Data vs. Commerce
The podcast that explores the messy middle between database and doorstep.
Every company that sells online wants frictionless commerce. But what does that actually look like in practice? Most businesses have already figured out the #1 rule of cutting out friction in their physical supply chain: all of its parts need to talk to each other, and somebody needs to own it.
Far fewer have figured that out for their digital supply chains. And somewhere in that pile of disconnected projects, data and commerce stopped talking. The most expensive relationship in your business needs work. This is their standing appointment. This is Data vs. Commerce.
Each week, hosts Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie sit down with the people who own the data, run the platforms, and pay the price when those two stop playing nice.
All Episodes
Recent Episodes
Taking the order is easy. Keeping the promise is where it breaks | Keith Gorney, OMS Practice Director, Pivotree | Ep. 5
The catalog looks right, the website takes the order, and then the promise falls apart somewhere between the click and the dock. That gap between what a screen shows and what actually ships is where this episode lives. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie sit down with Keith Gorney , OMS Practice Director...
The robots.txt setting that hides your catalog from ChatGPT | Dan Ornstein, Retail Industry Leader, Pivotree | Ep. 4
A customer asks ChatGPT how to fix his style, gets sent to three stores, and nobody on the retail side can explain why those three and not the other thirty. That gap is where this episode sits. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie talk with Dan Ornstein , Retail Industry Leader at Pivotree , about how lar...
Augmenting experts instead of replacing them with AI | Bill Di Nardo, CEO & Joel Farquhar, Chief Architect, Pivotree | Ep. 3
Every analyst call this quarter runs on the same promise about AI: fewer humans, same output. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie don't buy it, and neither do this episode's guests. Floyd sits down with Pivotree CEO Bill Di Nardo and chief architect Joel Farquhar to make the case for what they call real ...
Hosts & Resident Experts
The data and commerce experts behind the show.
Matt Johnson
Host
Floyd Blaikie
Host
Dan Ornstein
Retail & Industry Expert
Sam Russo
Automotive Industry
& Data Expert
What We’re All About
Every product moves twice. Once through the data layer—the place where it gets named, classified, attributed, priced, syndicated, and made findable. And then again through the physical layer where it gets paid for, picked, packed, shipped, and delivered.
Most companies invest heavily in an orchestrated physical journey, but treat the data journey as a pile of disconnected projects run by a different org on a different budget cycle. The gap between the two is where modern commerce actually fails: the stockouts that aren't really stockouts, the 0.8% integration error nobody's caught, the AI agent that ordered the wrong part, the ecommerce replatform that blew up on data nobody had cleaned in six years.
This show lives in that gap.
If you're responsible for any part of how products get from a database to a doorstep, this is your show. Follow us on LinkedIn and never miss another insight.