Recorded live at eTail Boston 2026. Listen to the episode:
Jeff Wender came to eTail Boston as Chief Revenue Officer of Minty, a company that lives in the gap between the shopper who is browsing and the shopper who actually buys, and when Isaac sat down with him at the booth the conversation opened on a phrase Wender had thrown out before the recording started, one that turned out to carry the entire thesis in two words.
“Money maxing is no different than what consumers have been doing for decades, which is in environments like this, when you know when costs are high and consumers are really trying to be as cost conscious as they can, they want to stretch their dollar.”
None of that behavior is new, and the part that is new is the machinery now pointed at it.
“What Minty does and where we focus is on proactive commerce. We’re about helping brands and advertisers to be able to put the right products in front of customers and then when they do customers have the ability to get the right incentives to get them from the discovery part where they’re looking and trying to find the best deal to money max and get to a place where they make that actual purchase.”
The number every merchant knows and mostly ignores
Ask Wender about the merchant side, and he goes straight to a split that most ecommerce teams can recite, and that few of them have a plan for.
“Today, when someone goes to an e-commerce destination, 5% of people effectively make purchases. But what’s really critical is that 95% of people go to an e-commerce destination and they don’t purchase because usually they’re in the discovery phase. They’re looking at a variety of different websites, a variety of different products that they’re interested in.”
The 5% is where retention software, loyalty programs and email flows all crowd in. The 95% stays dark, because the brand has no idea who any of those visitors are. So what is a merchant supposed to do with the nine out of ten people who look and leave without ever identifying themselves? That anonymity is the specific thing Minty sells against.
“Because we have a relationship, effectively a database of over 450 million connected devices with permission uses, we have the ability to identify those individuals that a brand doesn’t know who they are, and we can proactively reach out to them to make and offer an incentive that would get them from that discovery phase to the conversion phase.”
The booth graphic behind him put a number on the outcome, claiming 1.6 million dollars in revenue driven for clients since the last eTail.
Where the instrumentation sits
The mechanism is less exotic than the pitch suggests, which is a point in its favor. Minty runs an app inside Shopify, so the signal comes from the store itself rather than from a layer bolted on top.
“We work with e-commerce brands to put the right instrumentation and to work with them through Shopify capabilities. So we work very closely and have an app in Shopify that Shopify brands can incorporate our technology and to be able to identify when that intention takes place so that when it is we then can then reach out and directly engage with the customer so that we can provide the right incentive.”
Asked what he was hearing from everyone walking the floor, Wender described a market split between two jobs: squeezing more out of the customers a brand already has, and finding the ones it does not know yet. His read is that the second job is where the attention has moved.
The best answer anyone gave about AI
Every vendor on a conference floor has an AI position, and asked for his, Wender declined to give one at all.
“It doesn’t matter what we think, it matters what the consumer thinks.”
Then he produced a number instead, taken from a national holiday shopper survey Minty ran.
“We found in the national study that 78% of individuals are going to be using some form of AI as part of their holiday shopping. Now what that usually means for the most part is is that it’s primarily being used for discovery purposes. People are using to identify what are the types of recommendations you would make.”
Discovery again, the same phase where 95% of store visitors are already sitting, which means Minty’s response is a product that puts brands inside the machine doing the recommending.
“That starts with a product called Minty Promote. That allows a brand to be able to take their products as well as all the different incentives and to syndicate them across all of the major LLMs. So to the extent that a brand wants to make sure that they’re part of the conversation, Minty helps to enable that and surface those opportunities.”
For anyone who has been watching answer engine optimization turn from a curiosity into a line item, this is the same problem approached from the incentive side rather than the content side. Does a model mention your product, or can it also hand over a reason to buy it? Minty is betting the second question is the one that pays.
“AI is here to stay. How people are going to be utilizing it is going to be incredibly important. And we as a business have to be ready to support what the customer does in order to drive that behavior.”
The three products Minty is putting in front of brands
Wender closed on the full funnel, which for Minty means three pieces rather than one. Minty Promote handles awareness inside the LLMs, the Minty App surfaces incentives to shoppers directly, and Minty Ads is a retail media layer for brands wanting more prominence.
“It’s making sure that whether it’s giving the right level of awareness, whether it’s ultimately helping to kind of create that right spark that drives the conversion, that’s what we care about the most is that we want to be able to provide brands with the right tools and the platform capabilities so that they can be very effective in finding that next big customer.”
Three things worth taking from this
The 95% is a strategy question, not a conversion rate optimization question. Squeezing the 5% harder has a ceiling, and nearly every tool a brand already owns is pointed at that same small group.
Discovery is where both problems meet. It is where the 95% are sitting and it is where 78% of holiday shoppers say they will use AI, which makes it one surface rather than two.
And the useful answer about AI turned out to be a measurement, not an opinion. Wender refused the question and produced a survey, which is a better move than a manifesto and rarer on a show floor than it ought to be.
Jeff Wender is Chief Revenue Officer of Minty. This conversation was recorded at eTail Boston 2026. Find him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jeffwender and learn more at minty.com. For more at-event interviews, visit talk-commerce.com/events.
