Hey Cowboys,

Happy Friday! Have you seen how viral this AI video editing is right now? Wild stuff.

LIVE NOW — come hang out on X or YouTube.

Today’s lineup 👇 and stories.

Where is your brand leaving money on the table? Rabah Rahil, Daniel Peskin, Andrew Rea and Bryan MacDonald join today’s show to talk smarter acquisition, subscription-app fees and overlooked tax overpayments.

Tune in for a closer look at how you win customers and what it costs to keep them.

Future Brian shared a demo of GPT-6 Astra connected to DaVinci through MCP, bringing AI into the editing workflow.

For ecomm teams, the potential payoff is more creative ready to test. The question is how much production work this setup can handle while preserving the details that make an ad useful.

Why operators should pay attention:

• Production capacity: Could it help your team work through its editing backlog?
• Creative iteration: Could it make testing different versions less time-consuming?
• Quality control: How much revision does the output need before it’s ready to publish?

Our take: use the demo as a starting point for a small test. Give the workflow an existing brief and footage, then compare the finished result and total editing time against your usual process.

Watch Future Brian’s demo.

Dick’s wants more than sporting-goods advertisers

Dick’s Sporting Goods is pitching CPG brands, restaurants and automakers on its advertising network. Its selling point: access to 70 million consumers across properties including Foot Locker and youth-sports app GameChanger. For brands selling to sports families, this is an audience worth evaluating beyond the usual retail-media channels. Read more.

Shopify adds WhatsApp opt-ins at checkout

Shopify’s September 10 update lets merchants collect WhatsApp marketing consent during checkout. Brands using the channel can enable it in Checkout settings and build their subscriber list as customers purchase. A small update with a clear use case for your retention team. See the update.

Fast food is bringing hospitality back

McDonald’s is planning a hospitality push focused on warm greetings and customer engagement as fast-food chains put renewed emphasis on human service. For operators, it raises a useful question: where has making your customer experience more efficient also made it feel less personal? Read more.

Your CX team is buried in the same repeat tickets — refunds, order tracking, subscription cancellations — and every one of them is costing you money.

Richpanel is an AI helpdesk that automates 70–80% of those interactions end to end. Your team only handles the exceptions; a team of Richpanel AI agents handles the rest. If you're paying humans $2–$10 a ticket, wait until you see what 30 cents feels like.

Ridge cut their cost per ticket by 70% — saving $500K a year by making the switch. Migration takes under two weeks, and CSAT tends to go up, not down. The guarantee: 50% autonomous resolution in 30 days, or your money back.

→ Book your demo at Richpanel.com

Ecomm Cowboy is the go-to live show for ecommerce operators, breaking down the latest DTC, retail, and AI news while interviewing the founders and executives building today's fastest-growing brands.

We’re live every Monday to Friday at 12PM CT.

You can find our work on YouTube, X, and LinkedIn.

Have questions or want to come on the show? Simply reply to this email, we’re happy to chat.

See you on the stream,
Ecomm Cowboy Team