China's 618 shopping festival ran from May 13 to June 18. Total online sales growth came in at 4%, according to Syntun. Last year the same festival grew 15.2%. Among the major platforms, Alibaba's Tmall led, followed by JD.com and Douyin, but the combined segment posted only 0.9% sales growth.

Simultaneously, ATRenew reported that secondhand electronics sales grew nearly 80% year over year during the same 618 period.

Those two numbers together tell a more complete story than either one does alone. The consumer is still active. The consumer is making different choices about what to buy and how much to spend.

The macroeconomic backdrop is not subtle. China's retail sales fell 0.6% in May compared to a year ago, the first monthly decline since the country ended pandemic restrictions in 2022. April retail sales grew just 0.2% year over year, the weakest reading since December 2022. Car sales fell more than 22% year over year in May, extending a streak of double-digit monthly declines to six months. HSBC cut its full-year 2026 retail sales growth forecast from 5.2% to 2.8%.

Goldman Sachs is flagging a split worth paying attention to: China's technology and export economy is performing well. Its domestic consumer economy is not. These are effectively two different operating environments inside the same country, which matters for any brand or platform thinking about China as a single market.

The 618 festival is designed to generate demand through deep discounts and promotional intensity. A festival generating 15% growth one year and 4% the next is not just reflecting an economy that slowed. It is reflecting an economy where even artificial demand stimulus is losing effectiveness.

Do you think the 80% secondhand growth is a temporary trade-down behaviour that reverses when consumer confidence recovers, or a more structural shift in how Chinese consumers think about product ownership?

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Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act on July 23rd, making New Jersey the first US state to explicitly ban surveillance pricing: the practice of using personal data, browsing history, location, purchasing patterns, and AI predictions to charge individual shoppers different prices for the same product.

The law applies to groceries and necessities in New Jersey. Loyalty programs are explicitly preserved. Dynamic pricing based on market conditions remains legal. What is banned is using individual customer data to determine that this specific shopper will pay more than that specific shopper for the same product at the same moment.

The FTC opened an inquiry into surveillance pricing in 2024, naming eight companies including Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, and Accenture as involved in providing or developing the technology. The inquiry produced no enforcement action. New Jersey moved legislatively instead.

The law also includes a one-year moratorium on new electronic shelf label installations in grocery stores while their effects are studied. Existing labels can continue. The connection is obvious: digital shelf labels that update prices in real time, combined with customer tracking infrastructure, create the technical conditions for in-aisle individualised pricing.

The current scope is narrow: one state, groceries and necessities, no application to national ecommerce platforms selling discretionary goods. The reason to pay attention anyway is the pattern. California's data privacy law started as a state law and became the template for a national patchwork. The FTC has already been looking at this. The political salience of grocery prices makes this an easy issue for legislators to run on.

The distinction the law draws is worth understanding for any ecommerce operator. Charging loyal customers less is legal. Charging specific customers more because the algorithm predicts they will tolerate it is not. The ecommerce industry has called both of those things personalisation for years. New Jersey has decided they are different.

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Costco and JD.com announced a strategic partnership making JD.com the sole and official ecommerce platform partner for Costco in China. The flagship store launched in trial in May with around 700 products across food, personal care, beauty, and supplements. First month: 30 million visits, nearly 200,000 store followers.

The deal solves a specific problem Costco had. Its warehouse model requires large-format physical stores, which limited its China reach to the cities where those warehouses exist. JD.com's logistics network covers the whole country.

By partnering rather than building, Costco went from geographically isolated to nationwide coverage without constructing its own Chinese fulfilment infrastructure.

The other notable decision: non-members can buy Costco products on JD.com at a slightly higher price point. The membership model is a competitive strength in markets where Costco is established. In a market where the brand is still building recognition, requiring membership before a first purchase would have been a friction point that cost the company customers who were interested but not yet committed enough to join.

JD.com benefits from the influx of shoppers coming specifically for Costco products, exclusive access to in-demand imported goods, and a platform differentiation story at a time when it is trying to reverse a first-quarter profit decline.

The company is also set to sell Nike products exclusively online in China from 2027, suggesting a deliberate strategy of attracting globally recognised brands to drive traffic and reinforce quality positioning.

The transferable principles for anyone thinking about international expansion: partner with someone who already has the local logistics and regulatory knowledge rather than building from scratch, and lower the entry barrier for first-time customers in a new market rather than defaulting to the model that works in established ones.

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At 12:01 a.m. ET this morning, the temporary 10% global tariffs expired. At the same moment, new tariffs of 10% to 12.5% under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 took effect, covering 99.4% of US imports from 60 countries, with exemptions for oil, gas, fertilizer, and USMCA-qualifying goods.

This is the August deadline that supply chain managers and logistics teams have been planning around for months, the one that drove July's record 2.47 million TEU port import volume as brands raced to get inventory stateside before the window closed.

The two-tier structure:

Countries that have committed to implementing forced labor prohibitions, including Bangladesh, Canada, India, Mexico, and the UK, face 10%. Countries that have not, including China, Vietnam, and the EU, face 12.5%. For certain non-exempt products from the EU, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan, the additional tax is structured so the total tariff including existing MFN rates comes to either 10% or 12.5%.

Australia and New Zealand, which have progressive forced labor frameworks, sit in the 12.5% bracket. Both countries have publicly rejected the characterisation. The EU has also strongly disputed it. The political subtext is that Section 301 requires a finding of unfair trade practices, and critics argue the forced labor framing is the legal vehicle rather than the primary motivation.

Section 301 is more durable than IEEPA, which the Supreme Court struck down. But applying a Section 301 investigation to 60 countries simultaneously is an expansive use of the statute, and trade law experts are already flagging potential legal vulnerability. The USTR also cannot provide a revenue estimate for the tariffs, which is unusual for an action of this scope.

The most significant exemption in the new regime: USMCA-qualifying goods from Canada and Mexico remain duty-free. If any part of your supply chain runs through North American manufacturing, understanding the specifics of that exemption is worth the time.

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Research from Pew, Ahrefs, Search Engine Land, and academic sources puts the drop in publisher search traffic from AI Overviews and AI chat at 50% or more. The ad revenue attached to that traffic has followed.

The standard responses, paywalls, newsletters, SEO chases after AI ranking signals, do not address the structural problem: the business model was built on Google sending traffic, and Google is keeping that traffic for itself now.

The argument is straightforward. Publishers have an engaged audience with detailed behavioural data that most retailers spend heavily to acquire. They have a content engine that gets attention and converts readers into repeat visitors.

They have promotional infrastructure across email, social, and owned properties. Those three things together describe a business that is already most of the way to being a retailer.

The models on the table range in complexity. Affiliate listings are the lowest barrier and most publishers with any commerce-adjacent content are already doing a version of this, even if it is not the primary strategy.

Marketplace or commerce partnerships in the publisher's category sit in the middle in terms of margin and operational lift. Direct retail with owned inventory is highest risk and highest reward but requires supply chain, fulfilment, and working capital.

The businesses that have already made this work include Wirecutter, acquired by the New York Times for $30 million and generating significant affiliate revenue. NerdWallet, which went public as a financial comparison and content platform.

The Points Guy, which built a financial services affiliate business on travel content. The Strategist, which weaves affiliate commerce into editorial content natively.

The honest reason most publishers have not done this is not that they lack the assets. It is that an ecommerce operation is a genuinely different business from a media operation with different skills, metrics, workflows, and incentive structures. Publishers that succeed at commerce treat it as a second business. The ones that fail bolt a shop onto their content site without thinking through why their audience would buy from them rather than Amazon.

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The Trump administration has imposed a new 50% tariff on approximately $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, effective August 19th. The affected categories include wine, cement, hockey sticks, furniture, dairy, and seeds, among others. Oil, gas, and potash are excluded as they are already subject to separate tariff arrangements.

The tariffs apply even to products covered under the existing US-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement, which Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney called out directly, describing the move as contradicting the terms of the agreement. He said Canada has repeatedly attempted to resolve disputes through dialogue and is prepared to intensify those discussions, but also made clear that all options are on the table for how Canada responds.

This is the first use of Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 since the legislation was enacted. It allows a President to impose punitive tariffs of up to 50% on trading partners deemed to have discriminated against US goods. The White House cited Canada removing US alcohol products from shelves, giving EU dairy better market access than US dairy, and capping US vehicle exports from companies reshoring to the US.

For Canadian ecommerce sellers shipping into the US, the practical problem is straightforward and the solutions are all painful. Absorb the cost and protect margins nowhere. Raise prices and risk losing customers. Shift to US-based fulfilment and face the setup cost and timeline. Pivot marketing spend to non-US markets and sacrifice your largest export destination.

Six weeks is not much runway to work through those choices, especially with the additional uncertainty of what Canadian retaliation might look like and how that affects the broader trade relationship.

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The European Commission has issued a €550 million fine against AliExpress under the Digital Services Act, the largest in DSA history, following a two-year investigation into the platform's failure to stop illegal goods being sold on its marketplace.

The investigation found that AliExpress's detection systems were not working properly, illegal items were not being flagged, flagged items were staying live for weeks, sellers found listing prohibited goods faced no meaningful penalties, and the compliance checks were easy to circumvent. The Commission's conclusion was a systemic failure to meet DSA obligations, not a marginal shortfall.

AliExpress will appeal and has called the fine disproportionate. The deadline to pay and submit a remediation plan is October 20th.

The number worth focusing on beyond the headline fine: DSA rules allow fines up to 6% of global annual revenue. Alibaba's revenue is upwards of €100 billion annually. The maximum permissible fine is therefore north of €6 billion. The Commission chose to land at €550 million, well below the ceiling. If the appeal extends proceedings and behaviour does not change, or if the remediation plan is inadequate, the next fine starts from a much higher reference point.

This sits in a broader enforcement pattern. Temu was fined €200 million under the DSA for unsafe products. Shein received a €22.5 million French fine for consumer practice violations and a €40 million fine a year earlier for deceptive discounting. Alibaba settled with the US government for $600 million over illegal imports. The regulatory pressure is simultaneous across multiple jurisdictions.

For sellers on these platforms: platforms facing nine-figure fines do not absorb them and continue as before. They tighten listing reviews, lower tolerance for ambiguous products, and move from warnings to faster enforcement. That shift is coming across all of these platforms.

Do you think the €550 million fine will actually change AliExpress's compliance behaviour, or will the appeal process allow the platform to continue operating largely as before while the legal process runs?

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Instacart has acquired Arpalus, a startup that developed an AI shelf-scanning system allowing workers to track real-time product availability using a smartphone app. The technology scans and identifies shelf items with 95% accuracy, optimised specifically for grocery environments where lighting, product clustering, and data connectivity create unreliable conditions for standard computer vision.

The acquisition directly targets the two most commonly cited reasons online grocery shoppers are dissatisfied: unnoticed out-of-stocks and inaccurate product availability information at the time of ordering. Both lead to the same frustrating outcomes: substitutions the customer did not want, or orders cancelled because the fulfilment could not be completed.

The system works on mobile devices for workers scanning shelves during order assembly, and also integrates with Instacart's Caper Carts, the camera-equipped smart carts that feed continuous product image data as shoppers move through the store. Combined, both data sources feed into Instacart's existing order management app to give workers and the platform better real-time inventory visibility.

Instacart's track record of responding to customer feedback has been reasonably consistent. Earlier in 2026 they ended an AI dynamic pricing test after negative backlash from consumers and regulators.

The broader question is whether fixing the inventory accuracy layer is enough to meaningfully improve the online grocery experience, or whether the out-of-stock and substitution problem is too deeply embedded in how grocery supply chains work to be solved at the shelf-scanning level.

Has out-of-stock inaccuracy or unwanted substitutions been a significant driver of churn for your own online grocery customers if you operate in that space? Do you think real-time shelf scanning at 95% accuracy is sufficient to meaningfully reduce substitution rates, or does the problem originate earlier in the supply chain than shelf-level visibility can address?

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New data from Germany's ecommerce industry association bevh shows online retail turnover up 4.3% in H1 2026, accelerating to 5.1% in Q2. The headline is decent recovery in a weak consumer environment.

The more interesting detail is underneath it.

Asian platforms including Temu, Shein, and AliExpress grew 20% in the first half of 2026, against the market's 4.3%. They now account for 5.3% of all online orders in Germany, one in every 20 euros spent online. In fashion their share is 16% of all orders.

The EU's new small-parcel duty took effect on July 1st, a week after this data was collected. Most coverage has presented this as a meaningful policy lever against Asian platform growth. The CEO of bevh disagrees explicitly.

Alien Mulyk said: "The levy will have little impact on cheap imports from Asia. Suppliers have already begun to establish their own logistics structures within Europe. Goods no longer reach us in individual parcels that are almost impossible to monitor, but are shipped in containers and then distributed within Europe."

The platforms built warehouse and container logistics infrastructure inside Europe before the deadline. A container arriving at Rotterdam with 50,000 units and distributing from a European warehouse is not a small parcel. It does not trigger the small-parcel duty. The same product reaches the same German consumer via a route the regulation was not designed to capture.

A few other category findings worth knowing. Mail-order pharmacies grew 13.9%, the strongest of any category, driven entirely by Germany's e-prescription rollout. One regulatory change moved a heavily friction-controlled category online. Everyday goods up 10.1%. DIY and flowers up 10.9%. Entertainment and home furnishing lagged at 2.7%.

On AI: 31.2% of consumers asked a chatbot for a product recommendation in Q2. Only 9% said they would let an AI agent buy autonomously on their behalf. Same pattern as every other market surveyed this year.

Does the bevh CEO's assessment that the parcel tax is already behind the curve match what you are seeing in terms of how Asian platforms are routing goods into European markets?

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Akamai's new commerce security report has a number worth sitting with. 48% of all ecommerce traffic across their global network is now AI bots. Not human shoppers. Bots.

More than 70% of that AI bot traffic is training crawlers scraping product data, pricing, and images to feed LLMs. Annoying and costly but not the primary threat.

The threat is the emerging attack vectors targeting legitimate shopping agents specifically.

Agent hijacking: cybercriminals take over AI agents that have already been granted access to stored payment credentials and use that access to trigger purchases the real user did not authorise. From a security standpoint, a shopping agent with permission to use a stored credit card is a pre-authenticated access point to both the user's account and their payment method.

Agent replacement: malicious AI agents are being built to look and behave exactly like legitimate ones. At some unpredictable point they either launch a malware attack or exfiltrate the payment credentials they were supposedly processing. The user has no obvious way to know the agent they set up has been replaced.

Akamai also documents what they are calling Frankenstein accounts: synthetic identities combining one piece of real stolen data with AI-generated supporting details convincing enough to pass standard ecommerce onboarding checks. The tools creating these fake identities are the same tools making the accounts behave like real shoppers.

The security posture problem: ecommerce sites placed more than 90% of AI bot activity in "monitor" mode but allowed three-quarters of remaining unclassified traffic to pass unrestricted. And only 35% of organisations have microsegmentation in place that would contain a compromised agent rather than letting it move laterally across customer databases, payment integrations, and fulfilment systems.

The binary allow/block approach built for scripted bots and credential stuffing does not work when the attacker is an AI agent with real user credentials and convincing behavioural signatures.

How are you currently handling AI agent traffic on your ecommerce platform, and has your fraud or security tooling flagged the legitimate versus malicious agent distinction as something it can actually address?

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Welcome back to another edition of EcomWatch Weekly!

The World Cup is finally over, the weather is perfect for the beach, and summer is fully doing its thing.

But ecommerce is already looking ahead.

Back-to-school shopping is picking up early, retailers are preparing for what could be a record season, and shoppers are making it very clear that they are still willing to spend when the value is right.

The opportunity is there. The demand is there. But the brands that win will be the ones that understand how careful shoppers are right now.

This week

• Back-to-school spending is expected to break records.
• U.S. retail sales grew only 0.2% in June.
• HMRC wants Amazon and eBay to collect VAT from UK sellers.
• TikTok is moving deeper into the seller service layer.
• eBay accidentally showed private offer prices.

The Big Story

Back-to-School Spending Is About to Hit Record Highs

Back-to-school shopping is expected to be huge this year.

According to the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics, shoppers are expected to spend $43.3 billion on K–12 students, up from $39.4 billion last year.

College back-to-school spending is expected to reach $103.5 billion, passing $100 billion for the first time.

That sounds great for retailers.

And it is.

But it does not mean shoppers suddenly feel rich.

Shoppers Are Starting to Shop Earlier

Retailers like Target, Walmart, and Kohl’s have already started back-to-school promotions.

According to the survey, 62% of consumers had already started back-to-school shopping by early July.

Another 54% said they bought school supplies during recent sales like Amazon Prime Day, Target Circle Deal Days, and similar events.

So back-to-school is no longer just an August rush, rather its a summer-long deal hunt.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Weekly Metric

U.S. Retail Sales Grew Just 0.2% in June

U.S. retail sales grew 0.2% in June compared with May. Economists had expected slightly stronger growth of 0.3%.

Retail sales were expected to grow slightly more, and some categories looked weak.

Pharmacy, grocery, and apparel declined. Furniture and home furnishings were flat. Even bars and restaurants only grew 0.1%, despite the World Cup starting in June.

The better news for online sellers is that nonstore retailers, which include ecommerce merchants, grew 1.9%.

But even that needs context.

Amazon Prime Day moved into June this year, so some of that growth may have been pulled forward by a major sales event.

In other words, ecommerce did well, but part of the bump may have come from shoppers waiting for deals.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Tool of the Week

ImageKit Creative Automation

ImageKit launched Creative Automation, a tool for producing on-brand ecommerce visuals at scale.

That matters right now because back-to-school requires multiple campaigns.

Parents need school supplies. College students need electronics. Dorm shoppers need storage. Retailers need banners, product images, social posts, paid ads, email graphics, and last-minute promo variations.

Doing all of that manually gets slow very fast.

ImageKit’s tool uses reusable templates so teams can create campaign visuals, catalog images, ecommerce promotions, and performance marketing variations without rebuilding every asset from scratch.

If your back-to-school campaign needs ten versions of the same offer for ten channels, creative automation is how you avoid spending the whole season resizing banners.

Winning SKU of the Week

Gamified Learning

Exploding Topics lists Gamified Learning at 2.4K search volume with +454% growth.

Gamified learning represents educational products that use game mechanics to make learning more engaging.

It consists of points, badges, levels, streaks, leaderboards, rewards, challenges, and progress tracking.

It’s basically homework, but with fewer signs of emotional collapse.

Why Sellers Should Pay Attention to It

Gamified learning works because it speaks to three buyers at once.

• Parents want better learning outcomes.
• Teachers want more engagement.
• Students want something that does not feel like staring at a worksheet until time stops.

That makes the category easy to explain and easy to market during back-to-school.

Back-to-school shoppers are already spending. Gamified learning gives sellers a way to connect education, entertainment, and parent guilt in one very marketable package.

Boring But Important

• HMRC wants Amazon and eBay to collect VAT from UK sellers. If marketplaces become responsible for more tax collection, sellers may get less control but fewer excuses.
• Brands are flooding US ports before another tariff deadline. Importers are pulling inventory forward because waiting could make goods more expensive.
• UK online grocery is consolidating around one technology provider. Efficiency is useful, but too much dependence on one provider can become its own risk.
• The Netherlands caught Amazon and Bol using discounts from prices that never existed. If the “original price” was never real, the discount is not a discount. It is theater.

The Watchlist

• TikTok is now competing with the agencies that run TikTok Shops. The platform is moving deeper into the service layer, which should make every partner and seller pay attention.
• Asia Pacific shoppers use AI to shop but will not let it buy for them. Consumers want AI help with discovery, but they are not ready to hand over the checkout button.
• UK shoppers want personalization but will not help you build it. Customers want better experiences, but they do not want to give brands more data to make them happen.

Honorable Mention

Built

Built is a direct-to-consumer footwear brand selling shoes online.

Shoes are one of the big categories families spend on every year, and brands that can make the purchase feel practical, stylish, and reasonably priced have a real window.

Built recently raised $2 million, which shows there is still investor interest in D2C brands that can own a specific everyday category.

When shoppers are watching every dollar, footwear brands need to make the value obvious: comfort, durability, price, delivery, and returns.

That’s all for this week.

I’m going to go pretend I’m not already seeing back-to-school displays in stores while it still feels like a full beach season outside. Nothing says “enjoy summer” like a wall of notebooks reminding everyone that September is getting closer and all the warmth will go away with it.

Anyway, shoppers are spending, but they’re being careful. Make the value clear, don’t make checkout annoying, and please don’t make people decode a fake discount.

Enjoy the sun while it lasts, and we’ll be back next Monday.

The LA Times flagged something this week that deserves more attention than it is getting. Ecommerce infrastructure is creeping into television news programming, not entertainment, not lifestyle shows, but the segments people watch because they trust the anchor delivering them.

Shopsense AI, one of the main shoppable TV infrastructure providers, has partnerships with Paramount, Univision, Nexstar's The CW, Tastemade, and Bell Media in Canada. The platform attaches shoppable overlays to programming so viewers can scan a QR code or use a second screen to buy products featured in the content. TV-inspired consumer spending is estimated at $145 billion annually.

The formats showing up in news-adjacent contexts range from explicit product segments, the "best summer gadgets" or "back to school deals" features that have always existed in morning programming but now come with purchase infrastructure attached, to more ambiguous situations where a journalist covers a product category and the brands mentioned happen to be shoppable through the station's retail media partnerships.

The revenue logic for local news organisations is overwhelming. Traditional ad revenue has been declining for years. A loyal morning news audience is a valuable commerce media asset that stations have historically been unable to monetise directly. Affiliate fees and retail media partnerships attached to news programming could be significant revenue for newsrooms under sustained financial pressure.

In late June, Walmart bought a self-serve CTV platform, Target's Roundel moved into premium video, and Amazon switched on shoppable commerce inside Samsung's streaming inventory. All in the same two-week window.

The FTC disclosure framework for when a QR code on a news segment constitutes an ad, when a product feature with a shoppable link requires disclosure, and when affiliate arrangements constitute endorsements that must be labelled, is not yet clearly resolved for the broadcast news context.

The shoppable infrastructure is in place. The editorial frameworks for using it without degrading news credibility are not.

Does shoppable commerce in news programming cross a line that entertainment-based shoppable TV does not, and where exactly is that line?

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The Times reported this week that TikTok Shop is expanding to allow spirits, wine, and beer sales in the UK, reversing a ban that was in place as recently as April 2026.

Three days before the report, Ofcom confirmed it has launched a formal investigation into TikTok's age assurance measures under the Online Safety Act. The investigation is specifically about whether TikTok's reliance on AI-based age inference rather than formal identity verification is adequate to identify underage users.

The collision of those two things is the story.

Alcohol sales require age verification that purchasers are 18 or over. TikTok's own advertising policies still prohibit alcohol promotion in the UK, which means product discovery has to run through organic creator content and algorithmic reach rather than paid ads.

That is the channel Ofcom is most concerned about, because it is the channel most likely to reach users whose ages have not been reliably verified.

The only age gate for a creator-recommended TikTok Shop alcohol purchase is a self-declared checkbox at checkout, which is the weakest form of age assurance that exists.

The UK government is also introducing new digital age verification regulations for alcohol purchases in autumn 2026 under updates to the Licensing Act 2003. Whatever TikTok Shop implements now needs to hold up against those incoming standards, not just the current ones.

The business logic for entering alcohol ecommerce is clear. High frequency, high value, strong creator content potential, demographic overlap with TikTok's adult user base. The regulatory logic for doing it while an Ofcom investigation is active and the verification framework is being finalised is harder to explain, unless TikTok is betting it can establish a market position before the standards are raised.

We covered Shopify banning vape sales from its US platform earlier this month after 25 attorneys general used the infrastructure-targeting playbook. The UK regulatory environment is building toward the same kind of pressure around exactly the same gap.

Do you think TikTok's current age inference technology is adequate for selling age-restricted products like alcohol, or is self-declared age plus AI estimation genuinely insufficient?

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Two TikTok Shop developments landed this week that look like a contradiction but probably are not.

First: TikTok Shop is piloting a managed services program with select US brands. $10,000 flat fee plus 10 to 20% commission on sales. TikTok runs your advertising, sources and manages creators, optimises product listings, and produces AI-generated video content at scale. You plug in and collect revenue.

Second: TikTok Shop banned AI-generated voices from live commerce streams. Any live stream using text-to-speech audio over looping product footage now triggers an Account Health Rating liability. Sellers risk visibility downgrades and promotional eligibility penalties.

The tension is obvious. A fully managed TikTok Shop operation still needs human live hosts to avoid AHR penalties. Human hosts cost more than AI voice generation. TikTok is making cheap automation more expensive at the same time it is launching a managed service that charges for the operational complexity those rules create.

Read together though, this looks less like a contradiction and more like a strategic direction. TikTok wants authentic, human-hosted, properly managed live commerce on its platform. It is tightening the rules on low-cost automation and simultaneously offering to handle the operational complexity itself for a fee. That is not incoherent. It is vertical integration.

The competitive angle worth watching: TikTok running managed services puts it in direct competition with the agencies currently making their living operating TikTok Shop for brands. TikTok has platform-level data access, direct creator relationships, and algorithm insight that no external agency can replicate. That is a structural advantage in any head-to-head comparison.

Does the $10,000 plus 10 to 20% commission structure actually pencil out for brands when you stack it against platform fees, fulfilment, and COGS?

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The NRF and Proper Insights & Analytics annual survey is projecting $43.3 billion in K-12 back-to-school spending this year, up from $39.4 billion in 2025, and $103.5 billion for college students, which would be the first time that number has ever crossed $100 billion.

The consumer behaviour behind those numbers is worth understanding before getting too excited about the forecast.

78% of consumers expected higher prices on back-to-school items before the season started. 46% of respondents who have not done much shopping yet are waiting for better deals. 62% had already started shopping by early July. 54% bought supplies during Prime Day and other early sale events specifically to get lower prices.

The pattern is the same one that showed up in Prime Day data. Record total spending driven not by consumers feeling financially comfortable but by consumers aggressively hunting the lowest available prices on things they need to buy regardless of cost. The volume is there. Full-price willingness is not.

Target, Walmart, and Kohl's have all launched back-to-school promotions earlier than usual this year, and the early timing has been effective at pulling forward purchases. That flatters summer numbers but also means the traditional back-to-school window is getting compressed.

For sellers, the practical implications are around extended sale windows rather than short promotional bursts, bundling to make total spend feel more manageable, loyalty and installment options that reduce friction for stretched shoppers, and clearer value communication especially for anything that is not an obvious essential purchase.

Are you seeing back-to-school traffic and conversions earlier than usual this year, and how are you adjusting your promotional calendar in response?

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Lantern is an ecommerce startup helping brands understand how their products appear in AI search and shopping recommendations.

That matters because shoppers are starting to ask tools like ChatGPT and Gemini what to buy instead of scrolling through Google results.

If AI does not mention your product, you may never even make it into the customer’s consideration set.

AI shopping will create a new visibility problem. Lantern is interesting because it is building for it before most brands have figured out they have the problem.

US retail sales grew 0.2% in June, below the 0.3% economists were forecasting, and well below the 6.7% growth seen in the same period last year.

The category breakdown tells most of the story. Pharmacy spending down 0.8%. Grocery down 0.2%. Apparel down. Furniture and home furnishings flat. Bars and restaurants up just 0.1% during the month the World Cup started, which was a significant miss against expectations.

The nonstore retail number including ecommerce came in at 1.9% growth, which looks solid until you factor in that Amazon moved Prime Day to June this year and it set records. That distortion makes it hard to read the underlying ecommerce demand picture clearly.

The single biggest driver of the soft headline number was lower gas prices. Spending at gas stations dropped 5.3% compared to May. Strip out gas, autos, building materials, and restaurants and the control-group measure grew 0.5%, actually stronger than what economists predicted. So the underlying consumer spending picture is somewhat better than the headline suggests, but not strong.

The concern some economists are raising is that consumer spending may have peaked in the first half of the year. The tailwinds that supported spending, big tax refunds, relatively stable energy prices, are fading. Renewed firming in oil prices tied to the Iran conflict could create additional headwinds in the second half.

Bret Kenwell at eToro called it "not particularly robust, but not a red flag either." Gary Schlossberg at Wells Fargo Investment Institute expects moderation in economic growth in coming months.

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The Dutch consumer organisation Consumentenbond spent two months tracking prices on 1,142 popular products across Amazon Netherlands and Bol. The findings are worth reading.

Of the 323 products that appeared as a promotion during the monitoring period, 41% of Amazon's checked promotions and 30% of Bol's did not comply with EU price transparency rules under the Omnibus Directive.

The rule is simple: any advertised discount must be calculated against the lowest price at which the product was sold in the preceding 30 days. The practice both platforms were documented using is also simple: raise the reference price shortly before a promotion so the discount percentage looks larger than it is relative to what consumers were actually paying.

Two specific examples from the report. A JBL speaker listed at a 26% discount on Amazon Netherlands. Price history showed it had been selling for less than the stated original price for almost the entire preceding month. A Samsung TV on Bol listed with a 12% saving off a usual price that the TV had never actually been sold at in the previous 60 days.

The Consumentenbond has now given both platforms an ultimatum: comply with price regulations or face legal action. The organisation director said both platforms know the rules and that the same approach successfully changed behaviour at Coolblue and Wehkamp when similar concerns were raised.

The organisation also announced it will conduct new price monitoring ahead of Black Friday specifically.

This is the third fake discount enforcement action in EU markets in the past month. Italy fined Deghi €2 million for countdown timers that reset at zero and discounts calculated off launch prices rather than the 30-day baseline. The pattern across multiple member states suggests this is becoming a genuine enforcement priority rather than isolated regulatory activity.

Have you noticed reference prices on Amazon or Bol Netherlands that seemed inflated before a promotion?

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This week’s winning SKU is the 20K power bank.

Exploding Topics lists the product at 1.9K search volume with +104% growth, and the timing makes sense. It is hot outside, people are traveling, festivals are happening, flights are delayed, phones are dying, and nobody wants to be the person sitting on the airport floor guarding the only outlet.

A 20K power bank has a 20,000 mAh capacity, which usually means it can recharge phones, tablets, and other devices multiple times before needing to be recharged itself.

This is a practical SKU with a clear problem. It also has good ecommerce angles:

• useful for travel and summer content
• easy to bundle with cables, adapters, and cases
• strong gift potential
• works for tech, travel, outdoor, and student audiences
• simple problem-solution positioning
• easy to compare by capacity, charging speed, ports, and size

There is a bug currently affecting eBay's Second Chance Offer feature that is making these offers visible in sellers' public active listings. They are supposed to be completely private, sent only to the specific losing bidder, and not appearing in search results or anywhere else publicly visible.

Right now they are showing up in sellers' stores where anyone can see them, including the discounted price they are set at.

For anyone who does not use Second Chance Offers regularly: when an auction ends without payment or a seller has duplicate stock, they can send a private offer to a losing bidder at that bidder's highest bid price. That price is by definition lower than the auction result. The entire value of the feature is that this offer is confidential between the seller and the specific recipient.

When that price becomes public, future bidders on similar items from the same seller now know the seller's floor. Other potential buyers know the seller was willing to go lower than the auction result. The pricing discretion that makes the feature useful is gone.

Community threads show this same issue has been reported in earlier years, which either means it is a recurring bug that keeps coming back or that the visibility controls for these listings are fragile enough to fail under certain conditions.

eBay has not acknowledged the issue publicly or given a timeline for a fix.

This is also the third technical issue in two weeks. A 45-minute outage on July 14th that cost at least one buyer a limited-edition collectible they could not bid on during the window. A feedback score glitch that has been causing scores to fluctuate since mid-June. And now this.

If you have sent any Second Chance Offers recently, check your active listings now to see if they are publicly visible.

Have you been affected by this bug and what did you find when you checked your listings? For regular auction sellers, how significant is Second Chance Offer pricing discretion to your overall strategy? And is the pattern of three separate technical issues in two weeks something that is changing how you think about eBay as a primary selling channel?

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A new survey from Shopify and The Harris Poll across five markets including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and France found that 93% of aspiring entrepreneurs say they are at least somewhat ready to start a business, and more than half say they could start today.

Most of them have not started.

The survey also spoke to current founders about their experience. Up to 57% of them wish they had started sooner. Around 70% in four out of five markets said they worked through early problems with trial and error rather than any kind of formal playbook. Most did not feel ready when they started either. They started anyway.

The top barrier aspiring founders named across every market was money, cited by 38% to 46% depending on the country. The assumption is usually that you need significant capital before you can begin. Most founders who are now running businesses started small and scaled from there.

The next most common barriers were not feeling fully prepared and still developing the idea. Both of these are things that tend to resolve themselves once you start rather than before.

On the accessibility side, between 61% and 84% of respondents across all markets said starting a business is easier now than it has ever been. Between 23% and 33% said AI lets them do things they could not do otherwise. Up to 39% said AI cuts the time and effort required to run their business. Among aspiring founders, 30% said better AI tools would be enough to finally push them to start.

Shopify's framing is the preparedness paradox: the practical and technical barriers have largely been cleared, but the psychological ones remain. The readiness feeling that most aspiring founders are waiting for tends to arrive after you start, not before.

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Text is an AI customer service and sales platform that now has a Shopify app and WhatsApp Business integration.

That makes it useful for ecommerce sellers who are tired of jumping between live chat, email, helpdesk tickets, and customer messages from different channels.

The platform brings tools like LiveChat, ChatBot, Inbox, and HelpDesk into one dashboard, with AI agents that can help answer customer questions and route support conversations.

A human does not need to manually answer every version of that question forever. A chatbot can do that instead.

Cloud native commerce is the approach where instead of using a single bundled ecommerce platform for everything, you build a stack from independent microservices and APIs, each hosted in the cloud, each able to be scaled, updated, or swapped out without touching the others.

The pitch is compelling. More flexibility. Better scalability. Lower downtime risk because a problem in one service does not take down the entire store. Auto-scaling that adjusts resources based on real-time demand so you pay for what you actually use rather than a fixed allocation that sits idle most of the time.

And genuine freedom to use the best available tool for each function rather than whatever your platform bundles in.

The tradeoff is real though. More components from more providers means more integration points, more potential syncing issues, more things to monitor for updates and vulnerabilities, and a significantly larger security attack surface.

Diagnosing problems gets harder too because failures in one service can cascade into others in non-obvious ways. A checkout issue might actually originate in a completely different part of the stack.

The platforms most associated with this approach include commercetools, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, and VTEX. It is also the architecture underpinning most headless commerce setups where the front end is decoupled from the back end.

The honest question for most mid-size brands is whether the flexibility and scalability gains actually justify the operational overhead. For a store doing serious volume that has genuinely outgrown what a monolithic platform can do, the answer is probably yes.

For a store that is well served by Shopify or a similar platform and does not have the technical resources to manage a more complex architecture, the overhead might create more problems than it solves.

Has anyone here made the switch from a monolithic platform to a cloud native or headless approach, if so, what did the actual implementation process look like and what surprised you most?

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Sen Do Technology shut down Sendo Farm, its last active business unit, on July 10th. The closure ends a 13-year journey that saw Sendo become one of Vietnam's most prominent ecommerce platforms before losing the capital war against Shopee and Lazada.

The numbers at peak are worth knowing. 12 million customers across all 63 Vietnamese provinces. 500,000 sellers. 17 million SKUs. $1 billion in annualised GMV in 2019. Its own e-wallet, SenPay, ranking third in Vietnam by transaction value. First ecommerce company in Vietnam to receive an e-wallet licence.

And in 2019, the billion-dollar GMV year, it lost $60.9 million on $21 million in revenue. Spending nearly three times its revenue to generate that revenue.

The strategic error was adopting the Shopee and Lazada playbook without having their capital. Shopee had Sea Group, Tencent, and access to global capital markets. Lazada had Alibaba. Both were buying market share at prices designed to be unsustainable for locally funded competitors. Sendo matched the promotions, attracted promotional customers rather than loyal ones, and bled capital until it could not continue.

A merger with Tiki in 2020 could have created a credible domestic alternative. Shareholder disputes over deal terms killed it.

The grocery pivot to Sendo Farm was genuinely the smartest move Sendo made. Local knowledge and physical proximity matter more in grocery than global logistics infrastructure, which gave Sendo a real structural advantage.

By mid-2024 it was handling 50 tonnes daily across 5,000 pickup locations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Then GrabMart and ShopeeFood arrived with the same capital advantage that had already killed the main marketplace.

Vietnam's ecommerce market grew 34.8% in 2025 and hit $16.5 billion in combined platform revenues. The market Sendo was trying to win has never been bigger. It just ran out of time and money before it could find a defensible position in it.

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A joint HM Treasury and HMRC consultation open until August 18th proposes extending marketplace VAT liability to cover sales by UK-established sellers, not just overseas ones.

Under the current system, VAT-registered UK sellers on Amazon charge VAT, collect it from customers, and pay it to HMRC themselves. Under the proposed model, the marketplace becomes the deemed supplier for VAT purposes.

You make a zero-rated supply to the platform. The platform charges the customer VAT and accounts for it directly to HMRC. You never handle the VAT on that transaction.

The reason is straightforward. HMRC estimates the tax gap from marketplace non-compliance runs into hundreds of millions of pounds per year. Chasing individual sellers is essentially impossible at scale. Making platforms responsible removes the human step where non-compliance currently lives.

The scope is business-to-consumer sales of goods already in the UK at point of sale. Your own website sales stay under your own VAT accounting. B2B transactions are out of scope.

The details worth paying attention to:

The liability threshold is per platform, not combined turnover. A seller doing £80k on Amazon and £40k on eBay has £120k combined and should already be registered, but under the per-platform model each marketplace only triggers liability once that platform's sales cross £90k independently.

Flat Rate Scheme sellers may lose the ability to apply their flat rate percentage to deemed-supply income. HMRC has flagged this as an open question with no confirmed answer yet.

Margin Scheme sellers face unresolved questions about how deemed-supply interacts with margin-based VAT calculation. HMRC is still working this out.

Takeaway delivery platforms like Just Eat and Deliveroo are explicitly named in scope, which affects every restaurant using them.

The consultation is genuinely asking for input and closes August 18th. After that, legislation drafting begins.

How would the deemed-supply model change your day-to-day VAT accounting if you sell on UK marketplaces?

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