Coworking with Austin Goldman

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Austin Goldman is co-founder and CEO at Shoplift, an A/B testing platform for Shopify sellers.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? Shoplift is a tech company that helps online brands connect more effectively with their shoppers. You know how a physical store owner can walk the floor and see customers pick things up, put them back, and get confused by a display? Online, brands are flying blind. Shoplift helps them run real-time experiments on their website, so instead of guessing whether a new homepage or product page works better, they can actually prove it with real shoppers.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? I’m also a camp counselor! Kind of…We host Camp Commerce Hamptons Retreat every year, an invite-only day in the Hamptons for top DTC executives. The venue is the beachside mansion from Billions. There’s a half mile of private beach, conversations with some of the top minds in e-commerce, camp games, fireside s’mores—the whole thing. A huge part of my job is building relationships, and it turns out the best way to do that is over a golden hour dinner on the beach, not another Zoom call.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Shoplift has customers in 37 countries, so, when tariffs started to hit, it was chaos. With Shoplift, brands were able to use our price-testing feature to make data-backed pricing decisions instead of guessing. SAXX, for example, had tariffs threatening margins on 30% of their SKUs. They used Shoplift to test a 5% price increase on a product collection, found zero conversion impact, and rolled the increase out company-wide months earlier than planned, capturing margin they would have left on the table through Q4. Minnow, a premium children’s swimwear brand, ran into the same tariff pressure and tested a 10% increase on their best sellers. Again, no conversion drop. What started as a tariff response turned into a systematic pricing optimization framework they now use across every product category. That’s the kind of thing I love building for: giving brands a way to act on real customer behavior instead of just absorbing cost increases and hoping for the best.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? Agentic commerce. Consumers are already using ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to research and compare products before they ever visit a storefront. Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol in January with Shopify, Walmart, and Target backing it. OpenAI has its own protocol powering checkout inside ChatGPT. This is not a concept anymore. What makes me excited from a Shoplift perspective is that the storefront doesn’t go away in this world. It actually matters more. AI agents are evaluating product data, pricing, structured attributes, page content, and checkout experience to decide which brands to surface and recommend. The brands that show up in those results, and convert when they get there, are the ones with clean, optimized, well-tested storefronts. That’s exactly what Shoplift does. We help thousands of brands run experiments on how they present themselves to shoppers. As the “shoppers” increasingly become AI agents making decisions on behalf of real people, the brands using Shoplift to continuously test and optimize their product pages, pricing, and on-site experience are going to have a massive edge.

What’s your go-to coffee order? Black. Over 50 degrees [outside], cold brew. If under 50 degrees, hot.

Worst piece of advice you’ve received? “Start a company…How hard could it be?”

What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now? At 15: Wow, that’s a long time ago. I think it would have had to be Proactiv. A staple of every teenage bathroom. Who can forget the infomercials? Now: My 30s have been all about mornings. I wake up to my Philips SmartSleep sunrise alarm clock, which has been a game-changer for cold NYC mornings. My biggest recommendation is honestly any supplement made by Momentous. The quality and consistency is unmatched. I take their creatine and protein every morning, and I’m a huge fan. I drink it from my Yeti Yonder Shaker Bottle, which is also great. The patented internal design means no shaker ball or whisk, which is very convenient.