Author: Dailyusastory

Teamwork is fundamental to ecommerce success. Even solopreneurs work with others — customers, suppliers, service providers, freelancers. These new books aim to help leaders build effective teams. Culture Design: How to Build a High-Performing, Resilient Organization with Purpose Culture Design by James D. White and Krista White Combining decades of executive experience with a millennial entrepreneurial perspective, the father-daughter team shows how to apply design thinking to people, helping business leaders create the culture that best fits their customers and goals. The Strength of Talent: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Profit Strength of Talent by Mike Goldman…

Few companies have done more for global prosperity than Alibaba.com. Launched famously in China by Jack Ma, a former school teacher, in 1999, the company now connects 200,000 suppliers with millions of retail merchants. Suppliers grow, retailers diversify, and consumers have more choice for less money. Yet the B2B giant is not perfect. Language differences, intellectual property theft, and quality control can upend a supplier-buyer relationship. Rah Mahtani is Alibaba.com’s head of commercial strategy in the U.S. In our recent conversation, I asked him about those challenges, tariffs, and more. Our entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited…

This week’s rundown includes products and services for AI-powered advertising, email marketing, AI agents for shopping and B2B, social commerce, one-click payments, cryptocurrencies, personalization platforms, and ecommerce deliveries. Got an ecommerce product release? Email releases@practicalecommerce.com. New Tools for Merchants GoDaddy brings AI-powered ads to entrepreneurs. GoDaddy has expanded the digital ads feature on its Airo platform to nine English-language markets: Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. GoDaddy Airo drafts persuasive ad copy, selects relevant keywords based on the offering, and structures the campaign. Users can launch campaigns and track performance all within…

The Meta Pixel is a snippet of JavaScript with powerful implications for advertising performance. Ecommerce operators are typically experts in their products or industry, but not in advertising. I’ve seen conversion campaigns, for instance, with poor performance because the Meta Pixel was firing on the wrong event. One merchant went from a 0.3% conversion rate to 27.0% with the correct setup. The difference was not the ad creative, audience targeting, or page layout. It was pixel event tracking. Pixel Mechanics The Meta Pixel connects a website and the Meta Ads platform. The process goes like this: A Facebook or Instagram…

Every week we publish a handpicked list of new products and services for ecommerce merchants. This installment includes updates on shoppable ads, reverse logistics, customizable agents, cross-border delivery, generative engine optimization, conversational search, and more. Got an ecommerce product release? Email releases@practicalecommerce.com. New Tools for Merchants Snapchat and Woo announce ad manager integration. Snapchat has launched an integration with WooCommerce, wherein merchants can build shoppable ads inside the Snapchat Ads Manager. The integration syncs a Woo merchant‘s entire product catalog with Ads Manager in one click. Merchants can also set up Snap Pixel and the Conversions API, which provide data…

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have introduced optical generative models, a new paradigm for AI image generation that leverages the physics of light rather than conventional electronic computation. This approach offers a high-speed, energy-efficient alternative to traditional diffusion models while achieving comparable image quality. Modern generative AI, including diffusion models and large language models, can produce realistic images, videos, and human-like text. However, these systems demand enormous computational resources, driving up power consumption, carbon emissions, and hardware complexity. The UCLA team, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan, took a radically different approach: they generate images optically, using…

From the manufacturer Dew Clean Technology is a one button operation, that, when activated, automatically cleans the evaporator coil of the indoor unit heat exchanger by utilizing condensate water. This allows for better cleaning of Indoor Unit Heat Exchanger which ensures better airflow & consistent cooling performance throughout the year. It is capable to Trap fine air particles upto 2.5 microns resulting clean and pure inside air. Are you sure inverter ACs, save money? Daikin’s inverter technology is best in class because it has the widest range of compressor frequencies. You can witness the same…

Google Ads continues to shift its focus from keywords to campaign types such as Performance Max and Demand Gen, making audiences more critical than ever. Google has enhanced its audience targeting capabilities in Display campaigns to resemble those on Meta, LinkedIn, and other social channels. Custom audiences Search and Shopping campaigns take advertisers only so far. Display campaigns can help by building top-of-funnel prospects via custom audiences. A “custom audience” is any group of consumers chosen by an advertiser, such as: Visitors to a contact-us page who don’t convert, Email newsletter subscribers, Searchers with specific needs, such as queries for…

Jon Shanahan destroys the myth that founders make lousy employees. He co-founded Stryx, a men’s cosmetics provider, and is now a marketing executive at TRX, the storied exercise equipment company. He has thrived in both roles. He joined TRX in late 2022 amid a post-Covid hangover and a stale legacy brand. Fast forward to late 2025, and TRX is refreshed and flourishing, thanks in part to Jon’s entrepreneurial mindset. While at Stryx, Jon appeared on the podcast twice, in 2020 and 2022. In this latest conversation, he shares transitioning to a large corporation, the challenges of reviving a brand, and…

Google DeepMind has developed Gemini Robotics, a pair of AI models designed to bring sophisticated reasoning and action capabilities to robots. Built on the Gemini foundation models, these systems combine vision, language, and motor control to enable multi-step, general-purpose physical tasks. Gemini Robotics consists of two complementary models: Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 (Embodied Reasoning, ER) – a vision-language model (VLM) optimized for planning and reasoning in physical environments. It interprets visual and textual input, creates multi-step task plans, and can natively call digital tools like Google Search or third-party APIs to gather relevant data. The ER model acts as the high-level…