Thinking
Published judgement, dated and specific.
The practice writes down what it believes, and when, and lets the record keep score. Every piece carries a date, a number, and a judgement you are welcome to disagree with.
October 2026 · Trading kit
How to Trade the Golden Quarter
The companion to the Q4 readiness playbook, for the event days themselves: a launch checklist, the morning read, the daily action grid, the same-day retrospective and the lost-sales review. Templates, rules and owners. Free PDF, no form.
October 2026 · Second edition
The Retail AI Vendor Map, October 2026
The three layers re-verified to 1 October. Salesforce closed on Fin, the model frontier began shipping to restricted groups first, and in September US checkout moved back inside the assistant by platform default. What changed since July is listed at the foot of the page.
October 2026 · Position
The chatbot paradox
Conversational AI earns its keep where the customer cannot choose alone, and very little where they can. IMRG’s 0.39%, a peer-reviewed study of 973 websites, and a first-hand test of an AI stylist with nothing to style.
October 2026 · Position
Agents expose commodity, not brand
An AI stylist placed inside ChatGPT sent me to another retailer within three minutes. What agents compare, who they leave exposed, and the clause ASOS’s principle needs next.
October 2026 · Position
Adoption is an operating-model question
37% of organisations see any EBIT impact from AI, unchanged in a year. Ownership, failover and funding decide the rest, and ecommerce taught the same lesson a decade earlier.
October 2026 · From the stage
What customers say and what they do
The written version of the eCommerce Expo Headline Stage session. Five kinds of customer signal, the cases where retailers mistook one for another, and a five-question test before any signal earns a decision.
September 2026
Bulletproof for the Golden Quarter
The Q4 readiness playbook: seven foundations where a binding constraint can hide, the 2025 peak read through Currys and The Works, and a 23-point pre-peak checklist. Free, no form.
September 2026
Should we replatform?
Six questions a retail board should ask before committing to an enterprise ecommerce platform, from the chair that approved the spend.
August 2026 · Index
The Commercial Experience Index, Edition Two: Premier League Club Shops
All twenty Premier League club online stores, scored out of 100 across eight measures read from the live shopfront. Bournemouth top the table on 73. The famous clubs build good stores for humans and poor ones for machines, and sixteen of the twenty return a 404 where an AI agent looks first. Full 26-page PDF free to download.
August 2026
The two numbers the AI visibility industry keeps confusing
The industry is awash with AI statistics, most quoted with more confidence than they have earned. I have read the studies so you do not have to. Two conversion figures, roughly 15 percent and roughly 2 percent, are being confused for one another, and the message underneath the noise is calm: AI has not remade ecommerce yet.
August 2026
The Commercial Experience Index, Edition One
Ten UK retail sites, scored out of 100 on a single axis: whether the experience helps the customer move from arrival to commitment. Reputation did not predict execution. PDF available.
2016, republished July 2026
The Five-Stage Retail Transformation Model
The journey mapped for UK retailers in 2016, naming AI personalisation as the destination a decade early. Republished as written, with a note on what held.
July 2026
The Retail AI Vendor Map: A Working View
Three layers, category judgements, and the sequencing questions that come before any vendor conversation.
Contact
Thirty minutes, no deck.
Tell Steve what is not moving. If there is a problem worth solving, the conversation will find it. If Barking Cat is not the right answer, you will hear that first.
steve@barkingcat.ai