By the Numbers: Add To Cart’s 5 Most Listened Episodes of 2025 | #584

To kick off 2026, we're looking back at the five most downloaded episodes of 2025 and the ideas that resonated most with ecommerce leaders this year.

From practical frameworks for adopting AI without losing the human edge, to rethinking customer experience, localisation at scale, agentic AI, and the real-world mechanics behind a 48% conversion lift, this countdown captures the conversations shaping where ecommerce is heading next.

If you missed any of these episodes the first time around, this is your cue to add them back to the queue, and start 2026 with sharper thinking, clearer priorities, and ideas worth implementing.

Chapters

• 2:11 5. James Johnson - Shopify
• 6:17 4. Suzy, Jay and Jane - Klaviyo
• 12:11 3. YC Eu - Nespresso
• 17:13 2. David Brudenell - Decidr.AI
• 22:26 1. Heather Earl - Nutrition Warehouse

Transcript

SPEAKER_04: 0:02

Hey, it's Nathan Bush or Bushy joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. Welcome back to 2026. We're going to kick off the year with one of my favorite activities that has become a bit of an Ad Descart tradition in recent years is looking back at the top five most downloaded episodes from the year before. It's been fascinating taking a look back through the numbers in what episodes have really resonated with you and created that conversation around what's exciting in e-commerce. Because for us at Ad Dicart, we're always about looking ahead. What's the future looking like in e-commerce? What's the exciting things that are happening? Who's doing things a little bit differently? And I'm happy to say that the top five episodes from last year really reflect that. So today we're going to introduce, do a little bit of a countdown around the top five episodes from last year and a little bit of context on why we think they are important and how they are going to set the scene for what we have coming up next year. And hey, if you love the sound of some of these guests and you may have missed them last year, I can highly, highly recommend going back and listening to the full episode. And it has been a huge year in e-commerce. Today you are going to hear lessons right at the core of what's happening in e-commerce today and looking ahead at the future. Of course, AI, our friend AI, makes a huge statement and is involved in pretty much all of these conversations. It's very clear to us that you have a massive appetite in how AI will change the game in e-commerce. And we look to bring you more conversations and examples of people who are doing great and interesting things with AI in e-commerce in 2026. But beyond this, we're also going to hear around great CX, how to reimagine CX, uncovering the hidden levers of margin and growth, transforming businesses through B2B, all the stuff that's always been around in retail. So it's a really great mix of both the future and getting the foundations right. All right, let's get into it. From over 50 conversations in 2025, here are our top five most downloaded episodes. Coming in at number five is our good friend and Shopify legend, James Johnson, who joined me as the very first guest to join me in the Add to Cart home studio where we went deep on Shopify and AI within Shopify. James is really clear around not only how Shopify can help integrate AI into e-commerce operations, but has a really brilliant philosophy around how to approach AI in business. His approach is that it's not about replacing people, it's about getting more time back. James shares this challenge that he gives to merchants. For one or two weeks, let AI literally do everything first. Every email, every report, every task. It'll feel messy at the start, but you quickly learn what AI can take off your plate and where your time is actually better spent. Here's James to give us his philosophy on AI from our number five most listened to episode, episode number 524.

SPEAKER_06: 3:10

Part of my discussion is think, we'll start with why not AI. And I use the example of literally for one or two weeks in your business, try and do every single thing that you need to do AI first. Use the AI tool before you go in and do it yourself. And we're talking about this before, about some tooling that you do. So literally, do I have to send this email myself, or can I, is there a better way to do that from a workflow perspective? I need to run this report. Should I be running that report, or can I get some help? And the real talk is that that will be painful and bumpy, and you'll learn what's really hard and what's really crappy. But it's a good mindset to have, and you will have a few nuggets in your workflow to go, oh shit, I can do something different and have a real different perspective and take. One of the other key things we talk about is avoiding the shiny, making sure you have a real business value and impact linked to what you're doing. So there are a plethora of tools out there, unsurprisingly. Everything has AI sprinkled into it, but that's irrelevant if you're not getting the business impact. Don't waste your time if you're not actually going to get the right result and get something functional off the back of it. And I guess the last call out, and it's something that we've done culturally at Shopify that I think other retailers or retailers can pick up from as well, is look at how you can work cross-functionally and then also embed some of the AI thinking in everything you do. And so for us, we do that in many different ways. We share what's working and what's not. We have amazing access to a plethora of tools internally. We're very fortunate to be able to do that. But we can pick and choose and say, these tools are amazing. I use it in this context, whether that's solving a product problem or a go-to-market problem or a customer challenge. And so there's real cross-functional work that we do around saying, well, here's a technical person and a business person and a marketing person. Let's figure that out. Very specifically, we also do that via things like hack days. And so that's very intentionally saying, here's a project we're going to come together and solve. So I think it's less about the tool specifically. The answer is we've got access to many, many tools. I suppose the tip would be what is your workflow as a retailer or in your business? How can you blend or maximize the human impact from that? So leverage the tools in the most effective way to build human impact rather than the other way around. And again, if you do that in your business to say, okay, one week we're going to go follow these workflows, you'll find stuff, you'll find those nuggets, those areas that are unique for your business that you go, oh, that's crappy. How do we do that? And maybe just jumping back to that dinner that we spoke about, someone shared around the table that they were rethinking what their customer service team were doing. And so they've positioned basically their customer service team are now doing less around tickets and answering straightforward questions, but doing more about co-selling with customers in their sales room floor. And so if I think about the customer service team, that's more powerful for them. They're getting better sales results. It's probably more exciting for the team themselves. And so I guess the tip is think through your flow, think through how you interact and where can AI mean you can be more human, because that'll be the differentiator for businesses going forward.

SPEAKER_04: 6:08

We love James and we are so lucky to have James as part of the Add to Cart world where he's constantly sharing his thoughts and the direction of Shopify for you. All right, number four. This is another very special episode. And this one was done in person in Sydney in a professional studio where we had three guests, Susie Nicoletti from Clavio, Jay Wright from E-Commerce Equation, and Jane Kay from Bird's Nest, come together to discuss CX and customer service in e-commerce. It was brilliant to go deep onto that. This, of course, came off the back of Clavio's launch in Sydney of their new D2C CRM, which was an exciting step for them this year. And I love this conversation because we really got to get into the weeds of what makes a great customer experience and how tools can really help in making that seamless for both customers and for our teams. The part we've picked out of this conversation is where we ask our guests around a three-layer service model. It's a really, really great way to think about what types of customer service you are giving to your customers when you need to actually be really involved, when you might be able to let the bots take over, and when you allow your customers to self-service. So here we are, episode number 496, our very special episode with Clavio, featuring Susie Nicoletti, Jay Wright, and Jane Kay discussing everything CX. The service side is really interesting. And the slide that I really loved this morning, Susie, was that one where you said you've got options as a retailer around how you service now that you never had before. And you've got the option now of self-service. And I think the stat was that 90% of customers actually want to self-service if they have the opportunity. You've got the layer of AI service, and then you've got the element human service. And I've never seen it broken down like that, which I thought was really interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 8:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 8:01

How are you going to help retailers choose which one to activate and use at the right time?

SPEAKER_01: 8:06

Oh, you've queued me up so nicely. It's all about the data, right? It's really understanding your customer more deeply. And I think there's two parts of that that are interesting. So when you get the opportunity to build something new, you get the opportunity to do a lot of research to understand, you know, what the B2C customer is or brand is thinking and what the customer wants. And so the overarching theme that our our chief customer officer was taking us through is yeah, 90% of customers are like, hey, let's, I just want the information. I want to get get back to doing what I was doing. And I think, you know, nothing, nothing too magical there. I think what we then thought is, okay, how much of this, you know, to your point, can be a an AI agent, right? What percentage of your queries can get to you quick and easy? You come into the customer hub, you log in, you got a question, there's a quick answer, you're back on your way. And how can we keep growing and understanding that? The more we can answer in an automated fashion, the better, right? So I think that was it's really, we've created the components so that in the same way we've empowered our brands to learn about marketing, you can now also learn about your customer service side as well. And then the third part of that, which is interesting, is again with the data, how can you to have a customer coming in, right? And think about where it's an opportunity to answer a question and introduce something new. So how can we evolve, you know, service to be a revenue generator and not just a cost center? So that's the end-to-end game, but obviously we want to solve for that 90% need in the first instance while also giving brands those those insights and those anecdotes they need to think about how that experience becomes more seamless.

SPEAKER_04: 9:42

I feel like that has been talked about a lot over, say, the past five years around how to turn customer service from a cost center into a revenue generating team. But I don't see a lot of people doing it really well. What about you guys? Jay, I might say you've got a good view across everyone.

SPEAKER_03: 9:59

Yeah, look, I think we've seen like the prolification of some new tools that play in this space. So I definitely think there's like a latent like want for people to do this. And there's been some like Shopify apps and add-ons, like auto editing, for example, that have kind of come from nothing and sort of shot up. And it allows people to kind of like edit just like a simple app. Like you don't have to email in and ask to change your shipping address when you got it wrong because it was the default on your Apple Pay. You can just change that yourself. Like such a simple thing. But there's obviously a huge demand for that from retailers because it's a huge cost center, you know. And you know what we've seen from some of the analytics in that app that you are able to then upsell people and say, look, hey, we'll we're changing it. We've still got space in the box. Do you want to add something? So it definitely appears that people want to do it, but I think they need to be enabled with tech to do it because it's not something that you can just code yourself. So yeah, I think we are going to see more and more people moving to this like self-service model and also the AI service model. Because, like Jane, you would know like the majority of tickets are like, where's my order?

SPEAKER_01: 11:00

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 11:01

Like, that's the majority of tickets, really. Where's my order? You know, is it have you received my return?

SPEAKER_01: 11:05

Yeah, have you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 11:07

When do I get my credit? You know, like a lot of the stuff is like pretty linear, you know, query response, repetitive stuff. And so what I think that does is really clogs up your CX team doing kind of mundane stuff. And I think a lot of people think, oh, we'll be able to fire our entire CX team. I don't think that's really what's going to take place. I think it's more going to be your CX team can then spend longer with someone who's like, what style should I wear? Or like, what goes with this? And and actually move upstream to sort of that revenue generation activity. So even if the tools themselves aren't like driving hard numbers, just freeing up the human power to do more higher order tasks and provide that like human level of a service where it's more needed, like selling or or providing that first-time touch point. I think that's probably what we're going to see here.

SPEAKER_04: 11:50

That was a very special episode. I don't know if you can tell, but before that, I just got off stage interviewing Ned Brockman, the famous Ned Brockman who ran across Australia. That to me was a career highlight of 2025. Something that I never thought that I would get to do. Here we are. All right, let's get into our third most downloaded episode of 2025. Coming to you at episode 493 is YCU from Nespresso, who shared the secrets behind how the team at Nespresso Australia have translated a global strategy to create a really personalized and localized experience for this market. I'm a big YCU fan. We we catch up regularly throughout the year, and I'm so lucky to call her a friend. And she has such a great view on how to market effectively, but also take a team on a journey. And I really, really love that. In a brand as big as Nespresso, you can imagine how daunting and overwhelming that task may be. And also when you've actually got the guardrails of a global brand from both a marketing and a technology perspective, you might sometimes feel a little bit trapped. But I think YC has a brilliant viewpoint on how to have the right mindset in e-commerce for growth. Here's YC.

SPEAKER_02: 13:06

What I love most about retail is like no two days are the same, but it's really clear why we exist and what my role is. It is about three things performing, transforming, and thriving. And performing, I guess, meaning we're rolling out campaigns and making sure that, you know, the site has a seamless journey for customers, transforming. So kind of strategizing, accelerating the channel, and then thriving is really about, you know, growing self, leading the teams, making sure that they're engaged, they're high performing, and yeah, they're they're growing. So I'm either reviewing or gathering data. So we pride ourselves on being customer-centric and data-driven. So we're always looking at whether it's sales results, how the categories are performing, or we're looking at engagement stats. So conversion rates, you know, abandoned cards, things like that into what customers are saying about us. So customer voice, requests for assistance, all of those topics. And then it's also to kind of keeping abreast of trends. Like there's just so much happening out there. What do we pick that we can use internally that makes sense to the higher vision? I guess the second thing is about, you know, strategy and planning. So working with the leadership team and coming up and strategizing kind of the longer-term vision and then planning with the team from rolling out features on the site to campaigns to even, you know, what goes on our homepage, because we change that quite frequently and there's a lot of testing and learning. And then finally, it's about execution. So once we review the data, we've strategized, we've planned, it's really about rolling it out. And then throughout that, it's just lots of collaborations, you know, within our e-business team, within other functions, agencies. And then as part of the leadership team, obviously, we want to make sure we're driving an engaging team as well and making sure that they're thriving.

SPEAKER_04: 14:59

That to me sounds like a bit of a head fuck, for lack of better words, because you're going between some really high-level activity in terms of big picture strategy, engagement with senior stakeholders all the way through to measuring and A-B tests and doing analytics, like all that way through. How do you maintain a focus throughout all that?

SPEAKER_02: 15:21

Yeah. So again, I think you'll you'll pick up on this. I'm quite structured, but I'm also I like things simple. So within, you know, the three kind of roles we play, it's about making sure that you have the right mindset when you're going into each. Well, first of all, I guess it's about balancing each of them. And then going into each, you have to have a very clear mindset, right? So when you're performing, it's about executing with excellence. So when we're creating new pages, it has to be error-free, bug-free. You know, we don't want people kind of rage clicking on a button because on a side because they think it's a button, but it's not a button. And then it's about the one per senses, right? Like how do you continuously improve? So for the product pages, for example, we've now launched, you know, coffee specialist testimonials. We've then added recipes. So it's about constantly improving, you know, with kind of the one per senses. And then when you get into transforming, it's a whole nother mindset, right? It's about growth. It's about brave, not perfect. It's about testing, learning. You know, we decide what's a MVP and we go live with it. And then we let customers kind of tell us which part of it they like, which part of it they don't like, and then we iterate. So it is quite a different mindset. And once you're clear on it, then when you go into each, it's easier for you to find, you know, an approach that makes sense.

SPEAKER_04: 16:41

Do you do anything to get yourself in the right mindset?

SPEAKER_02: 16:43

Yeah. Looking after yourself, right? Making sure that there's and everyone's work-life balance is different. For me, it's even just the basics, like making sure that, you know, you get enough rest. Water is life. I mean, coffee is too, but making sure you're there is water and coffee. Making sure that is and really kind of doing what you love. I think when you figure out what that is, you know, then the days go by really quickly and you don't feel like you're working.

SPEAKER_04: 17:13

All right, we add down to number two, the second most downloaded episode of 2025. This one goes to episode 555, David Brudnell from Decider AI. Now, for many of you, you may not have heard of Decider AI before this episode, but it is one of the episodes that I'm constantly telling the story of at events and dinner parties. I think it's a fascinating view on what the world could look like under the control of AI bots. David, I think, is a few steps ahead of where we're thinking with AI bots. And the core of his philosophy is that we shouldn't just put bots within our operations and our customer service to answer questions. We should give them goals and tasks, just like we do our real team. So instead of saying when a customer asks this question, answer this way, we say actually, no, your job is to help make sure that that customer satisfaction is at 90% plus. So do whatever you need to do based on all the learnings with all the customers that you service to get that customer service up to 90%. That's your job. And I think that's a really interesting way to think about bots, to give them goals rather than tasks. Blew my mind a little bit. So here's David Brunel from Decider AI on episode 555 as our second most downloaded episode of 2025.

SPEAKER_05: 18:35

Many people don't have enough time to make decisions, or you're focused on the less important decisions. The decisions that we think people should be focused on are the aspirations and the goals of your company, what your product should be, who your customer ICPs are, and those types of things. Unfortunately, many of the decisions we have to make are can I afford to hire that additional person? Do I have to do this accounting and bookkeeping on a Saturday morning? The baloney, as I like to call it. The baloney. So in a world where, you know, we have this amazing new technology called artificial intelligence or generative AI that has all of the knowledge of humanity at your fingertips now. And as we begin to start to learn how to use this technology, we believe at decider when used properly, and we can get it, we can dive a bit more different deeply into like what that means, is we can start to get rid of the baloney and elevate teams to what we call higher order work. And that is, you know, making those more what we think are the more important decisions as a business runs. The example I love to give is that I'm sure there is a metric within Toyota of how many times the bonnet is opened in one of the cameras, right? And that that goal target is zero, right? Because who thinks about, you know, maintenance of a camry engine? Mm-hmm. Nobody, right? Because they're so reliable. When cars were first invented, yes, we had to go underneath the bonnet and fix it and crank it and do all kinds of those things. That's what we're doing with. That's what we're doing with businesses today. We're literally like in the bonnet, we're we're cranking the engine, we're doing all those things, but you know, with a system like decider, we want to be the Toyota Camry engine of businesses, like of business. I've never heard someone so aspirationally wanting to be a Camry. I know, I know. Isn't that the worst? But I get it. But you get it, right? So no one cares. But you know what you know what you're doing when you're in your Camry, you're taking the people who mean most in your life, you're taking them safely, you're going on journeys, you're experiencing life, you know, all the great things of every car commercial that's ever been made, right? That's what you're doing. And we're today in businesses, we're doing all the mechanic work and we're not driving the cars. So that's what we believe decider can do for businesses and business owners.

SPEAKER_04: 20:40

That's very different to a lot of other AI, I wouldn't even call them startups, but AI technologies that are in market at the moment where they're trying to be flashy and innovative, but it sounds like you're almost trying to solve old problems with new tech. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_05: 20:56

We are. We are absolutely doing that. We have created like some of deciders' technology is what we call an agentic schema. So, you know, the extra y would be like we're the palantier for SMEs. So palantier is creating an ontology for government, right? We've created like a schema for a business, the whole thing, right? And each node in that is agentic where everyone is focused on point solutions, which I think personally is, you know, being in the industry and working on, you know, many of the large language models and knowing what it looks like underneath the hood of building these things. I find it it's not surprising because you know, trends we all do the same things as humans over and over again. And you know, we're the tailwinds of SaaS and VC investment in SaaS are strong. So it's not surprising that we're taking this inhuman technology and putting it into very human businesses. That's like, you know, bricks and mortars to online. Like when websites were first created, you don't like literally have the same walkthrough as a David Jones or a Walmart. Or even worse, you then take the terminal and you put it into the Walmart. So you have people going like that's kind of what we're doing now when we're jamming these point solutions into human businesses, where we believe you need to, like any new technology, you need to build an AI first or an agentic first system and then have humans to go into it.

SPEAKER_04: 22:16

All right, massive drum roll. Here we go. Number one, the most downloaded Ad Descartes episode of 2025 goes to episode 551, The Secrets Behind a 48% conversion lift at Nutrition Warehouse with Heather Earl. I got so much amazing feedback around this episode with Heather. And I think it's because Heather has this insane knack for being able to give the big picture and to explain the transformation and explain the future vision of the experience that they want to give to their customers, but give real practical and in-depth advice. And as you'll hear in this part of the conversation, which we pulled out, we talked about LLM driven traffic, right? Because of course everything's tied back to AI this year, right? But we thought this passage was really, really powerful because Heather gives the context of how impactful that LLM traffic is, but also gives us really practical advice on how to improve our LLM traffic to our site. That was a theme that went all through this episode. We went high, we went low, but I can guarantee that you'll come out with two or three ideas that you can implement for your e-commerce business from this episode with Heather. So here's a snippet of that episode from Heather that gives you a hint of how good this conversation was. Are you getting much traffic now from your LLMs?

SPEAKER_00: 23:41

Oh, yeah, absolutely. We've had a huge increase in our traffic in LLMs. We had about a I it was over 300% surge in Chat GPT traffic in the last six months. Wow. But since Knowledge Base has been doing it, we're seeing gradually every week we can see it. But yeah, finding out exactly what our customers are looking for, being able to use the LLMs to find that out. I mean, it's quite a simple way of doing it. Finding out exactly that the majority of the searches that lead to conversion on our site are finishing in near me. So they're going, I'm looking for this product or help me with this journey. I'm looking for, or I'm trying to get into running. I'm gonna need this, or what do I need? And how do I get this near me? And they all seem to finish in a bit of a near me. I mean, why wouldn't we be leaning into that? We have 122 stores in Australia, three in New Zealand with more opening this year. And we're not slowing down in the store space. So we do have a store near you. One of our founders' goals is to be within 20 kilometers of every Australian, right? We want to be where our customers are. And I mean, that feels old school retail to a lot of people, but to us, I think that visibility of the store near the gym that they've got to get out of the house to go to the gym, it makes a lot of sense. And it works for us. And um, it builds that community, it builds that values, it keeps, you know, our customers feeling a part of something as well. But having that near me at the end of our search made me go, gosh, customers are wanting to shop a store online. So we reworked our collections pages to be able to filter by a store. So you write from a collection level, you can shop the store near you. You can go, hey, I'm in Melbourne City today. If I wanted to go to the Melbourne City store and I knew I was going to click and collect, because I don't have time to go to the store, browse, have a chat with my store staff, my local legend in the store that day. It's really being able to go online, filter the collection by Melbourne City, only see the products that are available there. We still do MSLs. So all our stores have fairly different stock based on what their customers are looking for in that region. And we give that power to our store managers. Both a blessing and a curse, I guess. But from a tech point of view, curse. But from you know, a customer point of view, great. So for us, having our collection pages be able to be filtered by stores so that you can shop the click and collect part of your journey far earlier on. A lot of people with click and collect have that intention as they're on site at a very early point. So having click and collect happen at checkout, which is what we did have early last year, where the earliest point where you could select click and collect is at checkout. And then it goes, actually, that's not available at the store near you that you actually want to shop from. It's only available online. That really hinders people. So bringing that earlier in the journey at the collection point not only helped us to feel like we were replicating that store experience, but it took away a really big barrier to purchase, a huge drop-off point, increased our bounce rates. Yeah. It helped look at the colour.

SPEAKER_04: 26:24

You're almost giving every physical store their own online store by doing it that way, right?

SPEAKER_00: 26:29

We really are. And after those learnings coming back from the LLMs, like leaning more into that, featuring that more heavily, we're reworking our entire store locator, the store landing pages to help better suit that model.

SPEAKER_04: 26:41

So there you go. Congratulations, Heather, on being number one in our 2025 most downloaded episodes of Add to Cart. Also, a massive, massive congratulations to David, to YC, to Susie, to Jay, to Jane, and of course to James for bringing real value to our audience. All of those conversations were absolutely incredible and gave so much help and information to those who are in e-commerce. So thank you so much to them, but also thank you so much to all of our guests from this year. As you might have heard on our best bits of 2025 episode last week, there is such a variety of skill sets and perspectives that we cover on Add to Cart, and everyone brings their own unique perspective. And that's what I hope for you is that you can pick the bits that work best for you and that help you create your unique advantage in market. Of course, you can't do everything, and it can be overwhelming to try and do everything that you hear. And there is pressure to kind of jump on the latest trends or the latest technology. I know we all feel that. But at the end of the day, if you're just picking the best bits out of what you've heard and implementing, that's the important part, is actually implementing, then you're going to be way ahead of the game. Thank you to everyone who joined us this year. But most of all, thank you for downloading and listening this year. We've had one of the most incredible years on Ad to Cart in terms of engagement and listenership. Of course, we've got our Ad to Cart community where we've got over 500 e-commerce professionals in there every day asking questions around the episodes, but also some of the problems that they have every day. So if you want to continue the conversation from any of these episodes or anything outside these episodes, maybe even request a guest for next year, come and join the Add to Cart community over on adducart.com.au. It's free to join, and we'd love to have you in there for 2026 just to be by your side to help you as we all find our way through what is going to be no doubt another year of drastic change. And of course, if this is the first time for you listening to us, whether you found us at the end of 2025 or sometime through 2026, make sure you hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple. And we'll continue bringing you great e-commerce tips and stories every week. Enjoy the rest of your holidays if you're still on them. And we can't wait to bring you brand new episodes into 2026.