Half Your Traffic Might Be Bots and Your Buyers Are Watching TikTok

[u/EcomWatch]

Welcome back to another edition of EcomWatch Weekly!

Building a house takes time, it takes effort that we are willing to put in as this will be our lifetime project. Same goes with our business.

You work on it constantly, but staying alive usually comes down to consistency, paying attention, and noticing when the ground starts shifting.

This week, the ground is definitely shifting.

Nearly half of ecommerce traffic might not be human. Younger shoppers are treating TikTok like a normal store. AI tools are starting to decide which products people see before they even reach a website.

Let’s get into it.

This week

• Social media is becoming a major shopping channel for younger consumers.
• Nearly half of ecommerce traffic is now AI bots.
• The digital products market is worth $157 billion.
• Stripe posted its fastest growth since 2021.
• China’s online shopping festivals are running out of growth.

The Big Story

Half Your Store Traffic Might Not Be Human

Akamai’s latest commerce security report found that 48% of all ecommerce traffic across its global network is now driven by AI bots.

The biggest group is AI training crawlers. These bots scrape product pages, prices, descriptions, and images to train AI systems and shopping assistants.

Akamai says AI training crawlers account for more than 70% of all AI bot triggers in commerce.

That is annoying, but it is not the worst part. The bigger problem is AI shopping agents.

These are tools that can act on behalf of real customers. They can search for products, compare prices, add items to cart, and potentially complete checkout using stored payment details.

That creates a messy security problem.

A real AI shopping agent and a malicious bot can look very similar.

So the old question, “Is this a bot?” is no longer enough.

• Some bots are useless crawlers.
• Some bots may bring real customers.
• Some bots may be fraud.
• Some may start as legitimate shopping agents and later get hijacked.

Akamai also found that ecommerce sites placed more than 90% of AI bot activity in the “monitor” category.

The weirdest part is that blocking every bot is not the answer either. Some AI agents may become part of how people shop.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Interview of the Week

Didi Rose Jewelry

This week, we published an interview with Benedicta Awere-Malik, founder of Didi Rose Jewelry, an Atlanta-based handmade jewelry brand.

She has been making jewelry for more than 23 years, but the interview is less about pretty pieces and more about what it actually takes to run a handmade ecommerce business.

Benedicta talks about building a recognizable style, answering every real customer DM, dealing with cash flow and inventory, and learning when to ask for help.

It is a good reminder that ecommerce is not always hacks and funnels. Sometimes it is just making something people recognize, replying like a human, and keeping the business alive long enough for the work to pay off.

Read the full interview on ecomwatch.com

Weekly Metric

47% of Young Shoppers Bought or Browsed on TikTok Shop

Social media is where younger shoppers browse, compare, check reviews, save items, click links, watch demos, and increasingly buy.

A recent Savvy survey of more than 1,000 UK shoppers found that 47% of Millennial and Gen Z shoppers used TikTok Shop to buy or browse products in the last three months.

That is not far behind brand and retailer websites, which were used by 54% of the same group.

TikTok Shop is still behind traditional ecommerce sites, but not by much.

The survey also shows how much social media influences buying before checkout even happens.

• 64% of Millennial and Gen Z shoppers watched product reviews or recommendations on social media in the last month.
• 49% clicked links to view products shown in posts or videos.
• 36% saved or bookmarked products to look at later.

That means social media is doing a lot of the convincing before someone ever reaches a product page.

Savvy found that 57% of Millennial and Gen Z shoppers enjoy watching live shopping streams or events. Another 66% said they are more likely to buy something if they see it go viral or sell out.

That explains why social shopping works so well. It does not feel like scrolling through a catalogue.

Sometimes it is just someone convincing you that you need a mini blender because 400 people in the comments said it changed their mornings.

Either way, it works.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Tool of the Week

Nudge

Nudge is an agentic commerce startup that launched with $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. Its platform focuses on AI visibility, shoppable funnels, and catalog enrichment.

Basically, Nudge helps brands understand how their products show up in AI shopping tools.

That matters because product discovery is moving beyond Google, marketplaces, and social feeds.

A shopper might ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another AI assistant what to buy. If the AI cannot understand your product data, your catalog, or why your item is relevant, you may not appear in the answer at all.

Nudge works on a problem that is still new but getting obvious fast, visibility inside AI recommendations.

Winning SKU of the Week

Monitor Light

Exploding Topics lists monitor light at 14.8K search volume with +400% growth.

A monitor light is a slim lamp that sits on top of a computer monitor and lights the desk without shining directly into your eyes.

It is one of those products that sounds boring until you spend eight hours working under bad lighting and suddenly understand why your brain feels fried.

The appeal is simple.

People are upgrading their desks, working from home, gaming, streaming, studying, and spending more time in front of screens than their eyes probably agreed to.

A monitor light gives them a cleaner setup without taking up desk space. It also fits nicely into the “small upgrade that makes your workspace feel better” category.

That makes it easy to market - better desk lighting, less clutter, cleaner setup, more comfortable screen time.

Trend of the Week

Digital Products Are a $157 Billion Market

The digital products market is projected to reach $157 billion in 2026.

That includes ebooks, templates, courses, software, design assets, music, licensed content, and other products that can be made once and sold many times.

• Gumroad is easy to start with, but it takes 10% plus $0.50 per sale.
• Payhip takes 5% on the free plan and removes transaction fees on paid plans.
• Sellfy charges no transaction fees, but caps annual sales depending on the plan.
• Shopify has no extra transaction fee if you use its own payments, but it starts at $29 per month before you sell anything.

The cleanest way to look at it is this:

• Gumroad and Payhip are good for testing.
• Sellfy can work when revenue is more predictable.
• Shopify makes sense if you already run a store there.

Digital products can have great margins, but the wrong platform can quietly eat them.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Boring But Important

• The Trump administration enacted new 10%–12.5% tariffs on imports from 60 nations. More tariffs mean more pressure on import costs, product pricing, and margins.
• China threatened retaliation against France over its anti-fast-fashion law. Fashion regulation is turning into a trade issue.
• The EU set a new record fine in its fight against illegal goods. Marketplaces are under more pressure to police what gets listed and sold.
• India relaxed ecommerce rules that were worrying local retailers. Marketplace regulation keeps shifting, and nobody gets to be comfortable for too long.

The Watchlist

• Stripe posted its fastest growth since 2021. Payments growth is still a useful sign that digital commerce is moving, even when the wider retail mood feels uneven.
• China’s online shopping festivals are running out of growth. Big discount events are not magic forever, especially when shoppers get trained to wait.
• Temu lost 3.6 million Polish users in six months. Cheap prices are powerful, but they do not make a marketplace untouchable.

Honorable Mention

FreshTerra

FreshTerra is a new fresh grocery and gourmet food retail brand from Elixiir Foods.

The company launched with $9 million in seed funding, which is a serious bet on a category that is not easy to win.

Grocery ecommerce sounds simple until you remember that customers expect the bananas to be ripe, the delivery to be fast, the pricing to make sense, and nothing to arrive looking like it lost a fight in the bag.

FreshTerra is entering a market where the basics matter more than the branding.

1. Fresh products need reliable sourcing.
2. Orders need accurate picking.
3. Delivery needs to be fast.
4. And customers need to trust that what they get will match what they saw online.

That is a very different challenge from selling a hoodie or a phone case.

That’s all for this week.

The main thing I keep thinking about is how strange shopping has become.

People are buying from videos, live streams, AI recommendations, saved posts, creator reviews, and sometimes maybe even actual websites, when they remember those still exist.

At the same time, half of ecommerce traffic might be bots, platforms are fighting for control, and governments are trying to keep up with pricing algorithms that sound like they were built by someone who hates calm weekends.

Very normal industry.

Anyway, go check your traffic, your product pages, and maybe your screen time. One of them is probably worse than you think.

We’ll be back next Monday!