Books are for the ideas that don’t change. For what’s changing this week, I read people. If you follow commerce for a living, this is the list I’d hand you, and none of them asked to be here.
I added myself, which is either useful or shameless. The button below pulls all twelve of us into one LinkedIn feed, so you can judge for yourself.
Opens a LinkedIn search. You’ll need to be signed in to LinkedIn to see it.
Scot Wingo
My podcast co-host for the last decade and my own go-to resource for anything in commerce, business, or finance. Scot was one of the first people to see the potential of e-commerce marketplaces. He founded ChannelAdvisor, one of the first SaaS companies in our space, took it public (NYSE: ECOM), and served as chairman. He’s now back in commerce with an AI startup, ReFiBuy (disclosure: I’m an advisor and investor). I’m lucky to have his brain on speed dial. You should at least follow his LinkedIn activity feed. By the way, Scot’s parents spelled his name wrong.
Bryan Gildenberg
One of the smartest people in our industry, and his opinions always make me think. Bryan was Chief Knowledge Officer at Kantar for years, and all my smartest clients hired him instead of me, which is annoying. He now runs Retail Cities in North America. Follow his LinkedIn activity feed. By the way, Bryan’s parents also spelled his name wrong.
Neil Saunders
Managing Director and Retail Analyst at GlobalData Retail. Neil knows the numbers on nearly every major retailer, and he still does a ton of store visits and visual merchandising audits, which used to be my life. His daily recap of retail news on his LinkedIn activity feed is the first thing I read most weekday mornings.
Russ Dieringer
Russ was the go-to e-commerce analyst at Cleveland Research before he launched Stratably. Nobody goes deeper on marketplaces, especially Amazon and Walmart, and his data on agentic commerce is the best I’ve seen. He no longer sells individual subscriptions, which is a loss for the rest of us, but there’s still a lot of useful free content on his site.
Juozas (Joe) Kaziukėnas
Joe founded Marketplace Pulse and spent a decade building the best public dataset on Amazon and the other marketplaces, so he understands how marketplaces actually work better than almost anyone. What matters more right now is that he’s on the leading edge of every new agentic commerce development: when an AI shopping feature launches, Joe has usually tested it, measured it, and written it up before the press release finishes circulating. Follow his LinkedIn activity feed.
Benedict Evans
Independent analyst and former partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Ben publishes a steady stream of thoughtful essays and an annual presentation that everyone in tech steals slides from. Subscribe to his newsletter at ben-evans.com. Lately he’s writing mostly about AI, and he’s one of the few people who is skeptical and interested at the same time.
Ben Thompson
Ben writes Stratechery, a paid newsletter based in Taiwan, and hosts several podcasts. He’s more general and more abstract than the commerce practitioners on this list, but his frameworks are the ones I reach for most. Aggregation Theory, and the distinction between platforms and aggregators, will change how you see Amazon. Worth every dollar.
Peter Fader, Dan McCarthy, and Michael Ross
Between them, these three wrote the books on customer lifetime value and customer-base analysis, and they keep rewriting them. If you care about incrementality, cohorts, or whether a customer is actually worth acquiring, follow all three.
Avinash Kaushik
Former digital marketing evangelist at Google and my go-to thinker on analytics. Avinash taught me more about measurement than anyone, and he’s the reason I believe you win in commerce by measuring better than the other guy. His newsletter, The Marketing Analytics Intersect, has a free version at kaushik.net. The paid version is worth it.
Jason Goldberg
That’s me, and putting yourself on your own list of people worth following is admittedly a bit much. I’m here because a commerce reading list that left out the thing I spend most of my week on felt like the wrong kind of modesty. I’m Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis Groupe, I write a commerce column at Forbes, and I co-host The Jason & Scot Show with Scot, who is at the top of this page for good reason. I post mostly about agentic commerce, the uncomfortable math behind retail media, and what the Census data actually says versus what people claim it says. Follow my LinkedIn activity feed if that sounds useful. The other eleven are still the real reason to bookmark this page.