s Playbook for 2026

Live shopping economics, catalogue prep, fulfilment SLAs and content cadence — what decides whether a brand makes money on TikTok Shop in Germany and France.

16 Jul 2026

Guardrails That Keep AI Agents Out of Trouble in Production

Approval gates, spend ceilings, typed tools, kill switches and audit logs — the guardrail architecture behind every agent, and the incidents each prevents.

9 Jul 2026

Azure Static Web Apps in Production: A Field Guide

SWA’s free-tier economics, custom domains and DNS, staticwebapp.config headers and caching, preview environments and the limits that matter in production.

8 Jul 2026

Taking a US D2C Brand into Europe: The Sequence That Works

Market selection, VAT and EPR groundwork, localisation, fulfilment architecture and channel order — an expansion playbook from operators, not a listicle.

2 Jul 2026

D2C Unit Economics in 2026: The Numbers That Actually Matter

Contribution margin after returns and ads, blended CAC honesty, cohort payback and the channel-mix maths that decides which D2C brands survive.

30 Jun 2026

Amazon vs Walmart Marketplace in 2026: Where Your Second US Channel Should Be

Fee structures, fulfilment options, competition density and buyer demographics — a working comparison for brands planning US marketplace expansion.

25 Jun 2026

RAG vs Fine-Tuning in 2026: How to Actually Choose

Our client framework: when retrieval wins, when tuning wins, when you need both, and the option most teams forget — better prompting on a better model.

19 Jun 2026

GDPR and AI: Processing Customer Data Lawfully in 2026

Lawful basis for AI features, the training-data question, DPIAs that actually help, vendor DPA clauses to demand, and how EU AI Act duties stack on top.

17 Jun 2026

Retail Media in 2026: Where the Money Went and What Brands Should Do

Retail media is the fastest-growing ad channel in commerce. How to run Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect and European networks without torching contribution margin.

11 Jun 2026

Technical Due Diligence Before You Acquire: The Checklist That Finds the Bodies

You buy the codebase, data liabilities and key-person risk with the company. What two weeks of diligence should examine, and the red flags that reprice deals.

5 Jun 2026

Cutting LLM Costs 60–90% Without Cutting Quality

Model routing, caching, batching, distillation and prompt hygiene — the cost levers that actually work in production, ranked by effort and payback.

4 Jun 2026

Voice AI in Commerce: Where It Actually Works in 2026

Past the demos: four voice-AI deployments earning their keep in commerce — order status lines, warehouse operations, outbound confirmations, accessibility.

30 May 2026

Channel P&L: Finally Seeing Which Marketplace Actually Makes You Money

Fees from settlements, allocated ads, real fulfilment and returns costs — per-channel, per-SKU profit statements that end the ‘Amazon feels profitable’ era.

27 May 2026

The 2026 Retention Stack: Email, SMS and the Channels After Them

Flows that outperform campaigns, zero-party data collection, SMS economics by market, and where WhatsApp and app push fit for US and European brands.

21 May 2026

What an AI Readiness Audit Should Cover (and What to Ignore)

The six questions that decide whether an AI initiative ships — data access, process clarity, evaluation, integration surface, governance and unit economics.

14 May 2026

Selling on Zalando and Otto: The German Marketplace Playbook

Germany’s two marketplace giants run on rules Anglo sellers underestimate — content standards, returns culture, EPR registration and logistics expectations.

7 May 2026

Telling Customers an AI Served Them: Disclosure That Builds Trust Instead of Killing It

The EU AI Act requires it, the FTC watches it, and customers reward honesty done well. Disclosure patterns that keep CSAT high — and the ones to avoid.

1 May 2026

Marketplace Repricing Without the Race to the Bottom

Floors from real unit economics, velocity-aware rules, buy-box strategy and parity constraints — repricing as margin engineering rather than a knife fight.

29 Apr 2026

Agentic Automation vs RPA: What to Replace First

RPA breaks when the screen changes; agents reason through variation. Where each still wins in 2026, and a migration order that pays back fastest.

22 Apr 2026

Attribution After Cookies: What Actually Works in 2026

Third-party cookies are gone, platform numbers disagree with finance, and the honest stack is MMM, incrementality tests and server-side conversion APIs.

15 Apr 2026

Rewrite the Client, Keep the Core: The App Modernisation Strategy That Ships

Full rewrites die in year two. Strangler-fig backends and clean-slate clients behind a stable API is the modernisation pattern that actually completes.

9 Apr 2026

Nine Marketplace Integration Mistakes That Quietly Kill Margin

From stock buffers set by folklore to unreconciled settlement reports — the integration failures we find most often in audits, and what each one costs.

8 Apr 2026

The US State Privacy Law Map in 2026: Complying With Twenty Laws at Once

State privacy statutes now cover most of the US population. The sane strategy: one high-watermark programme, universal opt-outs and honest data mapping.

1 Apr 2026

Dashboards Executives Actually Open: Design Principles From the Ones That Survived

Most BI dashboards die unopened. The survivors share traits: one question per screen, actions attached to numbers and fewer metrics than anyone asked for.

31 Mar 2026

Your AI Needs a Test Suite More Than It Needs a Better Model

Evaluation harnesses are the highest-leverage AI investment: catching regressions from model updates, prompt edits and drift — before customers do.

25 Mar 2026

EPR in the EU: The Packaging and Electronics Rules Sellers Keep Missing

Extended Producer Responsibility blocks listings in Germany, France and beyond. What LUCID, WEEE, battery and textile rules require of cross-border sellers.

19 Mar 2026

WCAG 2.2 for Commerce Sites: Accessibility as Law, and as Conversion

The European Accessibility Act now covers e-commerce; US ADA suits keep rising. The WCAG 2.2 criteria that matter on shop flows, and why they lift conversion.

12 Mar 2026

12 Questions Procurement Should Ask Every AI Vendor

A due-diligence sheet for buying AI in 2026: training data, evaluation evidence, cost at scale, exit rights, and the answers that should end the meeting.

11 Mar 2026

Launching on Mirakl-Powered Marketplaces: What Sellers Should Know

Hundreds of retailers run their marketplaces on Mirakl — Carrefour, Decathlon, Kroger, Macy’s. How the operator model works and how to onboard just once.

5 Mar 2026

Fractional CTO, Agency or First Engineering Hire? Choosing Technical Leadership at Each Stage

Founders face the same trilemma at every growth stage. The honest decision grid: what each option costs, what it delivers, and the hybrid most scale-ups run.

4 Mar 2026

Shopify, Composable or Headless in 2026: Choosing Without the Religion

The honest decision tree for commerce platforms: where Shopify wins outright, where composable earns its complexity, and the total-cost maths agencies skip.

25 Feb 2026

NIS2 and DORA: What Software Vendors Must Now Prove to EU Clients

Europe’s security regulations bind your customers and reach you by contract. The supplier obligations, incident timelines and evidence packs to have ready.

19 Feb 2026

Build vs Buy for AI: A Decision Framework That Survives Contact With Reality

Four questions that settle most build-vs-buy arguments: differentiation, integration depth, data advantage and total cost over three years.

18 Feb 2026

The Right-Sized Data Stack for a Commerce Brand (No, You Don’t Need Databricks)

A pragmatic architecture for €2M–200M commerce businesses: managed warehouse, ELT connectors, dbt transforms, one BI layer — and the enterprise toys to skip.

11 Feb 2026

Cross-Border VAT for EU Sellers: OSS, IOSS and the Rules That Changed the Maths

A working guide to EU VAT for e-commerce: when OSS applies, what IOSS covers, marketplace deemed-supplier rules, and the mistakes that trigger audits.

4 Feb 2026

SOC 2 for Small Teams: The Sane Path to the Report Enterprise Buyers Demand

What SOC 2 is, Type I vs Type II sequencing, the compliance-automation tooling worth paying for, and how to pass without hiring a compliance department.

29 Jan 2026

What Actually Belongs in Your Company AI Policy

Skip the 30-page aspirational document. The six sections an enforceable AI policy needs: approved tools, data rules, disclosure, sign-off and incidents.

27 Jan 2026

D2C & Growth3 min

A 27-Point CRO Checklist for Product Pages That Actually Converts

Above-the-fold clarity, price honesty, review depth, delivery promises and mobile checkout — the product-page fixes with measured lift, ranked by effort.

21 Jan 2026

Weekly Release Trains for Small Teams: Shipping Every Thursday Without Heroics

The release train turns deployment from an event into a schedule — trunk-based flow, feature flags, staged rollouts and the culture shift that makes it stick.

15 Jan 2026

Your Product Feed Is Your Real Storefront

Google Shopping, marketplaces, retail media, affiliates and AI shopping agents all buy from your feed, not your website. Feed engineering is merchandising.

14 Jan 2026

You Probably Don’t Need Real-Time Analytics

Real-time pipelines cost 5–10x batch and most decisions are daily anyway. Where streaming genuinely earns its keep in commerce, and the honest test to apply.

7 Jan 2026

Returns Are a Product Problem, Not a Policy Problem

Return rates fall when sizing truth and photography honesty improve, not when policies tighten. Returns-reason data is your cheapest form of product research.

17 Dec 2025

Ending Oversells: Inventory Sync Architecture That Actually Works

Oversells are not a stock problem — they are a latency problem. Event-driven sync, per-SKU buffers and channel allocation rules that protect seller metrics.

10 Dec 2025

Why Your Marketing Site Should Be Static (and What That Buys You)

Static-first marketing sites are faster, safer and nearly free to run — Core Web Vitals, zero-patch security and CDN economics. Where the approach ends.

3 Dec 2025

Subscription Commerce Models That Survive Their Own Churn Maths

Replenishment vs access vs curation economics, involuntary churn recovery, pause-first retention and the metrics that predict whether a subscription lasts.

26 Nov 2025

Integration Errors: Designing for the Failure That Is Coming

Third-party APIs fail constantly and yours must not care — idempotency, retries with jitter, dead-letter queues, circuit breakers and routine reconciliation.

19 Nov 2025

Demand Forecasting With ML, Minus the Hype

Where machine forecasting beats the buyer’s spreadsheet, and the unglamorous features — promotions, stockouts, lead times — that actually decide accuracy.

12 Nov 2025