StudioForty9 Next in Commerce

2026 Series Complete ✅

Three rooms. The problems retailers actually have.

Galway, Dublin and Cork. Retailers sent us their hardest problem in advance, then our panel and Shopify answered them live. No slides about the future of commerce. Here is what came up, and what we said.

01

Galway

Monday28 Jul

Complete The Dean, Galway

02

Dublin

Wednesday10 Sep

Complete The Dean, Dublin

03

Cork

Monday15 Sep

Complete The Dean, Cork

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The format

You sent the problem. We answered it in the room.

Every attendee submitted one real problem before the day. No hypotheticals, no survey questions, just the thing that was actually costing them time or money. On the day the panel worked through them one by one in front of everyone, and the best material came from the room pushing back. A hire company charging for fuel and damage. A florist forecasting peak on perishables. A plant retailer losing VAT on every custom POS sale. Nobody had to pretend their business was simple.

35problems submitted across the three sessions.

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retailers in the rooms

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Irish businesses

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cities

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problems submitted

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answered live

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Shopify and StudioForty9 experts

The sessions

What it looked like.

Variant ceilings – Bot traffic – Profitability – Peak forecasting – AI visibilityVariant ceilings – Bot traffic – Profitability – Peak forecasting – AI visibilityVariant ceilings – Bot traffic – Profitability – Peak forecasting – AI visibilityVariant ceilings – Bot traffic – Profitability – Peak forecasting – AI visibilityVariant ceilings – Bot traffic – Profitability – Peak forecasting – AI visibilityVariant ceilings – Bot traffic – Profitability – Peak forecasting – AI visibility

The themes

Five problems, over and over.

01

Catalogue complexity

Close to a quarter of everything submitted was a version of the same question. Furniture with hundreds of fabric options. Paint mixed to order. Planters paired with plants. All of it is the variant ceiling wearing a different coat, and the answer is almost always a base product with bundles generated through the API rather than a variant matrix that cannot exist.

02

Measurement you can trust

One retailer saw traffic from Singapore multiply overnight with no orders behind it. Another had two cookie notices firing on mobile, both being paid for. When the numbers are wrong, every decision downstream is a guess. Server side tracking came up, and so did the plainer point that daily conversion rate is the wrong thing to stare at.

03

The cost base

The sharpest question of the series came from a fashion retailer describing the messy middle. Too big to run on nothing, too small for volume discounts. Compliance costs, app costs, accessibility tooling priced like a salary line. The answer was an honest audit of what every app actually earns, not a longer list of tools.

04

Search and discovery

Asked from both ends, by a retailer whose customers cannot find things and one paying for a search app that may no longer be needed. Shopify's own Search and Discovery has quietly become good, and the you may also like feature now does work that used to carry a monthly licence.

05

Being visible to AI

Two separate questions, one foundation. Product attributes and the Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy are what make your catalogue legible to an AI shopping agent, and they are the same thing that makes on-site search work properly. Do it once, get both.

06

Retention over acquisition

Raised in every room, driven by rising acquisition costs and softening returns from paid social and search. The second and third orders are where the profit lives. Several retailers in the room were still buying the first one at a discount and hoping.

The most reusable answer of the series

Fix your product attributes. Two problems go away.

It answered a question about on-site search in one room and a question about AI visibility in another. The Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy, proper product types and filled-in attributes are the foundation under both. They are also what Shopify uses to decide how your products are treated across markets. It is unglamorous work and it is the highest leverage thing most catalogues could do this quarter.

1 in 4of every problem submitted was a version of the same catalogue question.