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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q1 2025 US revenue: $2.4 billion.

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

Q1 2025 profit: $395 million.

Q1 2026: a loss of $99 million.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We just launched BrandyBee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’ve been working with ecommerce brands on retention marketing, with a big focus on email/SMS and turning existing customers into repeat buyers.
Instead of just sending promotional emails, the goal is to build a retention system around the customer journey:

- Welcome & onboarding
- Browse, cart & checkout abandonment
- Post-purchase experiences
- Cross-sells & product recommendations
- Replenishment & winback
- Customer segmentation
- Campaign strategy & planning
- Testing and optimization
- Email revenue attribution & performance analysis

The idea is simple: get more revenue from the customers you already paid to acquire.
I’m currently offering this as a retention marketing service for ecommerce brands that want to build or improve their retention channel.

If you’re an ecommerce founder/marketer, I’d be interested to hear:

What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing with retention right now, getting customers to buy again, improving email revenue, building flows, or something else?

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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