The Death of eCommerce | Episode #023

The Death of eCommerce

E-commerce is dying, and we're all pretending everything is fine.

In this episode, Justin and Mike dig into why the entire online shopping experience has become a joyless, transactional wasteland. We're not talking about sales numbers or market cap. We're talking about the actual experience of finding and buying things, which has gotten objectively worse even as the technology has gotten better.

Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: shopping used to be an activity. You'd go to a store, talk to someone who actually knew about the products, browse around, discover things you didn't know you needed. Now? You type words into a search bar, scroll through pages of algorithmic nonsense, read fake reviews, and hope you picked the right one. That's not shopping. That's just... buying.

Amazon killed the browse. They optimized for speed and convenience but forgot that people actually enjoyed the process of shopping. And now we're stuck in this weird limbo where the old retail model is dead but the new one sucks.

But here's where it gets interesting. The future might not be what you think. We get into agentic shopping, where AI agents could bring back that consultative experience we lost. Influencers are already filling the expert void that retail used to provide. The whole landscape is shifting toward something that might actually be better, or it might just be a different kind of terrible.

We trace e-commerce from the Sears catalog to today's algorithmic hellscape. We talk about why expertise disappeared from retail. We explore whether AI shopping assistants and influencer recommendations can actually fix what's broken, or if they're just new problems wearing a solution costume.

The death of expertise. The rise of influence. The promise of agents. It's all happening right now, and most people haven't even noticed.

Full episode: https://youtu.be/FMME2BD9UhE

Strictly From Nowhere Podcast explores technology, culture, and the future through conversations that actually matter. New episodes weekly.

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