June 30th, 2025: Klarna CEO Claims They Will Be a Super App, Walmart Investor Event Sheds New Light, Should You Put a Chatbot In Front Of Your Retail Store, Musings from CommerceNext + Mirakl’s Summit
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It’s June 30, 2025 and this is the Watson Weekly - your essential eCommerce Digest!
Today on our show:
Klarna CEO Claims They Will Be a Super App
Walmart Investor Event Sheds New Light
Should You Put a Chatbot In Front Of Your Retail Store
Musings from CommerceNext and Mirakl’s Summit
- 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….
Klarna CEO Claims They Are Going to be a Super App
Let’s get this out of the way first, I don’t think this is going to happen. Whenever I see the term "super app" used in North America, it's almost always "look out below" because grift and hallucinations follow.
First, the term is meaningless at this point. You want a real super app? It's ChatGPT. The last person to announce they were building a super-app? Elon Musk's X. Hold my beer, I'm still waiting on a reason to give a social media network my bank account details.
There you go. In a recent PYMNTS article, the Klarna CEO announced the following:
* We are going to become yet another financial services company with a phone plan.
* We're trying to be a super app.
* We want to be a financial advisor in your pocket.
* Klarna is going to be adding stocks and cryptocurrencies.
Is this what defines a super app? Wouldn't that make Cash App already a super app? Only 57 million users. I mean, noteworthy, but not transformational.
So what is really going on here?
Ultimately I think they are trying to get the attention of Paypal. Essentially, there is a battle brewing where Paypal is possibly not able to modernize quickly enough to take on the threats of newer financial services upstarts.
It's entirely possible that the whole t is a ploy to get acquired by Paypal, which has historically been an acquisitive company and has a much higher overall valuation.
If this is Klarna's ploy, it still has not only brand work to do, it also has significant revenue diversification problem. When they company filed its F-1, it revealed BNPL is 80% of its revenue, and that number is accelerating y/y, not shrinking.
Which means the company seems to be increasingly grasping at straws to get off its single BNPL horse.
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[References:]
Our Second Story
Walmart Investor Event Sheds New Light: Retail Media as Biggest Untapped Opportunity
In the last two weeks, Walmart revealed a bit more post-earnings call information that I wanted to highlight for everyone. It was covered at the
Oppenheimer Consumer Growth event on Jun 9th. Here are a few items:
Q2 Off to a Great Start
* March actually was more in line with what we expected. And then, with Easter moving to April, we saw really strong performance around that, and we're off to a good start this quarter.
Tariffs Causing 20% Less Inventory Depth in Some Cases
* For high AUR, tariff-sensitive items, they are buying less into the selection depending on price/demand elasticity. Barbecue pits were one example mentioned as as much and 20% less was a number called out. It's really here that Walmart sophistication shines in my view.
General Merchandise Dragging
* Consumers still prioritizing food. Continued slugging rebound.
eCommerce Profitability Accelerating
* Hit major milestone last quarter: eCom profitability. Overshadowed by tariff news.
* Doubled # deliveries under 3 hours in last year. This is a premium/paid service. Some weeks this Express service is 40% of deliveries. Very material.
* Key factors to profitability: two-thirds of profit growth coming from alternative revenue streams, such as advertising, membership, marketplace, data, and premium Express shipping, improving last-mile batch density.
* Advertising is one of the biggest unlocks. (According to my research, Walmart media is 3x less penetrated on a GMV basis relative to Amazon).
* Vizio acquisition accelerates our ad revenue because we don't need to carry the item in our marketplace to advertise it.
These last two points are critical to how Walmart and most retailers need to see the universe.
* First-party retail is one level. And you can sell ads against that, sell data streams, and there is premium fulfillment revenue you can generate.
* Third-party marketplace is another level, and there are multiple revenue streams here.
* "Pure" advertising is another level. Literally selling anything against content people are watching on devices that are powered by Walmart's media network. This potentially has a much larger surface area than Marketplace 3P items.
Based on these comments, we have not seen the last of Walmart's acquisitions in electronics and connected device space. Walmart will continue to look for more ad inventory that is not tied to fulfillment an item itself, or even through one of its marketplace partners.
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Our Third Story
Should You Put a Chatbot in Front of Your Retail Store?
There are a lot of people speaking about how LLMs and Agentic Shopping will disrupt how we buy online. Yet we seem to be forgetting that 80% of shopping still happens offline. And online research is already pretty efficient today.
There will still likely remain a very large cohort of use cases, social behaviors, and user types that will demand physical interaction. Even if you use an LLM to help you research, it doesn't mean it will replace your shopping journey. But it could:
* Help you "reserve" the top 3 brands for you at the store for you to check out or even try on further. (After all, even your favorite brand's sizing isn't always consistent.)
* Help you place pickup orders if that's more convenient for you.
But what about within the store itself? Mr a16z threw a swing and miss on predicting eCommerce would destroy physical stores. I would predict the same fate to LLMs. So let's not give into hyperbole here, not just yet.
We all know the standard response to any sales rep at the front of a store:
"No thank you, I'm just looking." Why? You don't want to bother to get to know this person and give them context.
Even if an LLM could transfer context from your personal agent, in a privacy safe way, the same thing would be true of an annoying, even if useful, robot trying to talk to you at the front of a store. Who's got the time?
But what if you were walking through this store and you have a Perplexity + Apple Agentic Shopper in your Airpods, would the scenario change, and what would that mean?
Not just product data, but sales rep, POS checkout, store layout, item location, retail planogram, physical shopper intent/conversion could all be fair game for LLM input.
You would still have the freedom to follow your own path and keep your own data to yourself and your private agent.
Could your personal agent remind you if the product you're looking at matches the project you're working on back at your home without you phoning a friend? Definitely seems possible. How about if the paint color you are staring happens to be a color your wife hates?
To me, replacing online research and buying is great, but we are talking about cannibalization. "Agentifying" the physical world is going to be the most interesting cases -- the world is your surface area.
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And Our Last Story
Musings from CommerceNext and Mirakl Summit
Having attended CommerceNext and Mirakl’s Summit this week, I got a chance to speak with a number of brands and companies about the future. It’s produced the following thoughts.
First, I see three groups of people with regards to the AI revolution which is in its early innings.
* Group 1 is people who do not realize that change is coming. They are just doing the same thing they do every year Pinky, trying to beat last year’s comps. This is most upper-mid market and Enterprise brands. They don’t know what they don’t know, and aren’t worried about it. This is about 40 percent of people by my estimation.
* Group 2 are people trying to leverage AI on-site to please their investors and their bottom line, or increase conversion rate a few basis points. These people think there is a lot of potential, but are still thinking very small. This is probably most people.
* Group 3 are convinced something major is happening, and are trying to figure it out, and have teams dedicated to reimagine entirely their existing workflow and processes to take advantage of the public LLMs. This is less than 1% of people.
What strikes me about the coming AI revolution is still the importance of data and systems of record. Bigcommerce has a sneaky strategy with Perplexity which relies on Feedonomics and its integration with the systems of record at major brands.
Could it be that BigCommerce being asleep the past few years has actually worked in their favor? Inquiring minds want to know.
[References:]
It’s That Time Friends, for our Investor Minute. We have 5 items on the menu today.
First
FERMÀT Raises $45M In Series B Funding
Fermàt, an AI-native commerce platform, has raised $45M in Series B funding which will be used to invest in its technology platform. and to hire talent.
Second
PMG Acquires Momentum Commerce
PMG, a global independent marketing services and technology company, announced the acquisition of Momentum Commerce, a digital commerce agency, for an undisclosed amount. The strategic acquisition enables PMG to offer omnichannel digital marketing services and expand its retail media and marketplace offerings for global brands.
Link: https://www.pmg.com/blog/pmg-acquires-momentum-commerce
Third
Clay Reportedly Secures a Series C at a $3B Valuation
Data enrichment and sales automation platform Clay has reportedly raised an undisclosed Series C funding round at a $3 billion valuation, a month after $1.5 billion tender offer, which enables Clay staff to sell shares to Sequoia Capital.
Link: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/13/clay-secures-a-new-round-at-a-3b-valuation-sources-say/
Fourth
Freight Network Warp Raises $10M in Series A Funding
Middle-mile freight network Warp has announced that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding, which will be invested in its technology platform, a fully robotic cross-dock, and automation, with minimal hiring.
Link: https://www.finsmes.com/2025/06/warp-raises-10m-in-series-a-funding.html
AND FINALLY …
Figma Acquires Open-Source Headless CMS Payload
Figma, a cloud-based design tool, has announced the acquisition of Payload, a headless open-source content management system, for an undisclosed price. Payload will remain open source, and the transaction provides a more seamless workflow for designers, developers, and content teams.
Link: https://www.figma.com/blog/payload-joins-figma/
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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.
