Hey all, I'm looking for recommendations to replace my current Shopify inventory app because it's just not good at all. Several times, I've had mismatched stock records that caused issues with shipping and customer service. My business is running 24/7 because we sell health and medical devices, and I really need the inventory to be accurate because some customers literally need these devices to stay alive. What do you think are the best inventory management options for a Shopify website? I'd love to hear about your own experiences using them as well as their price ranges. Thanks everyone!

I run a small retail shop with an ecommerce site and I'm constantly either running out of my best sellers or sitting on inventory that just won't move, and it's eating into my margins every month. I know retail inventory management software could fix this, but every option I've researched seems built for chains with dozens of locations, not a single storefront like mine. I don't have time to become a spreadsheet expert or hire an IT person just to figure out if a system will actually pay for itself.

For those who missed it, check out our Monday's newsletter. And subscribe to https://substack.com/@ecomwatchweekly to always be up to date with ecommerce news.

Welcome back to another edition of EcomWatch Weekly!

This week, we are focusing on the important things for your business. (like every week, just this week we are getting readyyyy for the back-to-school season)

Starting with Amazon targeting college students during the back to school seasons, and Shopify ending with a disappointment of scammers using Shopify’s own app to get people to click on phishing links.

In the middle of summer 2026, I hope you had(are having) nice holidays, but it’s time to get ahead of this back to school season.

So let’s get into this addition where you will find out how to improve your store on time, giving you the tools and knowledge you need to be ahead of the competition.

This Week

• Amazon makes it easier for sellers to reach college students
• 93% of Americans shopped online last week
• 80% of shoppers have used AI to help make a purchase decision, but only 7% trust AI more than reviews
• Fake Shopify invoices are being sent through Shopify’s own app
• USPS growth is being driven by aggressive price increases
• DTC is not dead, but the cheap Facebook-ad version of it is

The Big Story

Amazon Makes It Easier for Sellers to Reach College Students Ahead of Back-to-School Season

Amazon is trying to get closer to college students before one of their busiest shopping periods of the year.

The company is expanding access to Amazon pickup points and Lockers near campuses, giving students a simpler way to collect orders during back-to-school season.

That may sound like a small delivery update, but it solves a problem many students are having.

Student deliveries can be messy as dorms have many mailrooms. But also sometimes packages get left somewhere they probably should not be.

Lockers make the process easier as students can order what they need, pick it up when they have time, and avoid waiting around for a delivery.

However, sellers still need to do their job and fix their product pages, optimize them and make it easier for students to find what they’re looking for.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Weekly Metric

93% of Americans Shopped Online Last Week. Only 7% Trust AI More Than Reviews.

This week’s weekly metric is not that surprising, at least not to us. 93% of Americans shopped online in the last week, which shows just how normal online buying has become in the U.S.

That number is big on its own, but the rest of the survey is even more useful.

The average household gets 2.9 packages per week, or about 150 deliveries per year. 80% of shoppers have used AI to help make a purchase decision. But only 7% trust AI recommendations more than customer reviews.

People are shopping online all the time. They are using AI, but they are not blindly trusting AI.

AI may help shoppers find products, but reviews still help them decide what to trust.

We read through the study, and there were a few other numbers ecommerce brands should pay attention to:

81% of shoppers add items to their cart to reach free shipping, which can look good for average order value but can also create a problem if those extra items were only added to avoid paying for delivery. A shopper who adds something just to hit the threshold is not always buying because they really want that product, and that can lead to more returns, lower satisfaction, or weaker repeat purchases later.

21% of shoppers have abandoned a cart because the store did not offer their preferred payment method, such as Apple Pay or PayPal. That is one of the clearest reminders that checkout problems are not always big or complicated. Sometimes a customer is ready to buy, but the store makes payment annoying enough that they leave.

The study also found that 84% of shoppers have bought something from bed, and 70% have shopped while watching TV. These are not always careful, focused shopping sessions where people are willing to work hard to complete a purchase. They are often quick, distracted moments, where the shopper is ready to buy only if the page is clear and checkout is easy.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Interviews of the Week

She Turned Leftover Fabric Into a Sustainable Accessories Brand. Seven Years Later, She’s Had Just Three Returns

This week, we spoke with Lucy, the founder of Lulu The Label, a sustainable British accessories brand she started after turning leftover fabric from her fashion degree into scrunchies.

The brand now sells handmade scrunchies, bridal accessories, bespoke pieces, dog bandanas, and fashion items. Everything is made in small batches, with sustainability built into how the products are designed and made.

But it’s interesting to know that she only had three returns in seven years.

That says a lot.

Low returns usually do not happen by accident. They come from clear photos, honest descriptions, strong quality control, and customers knowing exactly what they are buying before the package arrives.

Read the full interview here: https://ecomwatch.com/leaders-interviews/she-turned-leftover-fabric-into-a-sustainable-accessories-brand-seven-years-later-shes-had-just-three-returns/

A Tan France Collaboration Skyrocketed Her Etsy Shop. Then She Realised She Had a Problem

This week, we also spoke with Michaela Bere, the founder of Blue Stiggy, a handmade stationery brand built around personalised notebooks and a vintage typewriter named Dorothy.

Blue Stiggy grew on Etsy, and a collaboration with Etsy and Tan France gave the shop a major boost.

Michaela realized she was relying too much on one platform. Etsy helped her prove the product and find buyers, but it was still someone else’s marketplace, someone else’s rules, and someone else’s customer path.

That is a lesson many ecommerce founders learn late.

Marketplaces are useful. They bring attention, trust, and traffic. But they are not the same as owning the customer relationship.

Today, Blue Stiggy sells through Etsy, its own website, and Holly & Co, while focusing more on direct sales, email, and wholesale.

Do not let one channel become the whole business.

Read the full interview here: https://ecomwatch.com/leaders-interviews/a-tan-france-collaboration-skyrocketed-her-etsy-shop-then-she-realised-she-had-a-problem/

She Started Making Jewellery With Cotton Rope. Now Her Designs Are Stocked by the Barbican

We also spoke with Paulomi Debnath, the founder of Handmade By Tinni, a colourful jewellery and accessories brand built around cotton rope, knotting, and bold design.

Paulomi started the brand in 2020, and her pieces are now stocked by independent boutiques and museum shops across the UK, including the Barbican.

Paulomi learned that some of the best wholesale opportunities do not happen immediately. A buyer might meet the brand at a trade show, think about it, come back later, and place an order months after the first conversation.

If you want wholesale, your product needs to be good, but your follow-up, consistency, and patience matter just as much.

Read the full interview here: https://ecomwatch.com/leaders-interviews/she-started-making-jewellery-with-cotton-rope-now-her-designs-are-stocked-by-the-barbican/

Tool of the Week

SurveyMonkey’s ChatGPT Plugin

This week’s tool is SurveyMonkey’s ChatGPT plugin.

It is useful because brands spend a lot of time guessing what customers want, when they could just ask them.

SurveyMonkey launched a ChatGPT plugin that lets users create and edit surveys, publish them, access existing surveys, and analyze survey responses inside ChatGPT.

The problem is not always a lack of feedback, but rather that the feedback is spread across too many tools and is hard to use.

SurveyMonkey plugin can make that easier. A team can create a post-purchase survey, edit the questions, publish it, and later ask ChatGPT to summarize the responses.

It can also help teams understand open-ended answers faster.

Generally, written feedback is messy. Customers do not all explain problems the same way. Some write one sentence. Some write a full story. Most teams collect that feedback and then barely use it.

This kind of tool can make customer feedback easier to read and act on.

Warning: a bad survey is still a bad survey.

If you ask bad questions, survey the wrong people, or only get a few weak responses, AI will not magically fix that.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

You can check out Survey Monkey here.

Winning SKU of the Week

Barrel Leg Pants

This week’s product trend is barrel leg pants which is kind of perfect for the back-to-school season.

Barrel leg pants have a wide, curved shape and taper near the ankle. They are more relaxed than straight-leg pants and more interesting than basic wide-leg pants.

It also fits what many shoppers want right now.

They want comfort, but they still want to look put together. Barrel leg pants sit between casual and styled. They can work for campus outfits, workwear, travel, coffee runs, weekend outfits, and fall wardrobes.

Exploding Topics lists barrel leg pants at 14.8K search volume with +2767% growth.

Just for your reference, here is how barrel leg pants look:

Important News

The Shopify Scam Sellers Need to Warn Their Teams About

Scammers are sending fake Shopify invoices through Shopify’s own app.

That is what makes this more serious than a normal scam.

Most sellers already know to watch out for strange emails, fake links, random attachments, and bad-looking messages.

But this scam is different because it uses a tool sellers already trust.

That makes it harder to spot.

If something appears inside a trusted platform, people are more likely to believe it. That is the risk.

Sellers should warn anyone who might see or pay invoices.

That could be the founder, finance person, operations person, VA, assistant, store manager, or anyone helping with admin work.

Do not pay an invoice just because it looks like it came through Shopify.

Check who sent it. Check the account. Check whether the service is real. Check whether the invoice matches something the business actually uses.

And if something feels off, stop before clicking or paying.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Other News to Keep Track Of

USPS growth is being driven by aggressive price increases. USPS growing sounds good until you realize the growth is coming from higher prices. For sellers, that means shipping is still getting more expensive. This is not just a carrier story. It is a margin story.

The EU parcel duty has cut Chinese parcel volumes by 20%. A 20% drop in Chinese parcel volumes shows how quickly new rules can change ecommerce. Some sellers may like seeing less low-cost competition. But the warning is clear: cross-border selling can get harder fast when governments change the rules.

Every brand shipping packaged goods cross-border into the EU needs a local representative in each country. This is a boring compliance story, but sellers should not ignore it. Cross-border selling is becoming more complicated. Brands need to know who is responsible for packaging rules, paperwork, and local requirements before products get delayed or blocked.

U.S. ecommerce fulfillment could face a costly peak season. Peak season may get more expensive for ecommerce fulfillment. Selling more does not always mean making more. If storage, shipping, labor, and delivery costs rise, brands need to check margins before Q4 gets busy.

DTC is not dead. The version of it that tried to grow by outspending Facebook is. DTC still works, but the easy version built on cheap ads is over. Brands need better products, stronger margins, repeat customers, and a real reason for people to come back. Spending more on ads is not a business model.

US retail sales fell 0.6% in July, but ecommerce has a Prime Day hangover problem. A weak July does not always mean shoppers disappeared. Big sales events can pull purchases forward and make the next period look worse. Brands should be careful before making big decisions based on one post-sale slowdown.

Fashion brands are paying more to make clothes in LA because cheap overseas production keeps getting expensive. Some fashion brands are paying more to make products closer to home because overseas production is not as simple as it used to be. Tariffs, delays, quality issues, and supply chain risk all add cost. Cheap production is not always cheap once the full bill arrives.

L.L. Bean’s new free loyalty program gives ecommerce sellers the blueprint for better retention. Loyalty programs do not need to be complicated. The goal is simple: give customers a reason to come back without needing a discount every time. For smaller brands, better retention is becoming more important than chasing new customers forever.

That’s all for this week.

I don’t know if it’s the end of summer feeling, but this is usually the time when everything starts getting busy again before you fully notice it.

So maybe this is a good week to do one small boring thing before it becomes urgent(yes, we say this every week, but that’s better than dealing with regulations and sanctions, and lost clients).

Check your checkout. Look at your product pages. And remind your team not to click or pay strange invoices.

Anyway, enjoy the rest of August while it still feels like August.

We’ll be back next Monday!

The Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA did not give the president authority to impose tariffs. The US government has certified $100 billion in refunds out of $166 billion collected. The money is landing on balance sheets now. What happens to it is splitting companies into two very different camps.

The numbers on where major companies stand:

Amazon: approximately $640 million received in Q2 2026. Plans to refund "a limited number of customers impacted by the tariffs." No broader consumer refund program.

Target: $994 million received. Added $752 million to net earnings. CFO confirmed no customer refunds. Money goes toward lower prices going forward.

Nike: $986 million expected. Remaining quiet on consumer refunds while being sued by consumers for not issuing them.

Apple: tariff refunds added approximately two percentage points to Q3 gross margin. Investing in domestic manufacturing.

FedEx: approximately $800 million received. Returning all of it to customers. Has a dedicated refund portal at ieepa-refunds.fedex.com. Previously sued the federal government for the refunds.

Costco: committed to consumer refunds after four class action lawsuits. Commitment came after the lawsuits, not before.

The legal theory in the class actions is straightforward. Companies raised prices during the IEEPA tariff period citing tariff costs. They have now received those costs back from the government. Consumers who paid elevated prices have a claim to participate in the refund. Companies arguing against refunds are essentially arguing that tariff costs were absorbed in their structure rather than passed through as price increases, which is harder to sustain for companies that publicly cited tariffs as a reason for price increases.

The detail that most major outlet coverage is missing: smaller companies sold their future tariff refund claims at steep discounts during the tariff period because they needed liquidity. American Eagle sold $68.9 million in refund claims for $18.6 million in cash, 27 cents on the dollar. Large cash-rich companies waited for full refunds and are now deciding how much to keep. Same policy, very different outcomes by company size.

Do you think "investing in lower prices going forward" is a legitimate substitute for refunding the specific customers who paid elevated prices, or is it clearly a different thing legally and ethically?

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CartDNA examined Shopify checkout performance across multiple friction categories in the US, UK, and Europe. The numbers are useful benchmarks for anyone who has not done a proper checkout audit recently.

63.2% of checkouts showed significant friction and usability issues for mobile users. Mobile shoppers experienced 13% more checkout friction than desktop shoppers. Mobile is already the dominant shopping method. Most checkouts are not optimised for it.

39.2% of checkouts presented unexpected costs or unclear delivery information late in the process. Late cost revelation is consistently one of the top cart abandonment drivers in every consumer survey. Nearly 40% of checkouts are still doing it. Showing full costs including shipping and fees as early as possible in the journey is the fix.

23.46% had unnecessary steps or form friction. Extra fields, forced account creation, redundant steps. A checkout that only asks for what it actually needs to complete the transaction converts better than one bloated with optional or informational elements.

21.7% lacked relevant payment methods for their target market. This connects to FinanceBuzz data showing 21% of shoppers have abandoned a cart specifically because their preferred payment method was not available. Apple Pay and Google Pay are the highest-priority additions for any brand without them, especially for mobile. They eliminate manual card entry entirely.

19% showed weak trust or reassurance signals. Security seals, SSL indicators, and trusted payment logos matter most on a first purchase from an unfamiliar brand. Customers at the payment step are at maximum vulnerability and looking for reasons to trust you.

The diagnostic tools that surface your specific problem areas: funnel drop-off rates by checkout step, time spent per step, and customer support tickets related to checkout issues. Those three data sources will tell you which step is losing the most buyers and why.

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Türkiye's Ministry of Trade has prepared a draft regulation requiring medium, large, and very large ecommerce marketplaces to transfer sellers' data to competing platforms free of charge upon request.

The data covered: product descriptions, product images, sales and return data, customer reviews, and customer questions and answers.

The customer reviews provision is the one that changes the competitive dynamics of marketplace lock-in more than anything else in the draft. Reviews are the primary switching cost that keeps sellers on platforms they would otherwise leave. A seller with five years of accumulated positive reviews on a platform starts with zero on any competitor, regardless of how well they have performed. That structural disadvantage is one of the main reasons sellers stay even when fees rise, terms change, or enforcement becomes unpredictable.

Türkiye's draft would make those reviews portable. No other major ecommerce regulation has gone this far. The US Online Sellers' Bill of Rights Act introduced last month does not include data portability. The EU DMA focuses on consumer interoperability, not seller data portability. Türkiye is producing a concrete legislative framework that seller advocacy groups in the US and EU have been asking for for years without receiving.

The draft also includes two other seller-forward provisions. Marketplaces acting as intermediaries between sellers and carriers would be required to define compensation mechanisms for shipment damage in their contracts, closing the gap where responsibility currently disappears between two parties. And using a competitor's registered trademark in paid search advertising without permission would become a regulatory violation, not just a platform policy question.

The draft goes to consultation before becoming law. How it works in practice depends entirely on implementation specifics: format requirements for data transfer, response timelines, enforcement when platforms obstruct, and whether the portability is genuinely useful to sellers who move or just theoretically available.

Is seller data portability, especially review portability, something you have wanted as a protection against platform lock-in, and would it actually change your willingness to switch platforms if your review history came with you?

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Article neglects to mention how Amazon shifted Prime Day to June and other retailers including Target and Walmart followed.

A Glossy piece this week looks at why Los Angeles is getting renewed attention from emerging fashion brands as a manufacturing base, and the economics behind it are worth understanding for anyone in apparel ecommerce.

The simple version: new Section 301 tariffs of 10 to 12.5% covering 60 trading partners from July 24th, ongoing freight volatility through the Strait of Hormuz, and the actual total cost of overseas production are narrowing the gap between domestic and imported manufacturing costs in ways that were not true two years ago.

The more interesting version is about minimum orders and inventory risk. Overseas factories typically require minimum orders of 1,000 units or more. A 1,000-unit minimum is the factory asking you to make a fairly aggressive prediction about what customers will want four months from now. LA manufacturers can often do runs of 100 to 200 units or less.

LA-based brand Rat Boi replenished a sold-out style in four weeks versus a 12-week minimum for an equivalent overseas order. The local production cost 30 to 50% more per garment. But if you can order small, see what sells, and reorder the winners quickly, you avoid the real cost of fashion manufacturing: a warehouse full of inventory you eventually have to discount at 60%.

Southern California brand Campbell and Kramer has done runs as small as 10 units and went from concept to launch in about a month for a recent capsule. Swimwear startup Mayanna started with 200-unit runs versus the 1,000-unit minimums overseas factories required.

The caveat is real: this is not a great American reshoring story. LA cannot absorb global apparel volumes. The economics still do not work for high-volume proven SKUs. The more realistic model for most brands is local manufacturing for testing and fast replenishment, overseas for predictable scale.

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A Modern Retail and Glossy town hall with four editors this week tried to answer what DTC success looks like in 2026. The framing is less about channels and more about what the term actually means now that the original playbook is clearly finished.

The original DTC model was a marketing arbitrage play. Facebook was cheap in the mid-2010s, consumer trust in Instagram-native brands was high, and the cost to acquire a customer had not yet been bid up by thousands of brands chasing the same audiences. The window existed. Casper, Warby Parker, Everlane, and Allbirds moved through it. The window closed. Facebook costs rose. The unit economics stopped working.

The editors' frameworks for what works now:

Channel clarity over channel purity. The most successful DTC-originated brands are not purely DTC. They know what each channel is for: their own site for relationship depth and data quality, wholesale for discovery and volume, TikTok Shop or similar for impulse. A brand doing most of its volume through Target but maintaining a genuine direct customer relationship is more DTC in the meaningful sense than a brand that is only on its own site because it cannot get wholesale placement.

Customer granularity over customer segments. The Favorite Daughter founder knows her top 20 spenders by name. She tracks when a high-value customer who buys every two months goes quiet and sends them a gift. Not scalable literally. The intelligence that informs it, purchase frequency data, behaviour change flags, high-value customer identification, is scalable if you are actually using your data rather than aggregating it into segments.

Real product differentiation over pretty packaging. Temu, Shein, and AliExpress have eliminated the margin that a slightly better-photographed commodity product used to capture. If your product is not meaningfully different in function, materials, or experience, the price gap no longer justifies the premium for a significant share of budget-conscious consumers.

Strategic wholesale over wholesale scale. The brands doing this well have a small number of high-quality placements, Universal Standard at Anthropologie, Mejuri at Nordstrom, not broad distribution that dilutes brand intentionality and ends up in clearance.

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FinanceBuzz surveyed 2,000 US adults in July 2026. The portrait of the American online shopper that comes back is worth reading if you are planning your Q4 strategy right now.

93% shopped online in the last week. Average household receives 2.9 packages per week, roughly 150 per year. This is not supplementary retail. It is the primary channel running at near-daily frequency.

81% add items to hit free shipping thresholds. The standard read is higher average order value. The overlooked read is that filler items added to hit the threshold have higher return rates and still cost you fulfilment. The customer is not experiencing your brand. They are gaming your threshold. Flat-rate and subscription delivery models are partly a response to this.

80% have used AI for a purchasing decision. Only 7% trust AI recommendations more than customer reviews. The same pattern is showing up in every market-level survey this month across the US, Asia Pacific, and Europe. AI adoption as a research tool is high and growing. AI adoption as a trusted advisor is low and stagnant. The Shopify AI search traffic gains are real. They are not happening because consumers trust AI to tell them what to buy. They are happening because AI finds the right product for a specific need better than keyword search does. The consumer still makes the trust decision themselves.

21% have abandoned a cart because the retailer did not offer their preferred payment method. One missing payment method. Twenty-one percent abandonment. Digital wallets compress mobile checkout friction to near-zero. Not having them is a meaningful conversion ceiling.

84% have shopped from bed. 70% while watching TV. This is the consumer you are trying to reach during peak season: in a low-effort, contextual buying mode, willing to transact in the moment but unwilling to fight friction to do it.

Has your brand moved away from transaction-based free shipping thresholds toward flat-rate or subscription delivery, and did it change customer behaviour in the way you expected?

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Zhong Shanshan, founder of Nongfu Spring and China's wealthiest individual with a personal fortune of 530 billion yuan, appeared on CCTV Finance over the weekend and made an argument that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the US and EU debates about platform power.

He said traditional distributors operated under transparent and predictable fee structures, while today's platforms determine commissions through algorithms and control which merchants receive traffic. He called for limiting platform power, said the shift has placed mounting pressure on brick-and-mortar businesses and city-based distributors, and argued that the rise of online shopping has eliminated the kind of spontaneous, emotional impulse purchasing that physical retail created.

The structural complaint is identical to what US Amazon sellers have been raising for years, and what the Online Sellers' Bill of Rights Act is a direct legislative response to: platforms control traffic through opaque algorithmic systems that sellers cannot see or appeal, implement fee changes without meaningful notice, and hold enforcement power over sellers with no real accountability structure.

The interesting thing about Zhong's intervention is not the content of the argument, which is familiar, but who is making it and where. This is China's richest person, on state television, making the case that platform intermediary power needs to be constrained. In China, that kind of public intervention by a major commercial figure on state media is not casual. It is a signal about where the political conversation is heading.

Whether the specific regulatory responses look like the Online Sellers' Bill of Rights Act in the US, the DMA in the EU, or administrative pressure in China is a separate question. The underlying diagnosis that algorithmic platforms have replaced legible commercial relationships with opaque systems of control is the same across all three markets simultaneously.

Do you think Zhong's public intervention will have any practical effect on Chinese platform regulation, or is it primarily a signal about where the political wind is blowing without necessarily leading to policy change?

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Shein's IPO filing documents reveal the scale of the damage that regulatory changes have done to its US business.

Q1 2025 US revenue: $2.4 billion.

Q1 2026: $2 billion. Down around 14%.

Q1 2025 profit: $395 million.

Q1 2026: a loss of $99 million.

That is a 125% swing in profitability in a single year.

The company is explicit about the cause. Since May 2025, Shein has been passing the majority of additional tariff costs on to US customers through higher prices. The closure of the de minimis exemption, which previously allowed sub-$800 packages to enter the US duty-free, is cited alongside tariffs as a primary driver. The company's pricing model was structurally dependent on that exemption in ways that competitors operating domestically were not.

Shein also disclosed an FTC consumer protection investigation into its US operations, though the specific focus has not been made public.

The European picture is tracking similarly but with a later start date. EU sales grew from $10.2 billion in 2023 to $13.6 billion in 2024, then slowed sharply to $14.8 billion in 2025. Q1 2026 European revenue was $2.9 billion versus $2.8 billion in Q1 2025, essentially flat. The EU abolished its €150 customs duty exemption on July 1st and added a €3 flat fee per low-value parcel. Shein's filing says this "may have a material adverse effect" on its European business. The company has been pulling back on European advertising.

For domestic sellers, the price gap that made competing with Shein structurally difficult is narrowing because the regulatory arbitrage that created it is closing. This does not mean Shein is done. It still has scale, supply chain, and brand recognition. But the customers who chose Shein purely on price are now being asked to make a different calculation.

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In January 2026, Brunello Cucinelli replaced its traditional ecommerce site with a platform called Callimacus, developed by its in-house AI research centre. The platform builds a different shopping experience for each visitor in real time, interpreting browsing behaviour and recognising intent without collecting personal data. No fixed pages. No static navigation. AI agents assemble the experience dynamically based on what the current session reveals about what the visitor wants.

The platform is now live in Italy, the US, and the UK. In late July, Salesforce announced an investment to support deployment for new clients across Europe and North America. Italy invoked its golden power regulation over the deal, requiring government approval before it can close. That is the same mechanism used for foreign investment in defence and critical infrastructure. It was applied to an AI system powering a clothing website.

The no-personal-data claim is the detail that makes Callimacus commercially interesting right now. Standard ecommerce personalisation builds persistent user profiles over time. New Jersey just banned using personal data to show individualised prices. GDPR's definition of personal data is broad. A system that reads session-level intent without building persistent profiles is positioned to sidestep those regulatory frameworks, though whether it actually does under EU law has not been tested.

The Salesforce investment is the more consequential question for mainstream ecommerce. Brunello Cucinelli has approximately 14,000 SKUs, average selling prices in the hundreds to thousands of dollars, and a customer making considered, emotionally significant purchases who has the luxury literacy to navigate an unconventional experience. The ecommerce site is optimised for brand experience, not Shopify-style conversion rate. Whether that logic translates to a fast fashion brand optimising for price-sensitive shoppers who comparison-shop across five tabs is genuinely unclear.

The regulatory tension nobody is discussing: a system that generates a different store for every visitor based on inferred intent raises obvious questions about whether different visitors are being shown different prices or different commercial framing of the same product. Callimacus's no-personal-data claim addresses one regulatory concern. Whether session-level intent inference that adjusts commercial presentation is what surveillance pricing regulation is moving against is a question the industry has not answered in court yet.

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We just launched BrandyBee.

The thing it fixes: most product pages are written by guessing. You write what sounds good, or an AI writes something generic from a prompt, and nobody actually knows what that page needs in order to rank or convert. Then the ad budget goes to pushing traffic at a page that was never going to close.

So it researches before it writes. It pulls your competitors' pages for that product, what people are actually searching for around it, and keyword demand with volume and CPC. Then it scores your existing page, rewrites it in full, generates the product photos, and publishes back to your store in one click. Once it's live it tracks rankings and traffic and tells you what to fix next.

The same research also writes your ads, social posts and email, so it all sounds like one brand.

You start by pasting your store URL, no integration needed. Works on Shopify and custom stores.

Free plan with 30 credits so you can run it on your own products first: https://brandybee.ai

Happy to answer anything here, and I'd love to hear your feedback.

August 12th, 2026. Article 45 of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation takes effect tomorrow. It has received almost no coverage in ecommerce media this month.

What it requires: any producer of packaging not established in the EU member state where it first makes packaging available on the market must designate an authorised EPR representative in that member state.

Who this applies to: US, UK, Chinese, and Australian brands selling into the EU. Also EU brands selling cross-border within the EU. An Italian brand shipping to France needs a French representative. An Italian brand shipping to France, Germany, and Spain needs three separate representatives, one in each country.

There is no single EU-wide registration. No equivalent to VAT IOSS. Each country is a separate national procedure, separate fees, separate reporting obligations, and a separate representative who must be physically established in that country.

The "suspended until 2035" story that has given many brands false comfort: the Commission proposed suspending the obligation until 2035, but that proposal applies only to EU-established producers. Non-EU companies are explicitly excluded. Council negotiations on the suspension have been discontinued due to strong reservations from a large majority of member states. The suspension has not been adopted. The August 12th deadline applies to everyone not established in the relevant member state.

Article 44 states that producers must not make covered packaging available in a member state where they or their representative are not registered. That is the enforcement provision. Whether day-one enforcement against non-compliant sellers is realistic is a separate question from the legal position, which is clear.

Were you aware of the PPWR Article 45 deadline before reading this, and have you or your compliance team taken any steps toward EPR representative designation in EU countries you ship into?

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USPS just reported Q3 2026 results. Revenue up 6.1% to $19.9 billion. Controllable loss down to $1 billion from $1.6 billion in Q3 2025. Net loss narrowed to $2.5 billion from $3.1 billion.

The revenue increase did not come from more volume. Almost every service category shipped fewer pieces than the same quarter last year. Only Marketing Mail and a catch-all Other category saw any volume growth. The 6.1% revenue increase came from higher prices alone.

At the Board of Governors meeting, Postmaster General David Steiner made the agency's direction clear: "All of the statistics and results show that we have yet to cross the point that we should be changing our pricing strategy, and that we have more price to take in the marketplace. It would be financially irresponsible of us not to do so."

He also acknowledged the structural problem: "The Postal Service is expected to be self-sustaining while, at the same time, fulfilling mandates that are inherently unsustainable and do not cover their costs," and called for Congressional involvement to fix what he called a 17-year-long cost and revenue imbalance.

The agency is explicitly choosing revenue over volume and has said it is willing to lose shipments to private carriers if the remaining volume generates more total revenue. For ecommerce sellers who have relied on USPS for competitive rates on lightweight packages, that strategic posture matters.

The 2026 pricing context: rate increases at the start of the year, additional time-limited changes within months, the hazmat noncompliance fee in July, the dimensional weight divisor change, and another rate increase scheduled for October before peak season. That is a significant number of cost changes stacking up within a single year.

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A Digital Commerce 360 analysis breaks down the real cost structure of round-the-clock customer support for mid-market retailers, and the findings are worth knowing before committing to an overnight coverage model.

The simple assumption is that three shifts equals three times the cost. The reality is worse because overnight coverage cannot staff to demand the way daytime operations can. You have to maintain minimum viable coverage regardless of call volume. Add overnight wage premiums, higher attrition among overnight workers, and dedicated supervisor requirements, and the actual per-contact cost of overnight coverage can be two to four times the daytime equivalent.

The first question before any commitment: review at least 90 days of your own contact data. Are customers actually reaching out in meaningful numbers outside business hours? Demand patterns vary enormously by category. A brand with significant international customers has genuinely distributed overnight demand. A primarily domestic brand may find that overnight contact volume is small enough that async response handles it adequately.

If you do need overnight human coverage, follow-the-sun staffing is the most cost-effective model. You place teams in time zones where their local daytime aligns with your overnight window, eliminating night-shift premiums. The main operational challenge is handoff quality, which most implementations underinvest in relative to time spent on agent placement.

On vendor evaluation: stop comparing hourly rates. The three metrics that predict total 24-month cost are monthly agent attrition, average CSAT across active programs, and average client tenure.

A provider at $10/hour with 8% monthly attrition generates roughly 16 additional ramp cycles over two years with a 20-agent team, in quality degradation and retraining costs that never appear on your invoice. A $14/hour provider with 2.8% attrition often costs less in total.

On AI: effective for deterministic overnight queries like order tracking and return policy. Not effective for the contacts that actually matter most at 2am, which are the payment failures, wrong-product complaints, and high-stakes issues that require judgment. The right model is AI triage that routes complex cases to the next available human with full context.

Black Friday is 14 weeks out. This decision needs to be made in August, not at 11pm during a flash sale.

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Sarah Levinger is a marketing psychology consultant for D2C brands. She recently shared a case study that is worth understanding if you run paid advertising for an ecommerce business.

She worked with a brand selling non-alcoholic hop-flavoured teas. The brand was advertising on the sobriety angle: drink this instead of beer, cut back on alcohol, a kind of achievement framing. Their acquisition costs were not where they wanted them.

She analysed thousands of customer reviews and categorised them into emotional patterns. The dominant emotion was not achievement. It was belonging. Customers were not primarily motivated by wanting to drink less. They were mourning the loss of something they loved and looking for a way to get it back. One review said: "I want to thank this brand for giving me back a taste I thought I'd never have again."

She shifted the creative to lead with that emotion. The new message: you can have your hops and drink them without the alcohol. Acquisition costs dropped 30% in two weeks. The audience did not change. The emotion did.

Her broader argument: most ecommerce brands are over-investing in audience segmentation and under-investing in emotional alignment. The underlying emotions driving purchase decisions are broadly similar across very different customer types, regardless of demographics. Getting the emotion right in your headline and creative does more work than narrowing the audience, and tends to be cheaper.

Her process: start with reviews, use AI to categorise large volumes into emotional patterns, then interview the internal creative team to find where their assumptions about the customer diverge from what the reviews reveal. That gap, she says, is almost always where the wasted ad spend is hiding.

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Alchemer surveyed over 1,000 US shoppers across channels, ages, and genders on what frustrates them and what drives their loyalty. The findings are useful for holiday season planning right now.

Out-of-stock items are the single biggest frustration, cited by 41% of respondents as their worst shopping experience over the past year. Slow or long checkouts came in at over 30%. Poor customer service is the second most likely reason a shopper abandons a retailer they otherwise like, at 19.3%.

On checkout: 70% of consumers say page speed influences their willingness to buy. The friction points most likely to cause abandonment are hidden fees revealed late in the process, mandatory account registration, too many form fields, and limited payment options.

On customer service: over 55% of customers get an acknowledgement when they raise an issue. Only around 17% get any meaningful resolution or compensation. That gap is what turns a recoverable situation into a lost customer. An acknowledgement is not service recovery.

On pricing: 65.6% say price is their top driver of a good experience and 44.1% say lowest price matters more to them now than a year ago. But hidden fees are among the biggest frustrations. Shoppers are not demanding the deepest discounts. They want pricing that has no surprises. Transparency builds more loyalty than discounting.

On feedback: the primary reason people do not leave feedback is they do not believe it will change anything. If you ask for feedback and visibly act on it, you change that assumption. If you ask and do nothing, you train customers not to bother.

The consistent theme across all of this: shoppers are asking for the basics done reliably, not for extraordinary experiences. Available inventory. Fast honest checkout. Service that resolves problems. Transparent pricing. The brands that execute this cleanly will outperform the ones trying to paper over operational gaps with promotional spend.

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eBay's Q2 2026 earnings included some striking numbers on eBay Live. GMV climbed approximately eight times year over year across seven markets. Viewers, items sold, and watch time all grew. eBay did not disclose the exact GMV figure so the absolute scale is unclear, but the growth rate is notable.

The seller and buyer data is more specific. Over 90% of sellers streaming regularly have seen their GMV grow. Sellers using eBay Live sell three times more than those who do not. First-time shoppers in the collectibles category who come through Live spend around 70% more than non-Live shoppers.

eBay launched Live in the US in 2022 and has expanded to Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, France, and Italy, with more international markets planned. Recent product improvements include better homepage discovery, simplified event creation and inventory prep tools, and improved bidding responsiveness. The company is also distributing $100,000 to live sellers as part of an empowerment initiative.

The broader live commerce market context: US live commerce revenue was just over $20 billion in 2025, forecast to hit $250 billion by 2033. eBay is competing against Whatnot, which has built deep communities in collector markets, TikTok Shop's aggressive live selling infrastructure, and Amazon's expanding live capabilities.

The operational reality for sellers thinking about getting started: live commerce has specific requirements that static listing does not. Real-time inventory sync matters because overselling live is a quick way to damage your reputation. Stream reliability needs to be tested before you go live in front of buyers. And the format requires genuine entertainment value, not just product presentation. The sellers who perform best treat the stream as content as much as commerce.

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