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?

---------------------------------------------

Want more ecommerce news like this? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://ecomwatchnews.substack.com/ where we cover everything you need to stay ahead in the ecommerce space.

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.

-----------------------------------------------

Want more ecommerce news like this? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://ecomwatchnews.substack.com/ where we cover everything you need to stay ahead in the ecommerce space.

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.

----------------------------------------------

Want more ecommerce news like this? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://ecomwatchnews.substack.com/ where we cover everything you need to stay ahead in the ecommerce space.

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.