E-Commerce Platforms Defend Rising Fees
The Thai Digital Platform Trade Association (TDPA), formed by Grab, Lazada, Line Man Wongnai and Shopee, defended recent marketplace fee increases amid merchant complaints. It argued that early‑stage subsidies built a user base of 40‑50 million and that rising fees fund essential investments in cybersecurity, data protection and AI‑driven fraud prevention. The group also stressed that Thailand’s e‑commerce market remains highly competitive, with numerous domestic and foreign platforms. TDPA signaled openness to dialogue with policymakers over fee structures and platform practices.
Don’t Send Generic Emails — This Is the Personalization Shift That Will Boost Your Profits and Engagement
Email personalization has moved from a nice‑to‑have to a consumer expectation, with more than half of shoppers willing to share personal data for tailored messages. Data shows personalized emails deliver 82% higher open rates and generate 52% more sales than...
Why Retailers Must Think Like Tech Companies to Thrive in a Data-Driven Economy
Retailers head into the holiday season buoyed by improving consumer sentiment, but optimism alone won’t secure sales. In the data‑driven economy, success hinges on adopting technology‑company practices—scalable data pipelines, AI‑powered insights, and robust cyber defenses. The Adyen Index shows 38%...
Deliveroo Targets ‘Digital High Street’ Status with Multi-Store Baskets and Seamless Top-Ups
Deliveroo is launching a new “Bundles” feature that lets customers combine items from up to three different stores into a single order with no extra delivery fee, effectively creating a digital high‑street experience. The rollout also expands the post‑order top‑up...
Ahold Delhaize USA Expands Digital Commerce Capabilities
Ahold Delhaize USA announced a partnership with SmartCommerce to roll out the Click2Cart solution across its five U.S. grocery brands—Food Lion, The Giant Company, Giant Food, Hannaford, and Stop & Shop. Click2Cart lets shoppers add products they see in digital ads, social posts or brand‑owned media directly into...
English Wine Goes Digital at Artelium
Sussex-based Artelium Wine Estate has unveiled a digital cellar door that lets customers worldwide purchase its wines and arrange international delivery. The platform combines shipping, wine‑club memberships and curated collections, extending the vineyard experience beyond a physical visit. By creating...
EU: Austria Publishes Draft EUR 2 Delivery Tax on Distance Sales
Austria has released a draft Delivery Tax Act that would levy a flat €2 (≈ $2.15) charge on each e‑commerce parcel, payable by the distance seller. The tax applies only to sellers who generated more than €100 million (≈ $107 million) in Austrian distance‑sale...
Jumia Is Cutting 200 Jobs as AI Takes over More of Its Business
Jumia announced it will cut at least 200 full‑time jobs as it rolls out AI tools across logistics, customer support, finance and software development, aiming to become leaner and profitable by 2026. The e‑commerce platform reported Q1 2026 revenue of $50.6 million...
YouTube Is Turning Your TV Into a Shopping Cart, and It's Exactly as Bad as It Sounds
YouTube unveiled a "Buy with Google Pay" button for ads on its smart‑TV app, letting viewers purchase items with two clicks. The feature, announced at the Brandcast 2026 event, joins AI‑driven tools like Reimagine and custom sponsorships that tailor video ads. By...
Ulta Beauty Expands Uber Partnership
Ulta Beauty announced that more than 1,500 of its stores have been added to the Uber Eats marketplace, allowing customers to order beauty products for home delivery through the platform. The rollout expands the retailer’s on‑demand offering beyond its existing...
He Created a Tool That Lets Anyone Start Their Own Business With Just an Image — And It Has Minted...
Nuseir Yassin, the creator of the Nas Daily video brand, launched Nas.com, an AI‑powered platform that lets solo entrepreneurs build a storefront, generate marketing content and run ads from a single product photo. The startup has raised $40 million—$27 million in its...
Walmart Grows Last-Mile Network with Former Drug Stores
Retail giant Walmart is converting vacant drugstore properties into small‑format “Walmart Depot” fulfillment centers to accelerate grocery and household item deliveries. At least three 20,000‑sq‑ft depots have opened in Texas, New Jersey and Arkansas, with proposals for former Rite Aid...
How Vessi Uses Data to Drive Operational Decisions, Conversion
Vessi’s D2C team runs three to four conversion‑rate tests each month, using daily and weekly funnel data to pinpoint friction points across product pages and checkout. Insights from both quantitative metrics and qualitative customer feedback drive copy tweaks, product adjustments,...
3 Ways Edible Brands Has Grown Its AOV in 2026
Edible Brands lifted its average order value in 2026 by extending last‑mile delivery, adding AI‑driven personalization, and selling through major food‑delivery marketplaces. Partnerships with Nash, Uber Direct and Roadie let the retailer ship perishable gifts up to 70 miles while...
Ace Hardware and Instacart Partner to Offer Same-Day Delivery for Home Essentials
Ace Hardware announced a partnership with Instacart to provide same‑day delivery of its home improvement, grilling, and lawn‑and‑garden products. The collaboration adds Ace to Instacart’s marketplace of more than 2,200 retailers, placing it alongside competitors like Home Depot and Lowe’s....
Amazon's Least Competitive Marketplace Is Now Everywhere
Amazon’s average traffic per active seller jumped 25% in the past year to 3,544 monthly visits, extending a trend that began in 2021. While total web traffic across 23 marketplaces rose 5% to 5.5 billion visits, the number of active sellers...
Marketplace Briefing: Why Amazon Discontinued Its AI-Powered Rufus Chatbot for Alexa Shopping Agent
Amazon has retired its Rufus chatbot, replacing it with a new AI assistant called Alexa for Shopping. The rebranded experience is now embedded directly in the Amazon app and website search bar, allowing users to ask natural‑language shopping questions. Alexa...
ShipStation® Bridges the Ecommerce Expertise Gap with New Implementation Partner Program
ShipStation, the cloud‑based shipping and logistics platform, unveiled its first Implementation Partner Program to help high‑growth e‑commerce brands deploy advanced fulfillment features. The initiative pairs customers on the Premium Plan with seven certified consulting firms that deliver on‑site workflow design,...
States Rush to Ban AI-Generated ‘Surveillance Pricing’ That Uses Shoppers’ Personal Data
Retailers are increasingly using AI-driven algorithms to set individualized, real‑time prices—a practice dubbed “surveillance pricing.” Consumer Reports uncovered price gaps of up to 23% for identical groceries on Instacart, potentially adding roughly $1,200 to a four‑person household’s annual bill. State...
Walmart to Convert Vacant Retail Space Into Delivery Depots
Walmart is converting empty neighborhood stores—such as former pharmacies and thrift shops—into 20,000‑sq‑ft “Walmart Depots” that act as mini fulfillment hubs for grocery and household items. The depots are stocked with fast‑moving products and serve drivers in the Spark delivery...
Legacy Payments Abandoned Micro-Businesses, AI Makes Them Viable Again
Legacy payment providers once chased micro‑merchants but later dropped them because the cost of onboarding, support, and multi‑system processing outweighed the tiny transaction fees. The article argues that artificial intelligence can automate these overheads, turning the long tail into a...
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The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation: 3 Signs Your Retail Tech Stack Is Failing You
Retailers are grappling with fragmented commerce stacks that create data silos, slow deployments, and hidden maintenance costs. The article outlines three warning signs—excessive maintenance, peak‑season anxiety, and rising tech spend—that indicate a failing tech foundation. It cites Brand Collective, The...
From Scroll to Chat to Cart: Trends Reshaping How India Shops
At the 2026 Meta Marketing Summit in Bangalore and Mumbai, Meta highlighted a fundamental shift in Indian e‑commerce from search‑driven buying to scroll‑led discovery powered by AI, short‑form video and conversational messaging. New AI tools now auto‑populate product carousels from...
AI Shopping Agents Are Already Ranking Your Store. Do You Know Where You Stand?
AI shopping agents are already evaluating retailers before a human ever sees a website, using delivery data to rank options. nShift’s Johan Hellman outlines a five‑stage maturity curve that shows why most stores are invisible and how they can become...
Amazon Wants to Be a Beauty Powerhouse. Is a Big Beauty Sale the Answer?
Amazon closed its fourth‑annual Summer Beauty Event, offering discounts up to 50% on makeup, skincare and vitamins. The retailer reported $8 billion in U.S. beauty sales for Q1 2026, underscoring its growing foothold in the category. To shift from a discount‑driven...
Tapestry Builds AI-Powered Mira to Pull Data, Make Decisions
Tapestry Inc., the parent of Coach and Kate Spade, launched Mira, an in‑house AI platform that aggregates data across merchandising, supply chain, finance and retail operations. The company secured a U.S. patent covering Mira’s core architecture and integrated Amazon Bedrock to...
Amazon Launches an AI Shopping Assistant for the Search Bar, Powered by Alexa+
Amazon unveiled Alexa for Shopping, a new AI‑driven assistant that supersedes the earlier Rufus bot. Powered by Alexa+, it works via voice or text on mobile, desktop and Echo Show devices, delivering personalized product suggestions, price‑tracking and recurring‑order automation. The...
Amazon Ditches Rufus Chatbot, Launches Alexa Shopping Agent in AI Strategy Pivot
Amazon is retiring its Rufus chatbot and embedding its recommendation engine into a new Alexa for Shopping agent. The AI‑powered assistant appears as a chat window directly in Amazon search results, letting shoppers ask questions, compare products and schedule price‑triggered...
Amazon Bazaar Records 5X Growth Amid Intense Value E-Commerce Competition
Amazon Bazaar, the Indian low‑cost marketplace launched in April 2024, posted a five‑fold year‑on‑year increase in 2026. Around 70% of its catalogue is priced below $3.14, with a maximum price of $6.27, and the platform now hosts over 30,000 sellers...
Forget Dances. TikTok Wants People To Shop
TikTok is accelerating its shift from a short‑form video app to a full‑stack ecommerce platform. In March it unveiled TikTok GO, letting users book travel and activities directly in the feed, and introduced Branded Buzz and Search Hubs to scale creator‑driven...
World Cup 2026 Set to Drive a New Wave of Retail Spend as Fans Shop the Moment, Not Just the...
Unified commerce agency Visualsoft predicts the 2026 FIFA World Cup will spark a new wave of online retail spend that extends far beyond traditional sports merchandise. Building on trends from the Women’s EURO 2025 and Paris 2024 Olympics, the agency...
Walmart+ Surge Shows Retail Memberships Are Still Scaling
Walmart+ reached an estimated 30.7 million members in early 2026, posting a 17% year‑over‑year increase. The service undercuts Amazon Prime on price while bundling free shipping, grocery delivery on orders over $35, fuel discounts and streaming perks. Its growth shows that...
Three Trends Defining Subscription Retail in 2026
The subscription retail landscape in 2026 is pivoting toward flexibility, AI‑driven management, and micro‑subscription bundles. Consumers now prioritize the ability to pause, skip, or cancel over price, prompting retailers to offer short‑term or weekly plans that lower entry barriers. Around...
West Bengal Tax Body Rejects Flipkart’s GST Exemption Model for Delivery Charges
West Bengal's Appellate Authority for Advance Ruling has reversed a prior decision that exempted Flipkart's delivery charges from GST, classifying the service as a courier rather than a goods transport agency (GTA). The authority ruled that the company's logistics chain—hub...
Sea Lifts Sales, Profit as Shopee Delivers Another Record Quarter
Sea Limited reported a strong first‑quarter performance, with revenue climbing 46.6% to $7.1 billion and gross profit up 40% to $3.1 billion. Net income rose 6.7% to $438.2 million and adjusted EBITDA hit $1 billion, reflecting robust growth across its e‑commerce, financial services and...
As AI Traffic Surges 393%, ChannelEngine Launches Tools to Help Marketplace Sellers Stay Visible
ChannelEngine unveiled its Spring ’26 release, introducing an AI Attribute Builder that lets marketplace sellers generate and enrich product attributes using plain‑language prompts. Adobe Analytics shows AI‑driven traffic to U.S. retail sites surged 393 % year‑over‑year in Q1 2026 and now converts...
VTEX Revenue, GMV Grow Double Digits in Q1
VTEX reported Q1 FY26 revenue of $60.7 million, a 12.1 percent increase year over year, and GMV of $5.1 billion, up 17.1 percent. Subscriptions accounted for 98.8 percent of revenue, growing 14 percent, as the company deepened its AI‑driven commerce suite. More than 20 Top‑2000 retailers...
InMobi’s MobileAction Deal Boosts Agentic Commerce And Global Advertising
InMobi announced the acquisition of MobileAction, an AI‑powered app‑marketing platform, to strengthen its agentic commerce offering and expand into the Apple ecosystem. The deal adds MobileAction’s data on millions of creatives, keywords and apps, complementing InMobi’s Glance platform that already...
OroCommerce Partners with Intellias, Introduces a New Integration with iPaaS.com
OroCommerce announced two strategic moves in May: a strategic partnership with AI specialist Intellias and a new integration with iPaaS.com. The Intellias deal adds artificial‑intelligence capabilities, such as predictive demand forecasting, to OroCommerce’s B2B platform. The iPaaS.com integration creates a...
Klarna Brings BNPL Into Google’s AI Shopping Experience
Klarna’s buy‑now‑pay‑later services are now embedded in Google’s AI‑powered Gemini app and Google Search checkout flows. The integration surfaces Klarna’s flexible payment plans, including BNPL and longer‑term financing, with an affordability check at point of purchase. Klarna reports AI‑referenced traffic...
Signs Your Retail Catalog Workflow Won’t Scale Without More Manual Work
Retail catalog workflows often hit a scaling ceiling when manual judgment dominates the process. As product assortments expand, undefined “ready to publish” criteria, data‑content drift, and growing review workloads cause the team to shoulder more decisions, limiting efficiency. While AI...
Inside Amazon’s Push to Open Its Logistics Network to Everyone
Amazon announced it will open its extensive supply‑chain and logistics network to any business, not just sellers on its marketplace. The move stems from seller demand, growing off‑Amazon volume, and the need to detach internal‑only processes. Leveraging its AI‑driven speed,...
New Ecommerce Tools: May 12, 2026
The weekly roundup spotlights a wave of AI‑driven ecommerce tools launched in May 2026, ranging from Shoplazza’s Athena admin agent to GoDaddy’s Airo WordPress builder and Marqo’s Sibbi conversational shopper. Platforms are also adding AI‑powered marketing and ad‑tech, such as...
Omnisend Launches MCP to Bring Ecommerce Marketing Into ChatGPT
Omnisend introduced Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing ecommerce marketers to access its email and SMS platform inside ChatGPT. The feature lets users ask plain‑language questions about revenue, campaign performance, and root‑cause analysis without leaving the AI chat. MCP also generates...
Value Is Now the Default: How Retailers Should Rethink Assortment, Pricing and the Shelf
Zappi’s 2026 CPG Mega‑Trends report shows brand‑only buying halved to 10% as price becomes the primary driver for shoppers. Private‑label products now enjoy parity or superiority in the eyes of over 80% of U.S. consumers, yet they capture only 19%...
How Small Businesses Can Avoid ‘AI Homogenization’ Without Abandoning Automation
Small businesses are rapidly embracing AI, with 80% planning to use it for marketing by year‑end. While AI boosts efficiency, reliance on generic large language models threatens the personal touch that differentiates local brands. The article warns that off‑the‑shelf tools...
CQL Introduces New AI Commerce Services to Help Brands Drive Revenue
CQL, a Shopify Platinum Partner, announced AI Commerce Services to help brands capture revenue from AI‑driven shopping experiences while boosting on‑site performance. The suite includes a strategic roadmap, visibility monitoring, product revenue optimization, and AI‑powered UX and conversion audits. By...
Noibu Deepens Investment in Shopify Plus, Bringing Ecommerce Analytics & Monitoring Platform to Plus Merchants Across Every Build
Analytics platform Noibu announced expanded support for Shopify Plus, covering every implementation from traditional Liquid themes to fully headless architectures. The rollout includes two AI-driven features—Explorations and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—that let ecommerce teams ask natural‑language questions and receive...
Swap Storefront Delivers 2x Conversion Rates as Leading Brands Adopt AI-Powered Commerce
Swap has introduced an AI‑powered Storefront that operates as a separate, fully branded .ai site for each merchant. Early adopters such as SIMKHAI, Retrofête and Odd Muse report conversion rates up to twice the industry average, three times longer site...
Protect Omnichannel Margins With These 4 Fulfillment Automation Strategies
Omnichannel retailers face mounting margin pressure from rising labor costs, volatile freight rates, and complex multi‑channel fulfillment. Automation is emerging as a strategic lever, moving beyond simple cost cuts to improve decision‑making, reduce waste, and boost flexibility. Four key tactics—AI‑driven...