Welcome back! 👋
Writing this one from the Dominican Republic. 🇩🇴🏖️
Vacation mode, but still bringing you this week's edition. 💪
Let’s go!
Topics we'll cover today:
💠 Meta Joins OpenAI and Anthropic in the Race to Own Your Shopping Cart
💠 She Walked 125 Kilometers to Learn This About Resilience
💠 Latest news in the DTC space
Meta Joins OpenAI and Anthropic in the Race to Own Your Shopping Cart
Three announcements. Three companies. One direction.
This last week alone:
OpenAI kept expanding ChatGPT Ads with conversion tracking and product feed tools
Anthropic released a blueprint for Claude-powered shopping and merchant agents
Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can browse, fill out forms, negotiate, and check out on your behalf
Different companies. Same bet.
They all think the next interface for shopping isn't a website. It's an agent.
Muse is the most aggressive version of this so far.
It doesn't just answer questions. It takes action.
It remembers what matters to a person, so it can act without being asked. It can turn a recipe someone saved on Instagram into a grocery list. It can build the shopping trip before the person even thinks to.
And when it's time to pay, it checks out with its own virtual card, covered by purchase protections most brands don't even offer: price-drop refunds, no-fee returns, damage and loss coverage.
It also works directly inside WhatsApp, which a lot of you are already using for support and marketing.
So here's the pattern forming:
The agent finds the product
The agent compares the options
The agent remembers the preference
The agent completes the purchase
The agent holds the return policy
At every one of those steps, the brand is one layer removed from the customer.
This doesn't mean websites disappear. Most people still aren't buying groceries through a chatbot yet.
But the direction all three of these companies are building toward is the same:
Fewer moments where a human looks at your site, and more moments where an agent acts on your product data on a human's behalf.
The brands that show up well in that world will be the ones whose product feeds, policies, and data are actually built for an agent to read, not just for a person to browse.
The question isn't "should I have a website" anymore.
It's: "If an agent were shopping for my customer right now, would it even find me?"
Your Last Pit Stop Before Q4
In F1, the last pit stop before the final stint decides the race. Get it wrong, and the fastest car still loses.
Q4 works the same way.
If there's a leak in your offer, your funnel, or your ad spend, now's the moment to catch it, before the biggest weeks of the year expose it.
That's what the Revenue Leak Check is for.
Before we talk, I'll go through your site, your live ads, and your customer journey. On the call, I'll name the three places I think you're leaking revenue, and what I'd do about each one.
You get that whether or not we end up working together.
👉 Book your Revenue Leak Check here
She Walked 125 Kilometers to Learn This About Resilience
How much more are you capable of when giving up isn't an option?
During her time in the Danish army, Elisabeth Crossley-Wright went through experiences that pushed her far beyond what she thought she could handle, including walking 125 kilometers and going six days without eating.
Before one of those experiences, she was told something she never forgot: you can do 10 times more than you think, and about 100 times more than your mom thinks.
For Elisabeth, being under pressure and coming through the other side built a confidence and resilience that stayed with her long after the army.
In this episode of The DTC Insider, Brian Roisentul talks with Elisabeth Crossley-Wright, founder of With Love Darling, about resilience, entrepreneurship, and how the experiences that pushed her beyond her limits ultimately shaped the way she approaches business.
We talk about:
Why resilience became essential to Elisabeth's journey as an entrepreneur. 💪
How working with artisans can create a broader impact on their families and children. 👨👩👧👦
Why Elisabeth believes engaging with a community can be more powerful than simply spending more on ads. 🤝
Latest News in the DTC Space
📰 Amazon Ads has announced a partnership with OpenAI [read more]
📰 Amazon Prime Video Now Lets You Shop [read more]
📰 Google Ads AI Dashboards Turn a Text Prompt Into a Visual Report [read more]
What did you think of today's newsletter?
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About The Writer
Brian Roisentul is the founder & CEO of BSR, a growth marketing agency he started in 2013 to help e-commerce brands unlock hidden revenue by identifying misalignments between their marketing and customer behavior. He is also the host of The DTC Insider podcast, where he interviews thought leaders, founders, and directors in the e-commerce space.
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