June 2nd, 2025: Salesforce to acquire Informatica, Social Commerce Panel Reveals Influencer Importance, Lowes Launches Its Marketplace, and Tariff Feud Event with Passport Recap
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It’s June 2, 2025 and this is the Watson Weekly - your essential eCommerce Digest!
Today on our show:
Salesforce to acquire Informatica
Social Commerce Panel Reveals Influencer Importance
Lowes Launches Its Marketplace
Tariff Feud Event with Passport Recap
- and finally, The Investor Minute which contains 5 items this week from the world of venture capital, acquisitions, and IPOs.
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To hear new episodes of the show every Monday morning, subscribe now at rmwcommerce.com/watsonweekly and wherever you get your podcasts.
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BUT FIRST in our shopping cart full of news….
Salesforce to Acquire Informatica
“I think it's a good move for their relevance in the AI world, but let's unpack what it means.
What happened?
* Salesforce is signed an agreement to acquire Informatica. Informatica plays in what's called "Master Data Management" space, including storing the enterprise source of truth for product catalogs, and quite a number of other domains. This includes governance of that data -- how and why it can change, what changes have been made, and how to evolve that data over time.
Here are a few thoughts:
* Informatica is a long-term owner of a lot of Enterprise master data through their PIM and MDM solutions. All of the major global system integrators have a large Informatica practice.
* Just in case you think this is not interesting, Amazon has a serious belief that the AI models will follow where the data is housed, so there is potentially a very large model-creation and interaction business that Salesforce ensures it has a piece of in the future, which is their intention.
* Salesforce is signaling that to have an AI future you need the data. Data Cloud is not working well enough on its own -- what is the "draw" to give your core data to Salesforce? Not much. It had to find the next best source of data after Amazon and Microsoft, and that name is likely Informatica.
What's Next?
* I do think a player like Snowflake is in play, and I do think it is likely that Salesforce sniffed around Snowflake but it was too expensive. Informatica has less of a "cloud/AI" play than Snowflake and so this match-up for the valuation required sounds better.
* This could distract and slow down Salesforce. Informatica is not known for being nimble, and cultures do not change post-acquisition.
* You could almost seeing this as Salesforce dropping some of its on-again, off-again noises about the lower middle-market. It's not a very lucrative play for their goto-market strategy (heavy Enterprise sales cycle) anyway.
Overall, I would call this move commerce-adjacent. The world is consolidating AI around OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic/Amazon, Google, and the world is searching for other players. Salesforce wants to be the 4th or 5th player not the 10th player in this game and is trying to piece together the assets to do it.
I do think this complicates Shopify's Enterprise strategy. It also potentially boxes in Shopify's wins in Enterprise to the "front-end/checkout" of the stack, and makes it more unlikely to see Shopify moving further into the ERP/MDM side of things.
Which of course, Shopify was likely never even seriously considering in the first place.
>> closer
[References:]
Our Second Story
Social Commerce Panel Reveals Influencer Importance
At The Lead event today, I hosted a panel with friends David Baker and David Cost - it was good to catch up and talk shop about the state of global commerce. Here are a few takeaways on TikTok Shop from the chat:
1 - About 80% of sales are driven by influencers in some form or fashion. Either on the influencers own feeds (more often) or influencer-generated content on your feed.
2 - There is a 2-1 halo effect on Amazon + DTC. For every 2 TikTok Shop sales, at least 1 combined sale will happen through both Amazon + DTC. This is measured through MMM tools like Prescient AI
3 - It can take 6 months of hard work to prove to influencers that your products are worth taking. As a result, you need to have deep inventory of SKUs that you are interested in selling through. It's not worth your time otherwise.
That said, when a product "hits" it can skyrocket in as few as 30 days, so your supply chain needs to be ready and waiting to scale up quickly -- otherwise all that investment cannot be captured.
corollary: avoid TikTok Shop without deep inventory. Won't make sense for influencers.
4 - TikTok is obviously quite different than other social platforms (except perhaps Youtube Shorts). Instead of building a base of followers and trying to sell through them, TikTok's algorithm is almost 100% interest-based. Any bit of content can go viral to people who don't follow you because TikTok is constantly trying to find who is interested in what content.
Thanks again to Noah Gellman and Sonal Gandhi for helping setup the session.
[References:]
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ecommercestrategyconsulting_should-social-commerce-be-renamed-influencer-driven-activity-7333824534090801152-eQ1I?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAABzTYBMEkpgbpDWbI9miv0bkNA3W2mE1I
Our Third Story
Lowes Launches Its Marketplace
These vertical specific marketplaces where a retailer has traffic, dedicated customer, and scale, it’s without question a good idea. In that vein, Lowe’s launched its own marketplace. The reason is, people know why they are coming to your site, and especially in a category like home there are always niche use cases that can benefit from more selection.
I imagine based on the Lowes earnings calls, Lowes is going to follow to the letter the Walmart playbook right into digital services and ad revenue. Mirakl - one of the sponsors of the Watson Weekly - is the provider for the marketplace and in the United States, the company seems to have a hammerlock on basically all the top marketplaces that are not custom-built.
[References:]
https://corporate.lowes.com/newsroom/press-releases/lowes-accelerates-its-online-marketplace-announces-partnership-mirakl-05-21-25
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And Our Last Story
Tariff Feud Event And The Lead Recap
Last week we had a great event that RMW Commerce hosted together with Passport in Chinatown at a super-chill bar with 50+ of our closest friends.
I gave a few comments on cross-border at the outset, combined with long-time friend Jim Okamura one of the co-founders of the Global eCommerce Leaders Forums.
One of my favorite stats from Jim’s presentation was that there will be 11 total countries with greater than 20% eCommerce penetration by the next few years. This is a lot of consumers hungry for product globally. Of that list of 11 countries, the standard big ones of course like US, Canada, UK, Germany… but Indonesia and Mexico stood out on the list as countries that most people may not know have such high ecommerce penetration.
After our presentations, we had a great game of Tariff Feud with the teams chosen from the crowd which made the whole event. There will be pictures from the event and I may or may not have worn a crazy outfit for the occasion. Are you starting to sense a trend here?
Thanks to Alex Yancher, Tom Griffin and the entire Passport team for their partnership on the event! If you’re looking to have an actual interesting and fun event and you run marketing for a software company, drop me a note, we have a lot of interesting packages.
[References:]
It’s That Time Friends, for our Investor Minute. We have 5 items on the menu today.
First
Valley Lighting Acquired by Private Equity Firm Caymus Equity Partners
Caymus Equity Partners, an Atlanta-based private equity firm, has announced the acquisition of Valley Lighting, a Maryland-based commercial lighting distributor, for an undisclosed amount. The transaction was completed in partnership with the CEO and EVP of Valley Lighting, who both will maintain significant ownership stakes in the company. The company focuses on sectors such as healthcare, government, education, and data centers, and its business model is dependent on project-driven sales, supporting design-build and specified projects. This is not a distressed asset but rather a bet on growth in the Baltimore, D.C., and Northern Virginia markets.
Link: https://inside.lighting/news/25-05/valley-lighting-acquired-private-equity-firm
Second
Forethought.ai Raises $65M In Series C Funding
Multi-agent AI customer service automation platform Forethought, which serves enterprises, has announced that it has raised a $65 million Series C funding round. The funding will be used to hire technology and product talent, as well as in other departments. The company aims to integrate its AI platform across multiple sectors. Customer service is rapidly evolving into a sector where multiple AI agents handle routine queries, while humans address more complex ones.
Link: https://forethought.ai/blog/forethought-raises-65-million-series-c
Third
Dick’s Sporting Goods To Buy Foot Locker For $2.4B
Dick's Sporting Goods has announced that it will acquire Foot Locker for $24 per share, with an equity value of approximately $2.3 billion. The transaction will be financed through cash on hand and new debt. Dick's Sporting Goods will gain 2,400 retail stores across 20 countries and will operate Foot Locker as a standalone business unit, maintaining the Foot Locker brand. The combined company will have leverage to negotiate with apparel and shoe brands, but could this be Dick's Sporting Goods' CEO's first mistake?
Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/dicks-sporting-goods-nears-deal-to-buy-foot-locker-7ecf9194
Fourth
Nekuda Raises $5M to Power Agentic Payments
Nekuda, an agentic payments infrastructure platform, has announced that it has raised $5 million in venture funding. The funding will be invested in product development and scaling operations. Nekuda is aiming to become the trust layer for agentic commerce by providing built-in authentication, guardrails, and compliance, extending down to payment networks. The current financial sector relies on human presence, but Nekuda offers developers an SDK that enables agent-driven transactions within the existing payment ecosystem.
AND FINALLY …
Stord Raises $200M in Debt and Equity at a $1.5B Valuation in Series E Funding
Logistics startup Stord has announced that it has raised $200 million, a combination of debt and equity, at a valuation of $1.5 billion. According to reports, the equity raise was $80 million, and the debt raised was $120 million. The company is reportedly also looking at mergers and acquisitions, as third-party logistics is a volume-based sector. In 2024, Stord acquired the e-commerce fulfillment segment from Pitney Bowes for a reported $1.25 million.
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Did you know that RMW Commerce has another podcast? Check out The Watson Weekend for an unfiltered and lively eCommerce chat each week with me, Rick Watson, my co-host Jess Lesesky, and an array of interesting guests and topics. All focused on eCommerce. You can find the Watson Weekend by searching for it on iTunes, Spotify, or Youtube.
That’s all for this week! Till next time Watsonians.....
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Hi, I’m Rick Watson, CEO and Founder of RMW Commerce Consulting and host of the Watson Weekly podcast - your essential eCommerce Digest.
Our production partner for the series is Podcast on the Fly. This podcast is produced by RMW Commerce.
To hear new episodes of the show every Monday morning, subscribe now at rmwcommerce.com/watsonweekly and wherever you get your podcasts.
