It was a Tuesday in early October at the Cowtown Farmers Market, and everything from blue jeans and underwear to samurai swords and stun guns were for sale under the long brick-colored barn off Route 40 in Salem County, New Jersey.

“You’ll notice it’s not very busy,” Grant Harris, the fourth-generation owner of the century-old flea market and rodeo, said. “Tuesdays are really suffering.”

Cowtown is only open on Tuesday and Saturday, and in the past, the former was the busier of the two days. Now it’s slower, in part because Cowtown is competing with the likes of Walmart, Amazon, and Dollar General. “Super discounted merchandise used to only be accessible in a market like this,” he said. “Now there’s a lot of competition.”

Harris has watched this evolution firsthand, with a number of those big-name competitors setting up shop just down the road. All along the New Jersey section of Route 40, which extends from Atlantic City all the way to Silver Summit, Utah, millions of square feet of warehouse space are under construction, transforming this once-sleepy corner of rural South Jersey into a logistics hub for the biggest retailers in the US.

Keep reading here.—AV

Prior to the pandemic, Dick’s Sporting Goods payments strategy was scattered across different teams and channels. However, after a major effort to modernize its e-commerce platform, the company started thinking more holistically about how its customers bought and paid for its products, according to Chelsea Leenhouts, director of product management and design at Dick’s Sporting Goods.

“It became an inflection point in our journey to really take a capability like payments and centralize it technically and operationally and organizationally, so that we can really serve the cross-channel ecosystem,” Leenhouts said during a panel discussion on Thursday at the Endless Aisle Live conference in New York City.

Keep reading here.—AV

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Justin Grooms is CEO of Bolt, an e-commerce solution used by retailers and brands like Casper, Revolve, and Benefit Cosmetics.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? Bolt improves online checkout for retailers and connects them with our network of 80+ million shoppers. My role as chief executive is to ensure that we’re perfecting our product to live up to our responsibility of putting our merchants’ businesses first. That means being in constant communication with new and existing retailers about their challenges in order to align our offering to their pain points.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? One of Bolt’s core values asks our team to bring a “founder’s mentality” to our work, and that has been my approach to my day-to-day. In reflecting on my nearly six years at Bolt, I’m astonished at how much some things have changed while our vision for e-commerce has remained unchanged. In my time here, we’ve pivoted from being an SMB-focused checkout solution to a holistic e-commerce platform for enterprise retailers, all while building a network of shoppers that powers a new era of personalized, friction-free shopping. I truly believe that if I had the chance to found my own company today, it would be exactly what we’re building at Bolt.

Keep reading here.—EC