Here we go again...

I know, I am late. It is almost the month’s end and you guys would be thinking, where the hell is that funny guy with that weird newsletter. Well, I have been moving, and trying to convince a 5 year old that 0 divided by 0 is not 1.

In other news, we released two new apps. But I am not gonna tell you about them before the stuff you read my newsletter for. As promised in my first edition.

So, here is what is happening in the industry at large!

Deadline Desk

New segment. Shopify changes with an actual date on them, after which your store behaves differently whether you were paying attention or not.

Aug 24 - Managed Markets drops DDU. Everything goes Delivered Duty Paid, so duties get collected at checkout instead of ambushing your buyer at the door. Want the old behavior? Some of you do, your accounts have their own brokers. Then you switch Managed Markets off yourself, before the 24th. Nobody is going to remind you. Except me. Just now. More details here.

Aug 31 - the Address Blocker dies. Your settings auto-migrate to the new Checkout Blocks rule under Settings, Checkout, Checkout rules. “Auto-migrate” is a phrase that is true most of the time. Go look at yours.

Four minutes of work. Beats finding out in September from a customer in Germany who got a bill from DHL and is now typing to you in a tone. If either one touches something custom, hit reply and we will take a look. Diagnosis is free. We are only expensive after that.

Everyone is selling you agentic commerce. Nobody is buying through it.

New numbers this month, and they are gloriously deflating. 62% of shoppers use AI to compare products. 23% use it at checkout. 19% after. So AI is a discovery channel wearing a purchase channel’s jacket. Meanwhile AI referral traffic to retail sites is up as much as 4,700% year on year, which means the agents are already in your store. They are browsing. Which makes the job this quarter deeply boring: not an AI checkout integration, just product data a machine can actually read. The numbers are here.

Fax Machine of the Month

New segment. One genuinely archaic B2B workflow still holding up a real industry.

This month: building materials.

Quoting there still runs on a human checking a stockpile, phoning a plant manager, and hand-typing a number, and the trade press has finally had enough. Best line I have read in a trade publication this year: “That’s not tradition. That’s fear wearing a hard hat.”

Construction sits second from the bottom on McKinsey’s digitization index, and fifty billion dollars went into construction tech between 2020 and 2022 while productivity actually fell 8%. Somewhere in that spend is a fax machine that has outlived three CFOs. Read it.

Got a worse one? Reply and tell me. Anonymized. Mostly. (I promise I will try)

Right. The two apps.

Extend B2B Quotes. Quotes should not live in your inbox, and yet here we all are, searching for “Re: Re: FWD: pricing FINAL v3”. Rep-created or buyer-raised, per-line pricing that never touches your catalog, the negotiation attached to the quote, approval routing, one click to an order. Check it out here.

Extend B2B Trade Terms. Wholesale and retail sharing one inventory pool has exactly one failure mode: your best account’s reorder gets eaten by retail traffic on a Tuesday and you find out during the phone call. Reserve stock for specific companies, set an expiry, enforced live at the cart. Just install it, pay for a month, leave a 5-star review, then do what you want.

Dad Joke of the Month

A B2B buyer walks into a bar and asks for net 30. The bartender says they don’t do that here. The buyer leaves.

That’s the joke. It is also why you lost the order.

🖖🏼 Live long and prosper!

Fahad from Extend Commerce