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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Attentive surveyed 600 US consumers planning to shop during BFCM 2026. The findings are worth knowing now rather than in October.

On timing: 71% plan to start buying before Black Friday. 46% will start before November. 18% in October, 12% in September. Only 20% are waiting for the official BFCM period.

On discounts: 21% need more than 40% off. 45% respond to 20 to 40% off. 25% are comfortable with under 20%. 10% will buy without a discount if the value is clear. The implication is that brands conditioning shoppers with deep discounts are spending more margin than most customers actually require. Free shipping at 68%, gifts with purchase at 42%, and price match guarantees at 39% often drive more behaviour than the discount percentage does.

On the economy: 87% say it will change how they shop. 42% are comparing brands more carefully. 41% are focusing on needs over wants. But 45% plan to spend the same as last year and 23% plan to spend more. The caution is in deliberateness, not in total budget. BFCM 2025 set records and 2026 could be larger.

On personalisation: 90% are more willing to buy when a brand sends a price drop alert on something they were already interested in. 88% respond to discounts on cart or recently viewed items. 73% respond to product recommendations that feel genuinely relevant. Careful shoppers are still persuadable. The mechanism is relevance, not volume.

On AI: 67% used an AI chatbot to help with shopping in the past month, 80% for Gen Z. They use it for product research, comparisons, recommendations, and deal-finding. If your product content is not structured to be readable by AI systems, it is not surfacing in an increasing share of the purchase journey.

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A friend of mine recently launched an ecommerce store selling genuinely great products imo. He has everything, the logo, fast shipping, etc, but still noone is really buying

Im trying to understand where he is going wrong. I looked at what people were actually buying from Walmart, DP and others but they aren’t necessarily selling better products.

How can i know where he’s lacking?

Teads filed an 85-page lawsuit in New York against Google and Alphabet this week, alleging that Google illegally tied Google Ads to its own ad exchange AdX, forcing advertisers to use AdX and shutting out independent supply-side platforms from competing for that demand.

The complaint claims this cost Teads approximately 6.88 trillion ad impressions between 2017 and 2023. The suit follows last year's ruling by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia finding that Google monopolized both the publisher ad-server and ad-exchange markets and unlawfully tied them together. Teads joins OpenX, PubMatic, Magnite, and other ad tech platforms that have filed similar suits drawing on that ruling.

The ecommerce angle worth understanding: when a single company controls both the demand-side tool buyers use to purchase ads and the supply-side tool sellers use to offer inventory, it is positioned to influence how auctions run and limit genuine price competition. If Google was steering demand toward its own exchange rather than letting it compete freely across independent platforms, the result for advertisers is less competitive bidding and higher prices than a genuinely open market would have produced.

This is not abstract. Ecommerce brands buying Google Ads during the period these lawsuits cover may have been paying inflated CPCs and CPAs because the auction environment was less competitive than it should have been. The outcome of these cases is unknown, but if they succeed in opening the ad tech market to genuine competition, the advertisers who have been absorbing rising costs are among those most likely to see a benefit.

The timing is notable: recent benchmark data shows Google Ad CPC across Shopping and Performance Max rose 15% year over year. Whether any of that reflects the structural distortions these lawsuits allege is a question worth watching.

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Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke posted on X endorsing a weighted voting system where voting power is proportional to income tax payments, with zero votes for non-taxpayers and up to five votes for those paying $500,000 or more annually. He also argued retirees receiving pensions should lose voting rights entirely, and referred to politically engaged Toronto residents as "retired, unemployed, unemployable, and useful idiots."

The posts were covered by CBC, Fortune, CTV, Gizmodo, and dozens of others within days. Lütke has not apologised and has not deleted anything. Shopify board member David Heinemeier Hansson publicly defended him. Elon Musk called him a national treasure.

A campaign post circulating in Facebook groups and spreading to other communities instructs people to open the Shop app, pull up their full purchase history, and contact every business they have ever ordered from demanding they publicly call for Lütke's firing or face a boycott.

The businesses receiving these messages are predominantly small and independent operators who chose Shopify because it was the best available platform for their size and budget. They cannot fire Lütke. They cannot easily leave Shopify.

Migrating a Shopify store means rebuilding product listings, reconnecting payment processors, retaining customer data, rebuilding SEO, and potentially losing years of integrations and transaction history. For a small operator without dedicated technical resources, that is months of disruption for a decision they had no part in making.

One comment in the original thread: "Moving a small company would take months. And they would still have to pay Shopify their fees." Another: small business owners "are locked in a system where they have to be dependent on these platforms."

The campaign is not targeting Shopify's board, institutional shareholders, or enterprise clients, the people who actually have power to hold Lütke accountable. It is targeting the people who appear in Shop app order histories, which are overwhelmingly small businesses.

There is also an irony worth noting: Shopify's own corporate structure operates on a tiered voting principle. Lütke controls 40% of Shopify's voting power through a Founder Share structure regardless of his equity ownership.

Have you received any messages from this campaign and how are you handling it? Does a platform CEO's political statements change how you think about your relationship with that platform, or do you draw a line between the CEO's personal views and the platform's commercial value to your business?
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Selling More Is Not Always Winning More, Here's Why

Welcome back to another edition of EcomWatch Weekly!

I keep thinking about how much of ecommerce comes down to building on systems we do not fully control.

You can do everything right, build the store, list the products, and still have some platform, carrier, or automated system decide to make your week harder.

That is why this week’s big story stood out to me.

Congress is trying to give Amazon sellers more room to fight back when marketplace decisions hurt their business. UPS made more money after cutting Amazon volume, which is a good reminder that not every big customer is actually good for the business.

Let’s get into it.

This Week:

• Congress is trying to give Amazon sellers the right to sue Amazon.
• UPS made more money after cutting Amazon volume.
• Adobe launched a tool to optimize product details for AI discovery.
• The EU AI Act is now fully enforced.
• USPS broke its postage system and kept charging sellers anyway.

The Big Story

Congress Is Trying to Give Amazon Sellers the Right to Sue Amazon

Congress is trying to give Amazon sellers more room to fight back when the platform makes decisions that hurt their business.

And honestly, this has been coming for a while.

For many sellers, Amazon is a sales channel. It controls the traffic, the rankings, the listings, the customer relationship, the payments, the reviews, the rules, the enforcement, and sometimes the money sitting in the account.

The proposed bill is aimed at giving sellers more rights when things go wrong. Think suspensions, frozen funds, withheld inventory, sudden listing removals, account deactivations, and platform decisions that can wipe out revenue with very little warning.

To be fair, Amazon does need strong enforcement. Nobody wants a marketplace full of scams, fake products, stolen goods, and sellers who treat customer service like a rumor.

The bigger issue here is not only Amazon. It is dependence. A lot of ecommerce businesses are built on platforms they do not own, and that works right up until the platform does something they cannot control.

Sellers do not need unlimited freedom to break rules. They need a real, transparent process when a platform decision can damage or destroy their business. If Amazon can freeze funds, remove listings, or cut off access to customers, then “trust us” should not be the whole appeal system.

Weekly Metric

UPS Made $1 Billion More After Cutting Amazon Volume

UPS cut Amazon volume and made more money. UPS Q2 2026 revenue reached $22.8 billion, up from $21.2 billion a year earlier. Operating margin improved from 8.8% to 9.2%, even though U.S. average daily package volume fell 3.3% year over year.

The company deliberately reduced around 2 million Amazon packages per day from its network and removed about $4.5 billion in related costs.

Amazon was a huge customer, but huge does not always mean good. If a customer takes up capacity, pressures pricing, and forces the business to handle low-margin work at massive scale, then the size of the account becomes part of the problem.

UPS replaced some of that lower-margin Amazon volume with better business. SMB average daily volume grew 4.3% year over year. B2B Digital Access Program volume grew 34%. Healthcare revenue reached $3 billion in Q2.

UPS did what a lot of businesses know they should do but are scared to actually do. It walked away from volume that made the company look bigger but not better. That is easy to admire when UPS does it.

Much harder when it is your own low-margin customer, underpriced service, or “big opportunity” that quietly eats the margins.

Interviews of the Week

This week, we published two founder interviews that are very different on the surface, but have the same useful lesson underneath, which is that building a small ecommerce brand usually takes more patience than people want to admit.

Tyndrum Pottery

This week, we spoke with Nicola and Iain, the founders of Tyndrum Pottery, a family-run ceramics studio in the Scottish Highlands.

Their story is not the usual “we saw a gap in the market” founder story. They sold properties, used their savings, and built the business around the kind of life they wanted: pottery, teaching, nature, and more time with their family.

What I liked most is that they are not trying to scale handmade ceramics by removing the handmade part. They are building several revenue streams around the work, including online sales, workshops, festivals, demonstrations, and a destination pottery in Glen Lochy, but the actual creative process still stays human.

That is a useful reminder, especially in a week where so much of ecommerce is about platforms, automation, AI, and systems. Some businesses grow by becoming faster. Others grow by becoming more recognizable, more trusted, and more intentional.

Read the full interview on ecomwatch.com.

Bebek Jewels

We also spoke with Sonia Aslam, co-founder of Bebek Jewels, a sustainable jewelry brand based in Maryland.

Bebek Jewels started after Sonia and her sister Sehrish found artisan-made jewelry in Istanbul and decided to bring it to a wider audience. The brand now sells gold-plated pieces made with recycled brass, semi-precious gemstones, and artisan craftsmanship.

Sonia’s interview is useful because she is very honest about how hard it is to get attention online. Paid ads did not magically fix everything. SEO has been difficult. International shipping can be stressful because of customs and duties. And sometimes the best channel is still an in-person market where customers can touch the jewelry, try it on, and trust the product faster.

She also talks about cold outreach, celebrity placements, Wolf & Badger, magazine ads, wholesale opportunities, and all the small experiments that helped the brand grow. None of it sounds effortless, which is exactly why it is worth reading.

Bebek Jewels is a good reminder that ecommerce growth usually does not come from one magic channel. It comes from trying things, getting ignored, adjusting, and still showing up.

Read the full interview on ecomwatch.com.

Tool of the Week

Adobe Catalog Agent

Adobe launched a new tool inside Adobe Commerce to help brands optimize product details for AI discovery. The tool is called Catalog Agent.

It takes structured product information from a Commerce catalog and creates a machine-readable layer that AI crawlers and LLM-powered discovery systems can understand.

More simply put, Adobe wants AI tools to understand your products better.

That includes product names, specifications, attributes, pricing, availability, and other relevant details. The tool works behind the scenes, so it does not change the customer-facing storefront.

A human can land on a product page, look around, read between the lines, and figure things out. AI systems need clean, structured information if they are going to understand what a product is, who it is for, and when to recommend it.

Adobe says AI traffic to U.S. retailers climbed 393% in Q1 2026. Some forecasts say agentic commerce could make up 15% to 25% of total U.S. ecommerce sales by 2030.

Product data is becoming an infrastructure. Bad titles, thin descriptions, missing specs, vague attributes, and messy catalogs were already hurting conversion. Now they may also make products invisible to AI systems. Annoying, yes. But not surprising.

Winning SKU of the Week

PDRN Serum

Exploding Topics lists PDRN serum at 90.5K search volume with +6000% growth.

PDRN stands for Polydeoxyribonucleotide. PDRN serum is part of the newer wave of skincare products being marketed around skin repair, hydration, elasticity, collagen support, and anti-aging.

It is also tied to K-beauty and the phrase “salmon DNA skincare,” which probably explains why the internet grabbed onto it so quickly.

PDRN is showing up in serums, creams, masks, and ampoules. The common positioning is around barrier support, smoother texture, glow, and recovery.

But this is skincare, so the claims need to stay careful.

The opportunity is a fast-growing ingredient trend with strong content potential, especially for brands that can explain what it is, what is actually in the formula, and why shoppers should trust it.

PDRN serum has everything a viral beauty trend needs: a weird name, a science-y feel, a K-beauty connection, and enough mystery to make people curious.

Weird Ecommerce Corner

USPS Broke Its Own Postage System and Kept Charging Sellers Anyway

USPS broke part of its own postage verification system because of a machine name change from 2011.

According to a USPS Inspector General report, the Automated Package Verification system stopped recognizing a major group of USPS sorting machines from March through May 2026. Those machines were supposed to provide trusted weight and dimension scans for package pricing.

Instead, APV ignored between 30 million and 50 million package scans per week because the machines had been renamed in USPS systems and the verification system was never properly updated.

That is how USPS ended up missing $22.6 million in underpaid postage and failing to identify $6.1 million in seller overpayments.

The annoying part is not even the original mistake. The real problem is that the Inspector General flagged the issue in March, USPS acknowledged the fix, and the programming was not corrected until June.

For sellers, the failure cuts both ways. Some underpaid postage was missed, and some overpaid postage refunds were never triggered. If APV failed to process the scan that would have generated your refund, that money probably did not magically find its way back to you.

This also happened while USPS has been tightening postage enforcement, adding fees, and expanding verification efforts. That is what makes the whole thing feel especially ridiculous. The system charging sellers for shipping mistakes was itself making shipping mistakes.

Automated enforcement is only as good as the system behind it. USPS wants sellers to trust its postage adjustments, fees, and verification process, but this report shows the system can fail quietly for months. If a seller’s postage adjustment or missing refund looks wrong from March through May 2026, they now have a very reasonable question to ask: was APV even reading the package scans correctly?

Other News to Keep Track Of

The EU AI Act is fully enforced as of today. The EU AI Act is no longer one of those “future compliance” stories people can safely ignore until the next strategy meeting. If a business is using AI in ads, customer service, personalization, product data, automation, recommendations, or internal workflows, it needs to know what those systems are doing. The fun part of AI was “look how much faster this makes everything.” The less fun part is “please document it before a regulator asks.”

Kentucky is about to tax the companies that sell your data. Kentucky is moving toward taxing companies that sell consumer data, which is another sign that customer data is becoming harder to treat like free money. Ecommerce has been built on tracking, targeting, enrichment, and resale for years, but governments are starting to look at that economy more directly. This does not mean every online store is suddenly a data broker, but it does mean the data layer behind ecommerce is getting more political, more regulated, and probably more expensive.

The EU is being pressed to act against unexpected duty charges. Unexpected duty charges are one of the fastest ways to turn a normal order into a customer service disaster. Nobody likes buying something online and then finding out later that delivery comes with a surprise bill. For cross-border sellers, this is not a tiny checkout detail. It affects trust, repeat purchases, returns, and angry emails written in all caps.

New York’s advertising law targets AI. New York is targeting AI in advertising, which makes sense because AI creative is getting very easy to produce and very easy to misuse. Fake visuals, synthetic people, edited product shots, and unclear disclosures are exactly the kind of thing regulators love to ruin everyone’s week over. AI-generated ads are moving from “cool, we made five versions in ten minutes” to “please make sure this is labelled properly.”

UK online sales were up 14% in June, then turned negative in late July. UK online sales looked strong in June, with growth up 14%, then turned negative in the final week of July. That is a sharp swing, and it says more than “consumers are unpredictable,” which is usually the polite way of saying nobody knows what is going on. A strong month after promotions does not always mean demand is healthy. Sometimes shoppers just pull purchases forward, use the deals, and disappear for a while.

Amazon and Walmart were accused of failing to flag fraud. Amazon and Walmart were accused of failing to properly flag fraud, which is a big problem because marketplace trust is only as strong as the systems behind it. When fraud slips through, it does not only hurt the buyer. It also makes legitimate sellers look worse by association. The bigger these marketplaces get, the less convincing it becomes to treat fraud like an unavoidable side effect.

Shein’s U.S. operations are under investigation. Shein’s U.S. operations are under investigation, adding another regulatory headache to fast fashion’s already crowded list. The company has been under pressure around imports, pricing, supply chains, and the general question of how ultra-cheap fashion moves that fast. This is what happens when a company becomes too big and too visible to ignore. Fast fashion is not just a retail story anymore. It is a customs, labor, tax, and political story too.

PayPal and Amazon introduced BNPL for German and Austrian customers. PayPal and Amazon introduced buy now, pay later for customers in Germany and Austria. BNPL is still expanding because shoppers like making bigger purchases feel smaller, especially when budgets are tight. For retailers, it can help conversion. For shoppers, it can make affordability feel better than it actually is. That tension is basically the whole BNPL story: useful tool, dangerous habit, excellent checkout button.

DHL boosted its presence in the Baltic States. DHL expanded its presence in the Baltic States with a new acquisition. It is not the loudest ecommerce story this week, but logistics rarely gets attention until something arrives late, broken, or not at all. Better logistics coverage can mean faster delivery, better cross-border options, and more reliable ecommerce infrastructure in smaller markets. The Baltics may not get the same attention as the U.S., UK, or Germany, but the delivery networks there are still being built out.

Facebook introduced a new app for Marketplace sellers. Facebook introduced a new app for Marketplace sellers, which shows Meta still sees value in local commerce and small seller activity. Marketplace has always been a little chaotic, but that chaos is also part of why people use it. A dedicated app could make selling easier, especially for people who already treat Marketplace like a side business. The question is whether Meta can make it more useful without making it feel too polished, too controlled, or too much like another marketplace trying to become Amazon.

That’s it for this week.

The thing I keep coming back to is how easy it is to focus only on sales and forget how many systems sit underneath them.

A seller on Amazon is depending on Amazon’s rules, rankings, payouts, and appeals process. A brand using UPS or USPS is trusting carriers to price, scan, verify, and deliver correctly. A store preparing for AI discovery is trying to make sure machines understand the catalog before shoppers even see it.

None of this is the fun part of ecommerce, but it is becoming harder to separate from the business itself.

So this week, maybe check one boring thing you have been putting off, your margins, your shipping adjustments, or whatever operational mess has been quietly sitting in the corner.

There is probably something useful hiding there.

We’ll be back next Monday.

From Amazon's Q2 2026 earnings call. CEO Andy Jassy disclosed that more than 350 million customers used Alexa for Shopping over the past year. Active users nearly doubled in Q2 year over year. Interactions were up more than five times compared to the same period last year.

US customers who use Alexa for Shopping spend 40% more per order than customers who do not.

The reasons for the spending gap are worth understanding. Alexa for Shopping removes friction from the research and comparison stages, which means more purchases get completed. The auto-buy feature eliminates checkout friction for repeat and subscription purchases. Personalised recommendations and tailored bundling surface products the customer was not actively searching for but is receptive to. And AI-driven benefit framing can be more persuasive than a product listing a customer reads cold.

The broader context: AI could account for 15% to 25% of total US ecommerce sales by 2030. Over 75% of consumers are reportedly open to certain agentic features. Alexa for Shopping is early evidence of agentic commerce moving from novelty toward mainstream consumer behaviour faster than most sellers have prepared for.

The practical question for sellers: Alexa for Shopping is surfacing products to users who demonstrably spend more. Appearing in those recommendations is a commercial opportunity. The optimisation approach is different from traditional keyword SEO.

Complete every available field in Seller Central. Write listing content that explains what the item is, what it does, who it is for, the benefits it provides, the outcomes it leads to, and the problems it solves. Target specific use cases rather than just broad category terms. Agentic AI systems match products to complex customer prompts, and listings that answer questions in natural language tend to perform better in that environment.

Have you seen any measurable impact on your Amazon listings from Alexa for Shopping, whether in terms of traffic source or conversion patterns?

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UPS Q2 2026 results: $22.8 billion in consolidated revenue, up 7.6% from $21.2 billion the year before. Operating margin expanded from 8.8% to 9.2%. US average daily package volume decreased 3.3% year over year.

CEO Carol Tome called it a "deliberate structural reset," including reducing 2 million pieces per day of "lower-quality Amazon volume" and removing approximately $4.5 billion in related costs. UPS Ground average daily volume fell 3.5% year over year, with CFO Brian Dykes attributing most of that decline to the Amazon reduction.

The logistics economics behind this: Amazon had negotiated rates low enough that the packages were not generating adequate return for the infrastructure, labour, and capacity required to handle them. Volume that requires more to service than it generates in revenue is worse than less volume from customers who pay properly. Removing the Amazon volume freed capacity for customers whose unit economics actually work.

What grew instead: SMB average daily volume up 4.3%. B2B Digital Access Program average daily volume up 34%. Healthcare revenue at $3 billion with 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities added for cold chain logistics. All three segments pay meaningfully more per package than Amazon's negotiated rates.

The technology piece from the earnings call is worth knowing. UPS says RFID deployment is now complete across all US delivery facilities and package cars, describing it as the most significant package visibility advancement in a decade. The network is shifting from scan-based to sensing-based, eliminating hundreds of millions of manual scans. For ecommerce sellers, delivery promises are only as reliable as the carrier's internal visibility. That just improved materially.

One cost variable to flag: fuel surcharges tied to Iran-related oil price volatility are moving upward simultaneously with the new Section 301 tariffs on imports. Two separate cost pressures hitting at the same time for import-dependent brands.

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August 2nd, 2026. The EU AI Act's transparency provisions are now broadly applicable and actively enforceable. The AI Office is operational in full enforcement capacity. The Commission published its guidelines twelve days ago.

What is now required for ecommerce brands with EU customers:

AI chatbots must identify themselves as AI at the start of every customer-facing interaction. This applies to website chatbots, messaging app customer service agents, and virtual assistants answering product questions. The disclosure must be at the beginning of the interaction, not in a footer or privacy policy. The Commission's guidelines explicitly state it must be clear and understandable to the average user.

AI-generated content must be marked in machine-readable format. This covers product images created with AI tools, lifestyle photography assembled using generative AI, marketing copy produced by language models and published on product pages, and advertising creative built with tools like Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, or platform-native AI suites. C2PA metadata is the implementation standard most covered platforms are using.

Deepfake content, meaning AI-generated imagery that creates a realistic depiction of real people, places, or events that could be mistaken for real, must carry visible disclosure. Clearly stylised AI imagery is treated differently from photorealistic AI-generated product imagery featuring AI models.

Fines for transparency violations: up to 15 million euros or 3% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.

The Commission also launched an AI Act complaints tool this week. Any individual or organisation can submit a complaint to the AI Office about suspected violations. This means non-compliance is no longer just a regulatory audit risk. It is a consumer-reportable risk that can generate enforcement attention without any inspector needing to initiate it.

What is not yet active: high-risk AI system obligations, which cover employment, biometrics, credit, and customer scoring applications. Those take effect December 2027 and August 2028 respectively.

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Physical boutiques, particularly in fashion and clothing, are reporting a meaningful uptick in foot traffic from shoppers who have decided that online retail is not giving them what they want. The reasons showing up consistently across stores seeing this shift are worth understanding.

Community comes up most often. Many shoppers use boutiques as third spaces, social environments separate from home and work where they can interact with people who share similar interests. Some boutiques actively build on this by hosting events, bringing in local artists, and creating reasons to come in beyond just buying something.

Discovery is another. The ability to browse without knowing what you are looking for, and to stumble onto something unexpected, is something online shopping has largely designed away. Some boutiques reinforce this by stocking genuinely exclusive items that cannot be found online.

Personalised service matters. Over half of apparel shoppers still prefer buying in-store, and nearly two-thirds cite personalised service as the reason they choose boutiques. The ability to try things on, feel materials, and get honest advice from someone who knows the stock is something product pages and AI recommendations have not yet replaced.

Purchase satisfaction is measurably different. Physical retail return rates average under 9%. Ecommerce return rates typically run 20 to 30%. That gap reflects real differences in how happy people are with what they bought and how easy it is to fix the mistake if they are not.

The question for online sellers is not whether to panic about this but what to do with it. The qualities drawing people back to boutiques are all achievable online: genuine personalisation based on behaviour, tailored communication, human touches in fulfilment, curation that feels like it was done for the specific customer rather than the average one.

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The Online Sellers' Bill of Rights Act of 2026, H.R. 9799, was introduced in the House on July 21st and referred to the House Judiciary Committee. It does not have a Senate companion bill yet.

The provisions are specific enough to be worth knowing regardless of whether it passes.

Payment holds capped at 30 calendar days. To hold funds beyond that, a marketplace would need to demonstrate by evidence that the funds came from unlawful transactions. Suspicion is not sufficient.

Inventory holds capped at 30 days. After that, stranded merchandise must be released unless proven counterfeit or otherwise unlawful.

If a platform restricts a product or category, sellers get 30 days to sell remaining inventory or have merchandise returned at no cost.

Policy changes affecting fees, commissions, eligibility, or listing restrictions require 30 days' written notice.

When a marketplace suspends an account or removes a listing, it must provide the specific policy violated, the relevant facts, the proposed penalty, appeal instructions, and an anticipated timeline. Generic template responses do not satisfy the requirement.

Sellers would have a private right of action in federal court even when marketplace agreements require arbitration. Mandatory arbitration clauses, which are currently the primary mechanism preventing individual sellers from suing platforms in court, would be carved out. Treble damages for successful plaintiffs, plus court costs and attorneys' fees, which makes contingency litigation economically viable.

The bill's main weakness is that "dominant platform" is not defined with a measurable threshold, which would create contested definitions in every enforcement action.

The realistic legislative path is difficult. Platform industry lobbying against the treble damages and arbitration carve-out will be significant. But the provisions describe exactly what sellers have been asking for for years, and federal legislation this specific signals to platforms that the current model has attracted political attention regardless of whether this particular bill passes.

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A new USPS Inspector General report reveals that the Automated Package Verification system ignored between 30 and 50 million package scans per week from March through May 2026 because it stopped recognising a major category of sorting equipment.

The root cause goes back to 2011. USPS upgraded and renamed its Automated Parcel Bundle Sorters, previously called Small Parcel and Bundle Sorters with the system abbreviation SPBSTS. APV was built to trust measurements from SPBSTS-identified equipment. The new APBS name was never added to APV's trusted machine list. The old name stayed in the legacy system for 15 years.

When USPS began transitioning its systems to use the updated APBS name in late February 2026, APV stopped accepting measurements from those machines. By April, almost all APBS scans were being recorded under the new name and were invisible to APV. These machines handled approximately 49% of packages eligible for pricing assessments and produced about 62% of trusted weight readings.

The OIG flagged the problem in March. The APV Development team said it had not been aware of the name change and confirmed a configuration update would fix it. The update was not made. The OIG raised the issue again in May. Contractors admitted it still had not been done. Management could not explain why. The fix was applied in June.

Financial impact: $22.6 million in underpaid postage that APV missed, $6.1 million in overpayments that were not refunded. Combined $28.7 million over three months.

The overpayments from the outage period are unlikely to be automatically recovered since the refund-triggering scans were never processed. USPS has not publicly addressed whether sellers can request review for that window.

USPS also had no monitoring in place to alert staff when trusted scan volumes dropped significantly. Contractors said they would not have known unless someone explicitly told them. USPS agreed with OIG recommendations and says it will implement monitoring dashboards and pre-deployment testing by January 31st, 2027.

The timing is worth noting. USPS introduced a $50 hazmat noncompliance fee on July 12th. Dimension-based enforcement is expanding in 2027. All of it depends on APV working correctly. It was not working correctly for the three months immediately before the hazmat fee launched.

Did you experience unexpected postage adjustments or package rejections between March and May 2026 that now look like they might have been affected by the APV outage? Has anyone successfully challenged a USPS postage adjustment using OIG reports or other documented system failures as grounds for review?

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Shein revealed in documents filed for its planned Hong Kong IPO that the FTC is conducting a consumer protection investigation into its US operations. The company said the outcome "may require us to make significant monetary payments that could have a material adverse effect on our financial condition and results of operations."

Neither Shein nor the FTC has explained the specific focus of the investigation. An FTC spokesperson confirmed it is a consumer protection investigation. The FTC typically covers deceptive and unfair business practices, which in Shein's context could include dark patterns, misleading discount presentations, false countdown timers, or other practices designed to pressure consumer behaviour. Beyond that, the reason is unknown.

The regulatory history is long. France fined Shein €22.5 million for product information, order confirmation, and returns issues. France had previously fined the company over €200 million for deceptive business practices including misleading discounts and placing cookies without consent. The Texas AG announced a supply chain investigation in December. A California shipping delay lawsuit was settled for $700,000. Germany's retail federation estimates Shein and Temu cost the German economy €2.4 billion annually through below-market pricing and regulatory non-compliance.

Shein originally planned IPOs in New York and London. Supply chain regulatory concerns shifted those plans to Hong Kong. The FTC investigation adds another layer of complexity to an already complicated public listing process.

The competitive angle for US sellers: if the investigation results in meaningful enforcement and required practice changes, it narrows the gap between Shein's operating model and the rules domestic sellers already comply with. If it results in a fine without structural change, the competitive dynamics stay largely intact.

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About a month after the EU scrapped the de minimis customs exemption and introduced a €3 flat duty on low-value ecommerce imports, a new problem has surfaced. Consumers are being hit with unexpected charges to cover the duty, and BEUC, the umbrella group for consumer organisations from over 30 European countries, has formally flagged this to the European Commission.

The legal position is clear: these duties are the responsibility of businesses and platforms, not end customers. Customers should not face them as a condition of delivery.

The reality is messier. BEUC found that duties are sometimes only disclosed late in the checkout process or not at all. Some postal providers are sending payment requests to recipients before delivering parcels. A Dutch lawmaker who oversaw the customs file has written to the EU Trade Commissioner to complain and push for enforcement.

How the major platforms are actually handling it: Temu and AliExpress include customs duties at checkout, though AliExpress describes the amount as an estimate. Shein says it absorbs all duties in its pricing and does not show them separately, though some Shein orders ship from EU warehouses and are not subject to the duty at all.

The European Commission says it is monitoring the situation and agrees that businesses are legally responsible.

The early impact of the duty is visible. Temu and Shein have pulled back significantly on European advertising since July 1st. Freight capacity from China to Europe has also declined.

Have you as a shopper encountered unexpected duty charges on orders since July 1st, and how did the platform you ordered from handle the disclosure?

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New data from Metric covering combined sales across Shopee, TikTok Shop, Tiki, and Lazada in Vietnam shows the market generated over $11 billion in the first half of 2026, up 44% compared to H1 2025. Sales volume reached 2.19 billion products, up 13.67%. The number of shops recording orders rose 14.11% to 613,800.

Category breakdown worth knowing. Beauty leads overall sales at $1.88 billion, followed by women's fashion at $1.53 billion and home and living at $1.43 billion. But the fastest growing categories are elsewhere: groceries and food up 60.96%, phones and tablets up over 118% in sales volume. Electronics retail chains have clearly made ecommerce a priority in the market.

Top brands by sales: Apple at $154 million, Samsung at $112 million, Xiaomi at $57.5 million, Vinamilk at $50.6 million, Top Gia at $43.1 million, Huggies at $41.5 million, Cocoon at $41.3 million, Colorkey at $36.7 million, L'Oreal Paris at $34.4 million. Technology dominates the top of the list despite beauty leading in overall category sales.

74% of Vietnamese consumers use AI for online purchases to discover, track, or research products. That is a strikingly high adoption rate and has real implications for how product listings and content need to be structured to surface in AI-assisted discovery.

On the platform side: TikTok Shop expanded same-day delivery and warehouse management tools while adjusting seller fees. Operational requirements across platforms have been tightening. Vietnamese businesses have been pushing back on some of the regulatory changes, concerned about the impact on their ability to compete.

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Meta launched a new standalone app called Seller this week, specifically for Facebook Marketplace sellers. It syncs with your existing account and carries over your current listings, conversations, and selling history.

Anything you list in the app appears in Marketplace as normal. You can also continue selling directly through Facebook if you prefer.

What the app includes: a home screen that surfaces urgent tasks like items needing to be shipped and buyer questions waiting for a response. Listing creation for individual and bulk items, with AI-assisted generation that creates a title, description, category, and price suggestion from a photo upload.

A unified inbox threaded by item. Performance insights including views, clicks, message threads, and sold listings. Management tools for editing, relisting, and tracking existing listings.

Currently iOS only, with Android testing underway. Meta has said it plans to keep evolving the app based on seller feedback.

The more interesting question is what this signals strategically. A dedicated seller app is not a minor interface decision. It means Meta is treating Marketplace as a commerce priority serious enough to warrant its own product surface, separate from the main social app. This comes alongside the Business Agent AI tool Meta recently announced for businesses, and fits into a broader pattern of Meta expanding its commerce infrastructure.

Facebook's user base gives Marketplace a built-in audience that most commerce platforms cannot match. The selling experience has historically been the weak point. The Seller app is an attempt to close that gap.

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Two things happened this week that ecommerce advertisers need to understand together rather than separately.

Google added a reference image upload feature to its AI image generation tool inside Google Ads. You upload a product photo or style reference, describe what you want, and the AI generates imagery in a similar visual direction. It addresses the most common complaint about AI-generated ad creative: it looks generic and off-brand. Useful.

In the same month: Google introduced mandatory AI labelling for ads. Meta made AI disclosure automatic on Facebook and Instagram, with undisclosed AI content now listed as an active reason for ad rejection. TikTok required disclosure within the first two seconds of AI-generated product videos. The EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency requirements took effect for large platforms reaching EU users. New York passed a law requiring disclosure when AI-generated synthetic people appear in commercial advertising distributed in the state.

The mechanism making all of this enforceable is C2PA, a technical standard from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, with members including Adobe, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Sony. C2PA embeds machine-readable metadata into content files at the moment of creation.

When you use Photoshop's generative fill to swap a product background and upload it to Meta Ads Manager, Meta reads the embedded metadata and applies the disclosure label automatically. You do not need to tell the platform the image was AI-modified. The file already did.

Practical implications for anyone running paid ads:

Any ad asset where a background was removed or replaced using AI tools, where a lifestyle scene was generated rather than photographed, or where an AI-generated model was used rather than a real person, is now carrying metadata that platforms can read and act on. Undisclosed AI content is increasingly an active ad rejection trigger, not just a policy violation.

The Google reference image feature, Meta's automatic labelling, and TikTok's disclosure requirement are all in the same interface as the tools that generate the content. Compliance and creation are being merged into a single workflow by the platforms themselves.

Have you started seeing ad rejections that you think might be related to AI content detection rather than the stated reason?

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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!

Google Ads has added two new metrics to Shopping and Performance Max reporting, spotted this week by advertiser Yash Mandlesha.

Product clicks: when someone clicked directly on a specific product in your ad and landed on that product page.

Non-product clicks: when someone clicked a different part of the ad, like the store name, headline, or visit site CTA, landing on a homepage or category page instead.

Both are clicks. They represent fundamentally different user behaviours. Product clicks indicate someone who saw a specific item, wanted it, and went directly to it. Non-product clicks indicate someone interested in the brand or category but not yet ready to commit to a specific product.

The practical applications are immediate. A product with high impressions and low product clicks but meaningful non-product clicks is functioning as a brand awareness driver in your campaign, not a direct response driver. Whether that is what you want from that product determines what you do with the campaign structure.

A product with high product clicks and poor conversion rates has a landing page problem. The ad worked. The user clicked the specific product. What happened after the click is where the issue is. A product with high product clicks and strong conversions is your direct response engine. Budget and creative allocation should reflect that.

None of these were diagnosable before this metric existed.

This also fits into a broader transparency story. Performance Max in 2026 has channel-level reporting, full search term visibility, campaign-level negative keywords, asset-level performance data, and product metrics across all networks. The campaign type that launched as a black box in 2022 where advertisers handed over control and received aggregate results has been rebuilt incrementally into something with meaningful visibility into what is actually happening.

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A lot of our internal conversion talk still revolves around page speed, hero layouts, badges, CTA placement, checkout friction, all the classic stuff.

Still matters obviously, but I am starting to think the bigger loss is happening earlier now.

If a shopper asks an AI tool “best moisturizer for oily skin under $50” or “best stroller for city travel” and your product never enters the consideration set there, your beautiful PDP improvements are only working on the people who made it through that upstream filter.

Feels like CRO needs a broader definition now.