Shoppers don’t stick to one lane anymore. They browse online, walk into stores, and ask AI what to buy. Shopify’s latest round of updates tackles this new way of shopping with updates to agentic search and a faster in-store checkout system.

The throughline from Shopify’s June 17 Editions event, a bi-annual event for product updates, is that the company wants to connect all its surfaces—from the online store to point-of-sale (POS) hardware and its Shop App—into one smooth experience for both merchants and shoppers. It is making sure a frictionless shopping experience carries over, whether someone is shopping in store or via the app.

Search assistant: Shopify has upgraded the search function in its Shop App, the hub of all its shopping activity, making it easier for shoppers to go from browsing products to asking post-purchase questions, like return policies, all in one place. Think of it as a personalized shopping assistant.

“We’ve extended our search functionality to really encompass many more use cases,” Jess Jacobs, VP of consumer marketing and head of growth for the Shop App, told Retail Brew. “What’s unique about our experience is it’s all powered by that single understanding of the buyer.”

Keep reading here.—VC

There are a few things that are hard to miss in Prime Video’s hockey romance series Off Campus: shirtless workout montages, nostalgic musical moments, and Liquid I.V.

The hydration brand has a sweeping sponsorship deal with the show spanning ads, events, a landing page, and a four-episode integration into the plot. Main character Garrett Graham sips a Liquid I.V. at a bar; he and his teammate John Logan appear in an ad campaign for the brand, and ads for Liquid I.V. show up on the boards of their hockey rink at the fictional Briar University.

It’s product placement dialed way up, and it’s not the first time a brand has had a major integration into a sports streaming show this year.

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—AM

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Piyush Patel is chief ecosystem officer at AI search and discovery company Algolia, whose customers include PetSmart, Hershey, and Walgreens.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? We help the world’s largest retailers turn chaotic product data and fragmented digital experiences into something that actually feels intuitive for shoppers. At Algolia, that means making search, discovery, and AI-driven experiences fast, relevant, and scalable—so customers can find what they want instantly, and brands don’t lose them in the process. My job specifically is to build the ecosystem around Algolia that customers already invest in and need to leverage for success, including our tech partners, our SI partners, and our Cloud partners, as well as our largest customers who push the limits and help us innovate for the broader customer base.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? A big part of my job is translating between worlds. Technical teams, merchandisers, and executives all think about “search” and “AI” very differently. The real work is aligning those perspectives into something that can actually be operationalized at scale.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Honestly, building a home lab with my son last summer—setting up performance servers, large-scale storage, and running our own containers and AI inference workloads. It’s nowhere near foundation-model scale, but that wasn’t the point.

Keep reading here.—EC

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