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.

Welcome back to another edition of EcomWatch Weekly!

Italy is still hot enough to make opening a laptop feel like an act of personal bravery, so I will keep this short.

Unfortunately, ecommerce regulations did not get the memo about summer. Therefore, you have more things to pay attention to this week.

While everyone else is supposed to be sitting near an AC and pretending work can wait until September, regulators, platforms, and marketplaces have remained very busy finding new ways to complicate life for ecommerce businesses.

So yes, another normal week online.

This week

• Levi’s sold more with fewer discounts.
• 88% of Nigerians use AI to shop, even though a lot of them got scammed.
• Italy is making shrinkflation harder to hide.
• US customs now want digital safety certificates.
• Shein and Temu are pulling back on European ads.

The Big Story

Levi’s Grew Ecommerce While Running Fewer Promotions

Levi’s, the American denim brand best known for its jeans, grew ecommerce by 19% while running fewer promotions.

The company did not grow online sales by throwing bigger discounts at shoppers or turning every week into another sale event. It grew while pulling back on promotions, which is the part many ecommerce brands should be paying attention to.

A lot of brands say they want to rely less on discounts.

Then sales slow down, and the coupon codes come back.

Levi’s is showing a different version of ecommerce growth. One built around

• stronger brand demand,
• better full-price selling,
• and less dependence on constant markdowns.

The problem with the discounts starts when promotions become the only reason the customer converts.

At that point, the brand is not building demand, but borrowing it from the next sale.

Discounts can support a strategy, but they cannot replace one. If your ecommerce growth only works when prices drop, you are not growing cleanly. You are renting revenue from your own margin.

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Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Weekly Metric

88% of Nigerians Use AI to Shop

88% is the share of Nigerian consumers reportedly using AI to shop.

Another 72% use AI to compare products across brands and retailers.

That means AI shopping in Nigeria is already a normal behavior. But there is a problem.

More than half of Nigerian consumers said they were scammed in the past year. Among those who were scammed, 57% said it happened through social media.

Nigeria is a very social-first ecommerce market. Over 82% of consumers have bought directly through social media, and 78% discover new brands there.

So shoppers are using AI and social platforms to buy faster, but fraud is growing in the same places.

The surprising part is that trust in digital payments is still high. Over 96% of Nigerians surveyed said they trust digital payments in some way.

That tells us that people may not trust every seller, but they still trust the payment system enough to keep buying.

What sellers should take from this: AI shopping is about being trusted. If shoppers find you through AI or social media, your store needs clear product information, real contact details, visible policies, secure checkout, and enough proof that you are not another fake storefront.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Tool of the Week

Text

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.

Winning SKU of the Week

20K Power Bank

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.

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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

Boring But Important

• The EU is done warning tech companies. Regulators are moving from speeches to fines, which means platforms should expect enforcement to become more expensive, not more polite.
• Italy is making shrinkflation harder to hide. Brands that reduce product size while keeping prices similar may need to tell shoppers clearly, because quiet downsizing is becoming a legal and reputational problem.
• Products now need digital safety certificates filed at US customs. For regulated consumer products, compliance paperwork can now decide whether goods enter the country at all.
• Switzerland is considering a low-value parcel fee. If it follows the EU’s direction, cheap cross-border parcels could become less attractive for sellers relying on thin margins.
• SHOPLINE’s new tax integration automates compliance for merchants. Not exciting, but useful, because sales tax, VAT, and GST are the kind of problems sellers usually appreciate only after they become expensive.

The Watchlist

• Shein and Temu are pulling back hard on European ads. After spending aggressively to win attention, both companies appear to be slowing down in Europe, which may say more about fees, regulation, and growth pressure than about demand disappearing.
• TikTok Shop cut US FBT fees. The platform is making Fulfilled by TikTok cheaper, which looks like a clear attempt to pull more sellers into its own logistics system.
• Luxury fashion found a customer acquisition tool that outperforms digital ads. The useful lesson is not that every brand should copy luxury fashion, but that high-value customers are not always best reached through another paid social campaign.

Weird Commerce Corner

A Japanese Mask Brand Posted a Valentine’s Day Ad on the Wrong Date in China

A Japanese mask brand posted a romantic Valentine’s Day-style ad in China.

The issue is that it went live on July 7., apparently treating “7/7” like Qixi, but Qixi follows the lunar calendar. In 2026, that made the timing especially bad because July 7 is also the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, one of the most sensitive Japan-China historical dates.

In China, that date already carries its own cultural meaning, so the campaign landed less like a cute romance push and more like a brand that did not check the calendar.

Because this is exactly where cross-border ecommerce gets messy. Localization is not just translating the caption and hoping for the best. It is understanding dates, holidays, symbols, cultural references, and what your campaign accidentally says when it enters another market.

A good product and a decent creative idea can still fall apart if the timing makes the brand look careless.

Honorable Mention

Lantern

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.

That’s all for this week.

Discounts can move revenue, but they can also train customers to wait. AI can help people shop, but it can also speed up bad decisions.

The brands that become sucessful from here will probably not be the ones shouting the loudest or discounting the hardest. They will be the ones that know their margins, clean up their operations, earn trust, and stop treating every boring part of the business like it can wait.

Forward this to someone who still thinks another discount code will fix everything, stay cool out there, and we’ll be back next Monday!

Because sellers are getting squeezed by everyone and then blamed for the final price.

Google now charges more for the click. Payment processors take their cut.

Customers abuse refunds and chargebacks, but sellers are still supposed to treat every claim like it came from a saint.

And JUST NOW, USPS is about to charge $50 for a shipping mistake many sellers may not even know exists.

We know that the customer usually sees only the final price.

They usually do not see the ad cost, chargeback fee, return label, platform penalty, shipping adjustment, payment fee, or support time behind it.

We covered the full margin squeeze in this week’s EcomWatch Weekly:

https://ecomwatchnews.substack.com/p/google-ads-got-pricier-fraud-got

If you can't keep up with all the new fees, regulations, and possible tools that came help carry your business, subscribe to our Substack to stay updated!

What cost has gotten the most ridiculous for you lately?

Fraud is no longer just the cost of one stolen order. It is the cost of everything that happens after it.

According to the 2026 LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud Study for Retail and Ecommerce in North America, retail and ecommerce companies are now paying more than $5 in total costs for every $1 they lose directly to fraud.

In the U.S., the figure is about $5.13. In Canada, it is about $5.23.

>

More than half of U.S. merchants in the study reported increased customer churn linked to anti-fraud measures. Some shoppers are leaving because security checks are making the buying process feel too slow, too suspicious, or too annoying.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

According to Exploding Topics, the search term currently has 165K monthly search volume and is up 324%. The topic is also marked as exploding, which is usually the part where ecommerce sellers either start researching suppliers or pretend they “saw this coming.”

Soursop bitters are herbal supplements made from soursop fruit and other natural ingredients. They are usually positioned around digestive health, detox, antioxidants, immune support, and general wellness.

Why is it growing?

This sits right in the messy but very active overlap between wellness, natural remedies, gut health, and TikTok-friendly supplement culture.

It is also the kind of product people do not always discover because they woke up and calmly decided to compare herbal bitters.

They usually discover it through:

• a wellness video
• a detox routine
• a gut health recommendation
• a friend who is suddenly very into “natural remedies”
• a creator holding a bottle and saying something vague but confident

Why should sellers care?

Soursop bitters has a few ecommerce-friendly traits.

It is small, repeat-purchase friendly, easy to bundle, and fits into a larger wellness routine. It can also sit next to related products like herbal teas, digestive supplements, wellness kits, detox bundles, and natural health products.

But it is also a category where sellers need to be careful.

Health claims can get messy fast.

A product like this should not be marketed like it cures anything, fixes everything, or replaces medical advice. That may work for a sketchy TikTok comment section, but it is not a great long-term ecommerce strategy.

Keep up with the latest SKUs on our newsletter: https://ecomwatchnews.substack.com/

France introduced a €2 fee on low-value parcels from platforms like Temu and Shein, expecting to raise around €400 million a year.

After four months?

It raised just €2.3 million per month.

Because around 90% of the targeted parcels were simply rerouted through other EU countries before entering France. Instead of landing in French customs, many shipments entered through places like Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Now France has scrapped the national fee as the EU introduces its own €3 duty across member states.

The big question is whether Europe’s new system will be any harder to avoid, or if platforms will simply adapt again.

Read more ecommerce stories like this in our free newsletter: https://ecomwatch.com/

Just as US-EU trade tensions seemed to be cooling, a new flashpoint has arrived.

Trump has threatened a 100% tariff on any country imposing a digital services tax on American companies, and made clear it would supersede any existing trade agreements. This comes less than two weeks after the EU approved a deal designed to cut tariffs on US goods.

The tactic has worked before. Canada repealed its 3% digital services tax after a similar ultimatum to keep trade negotiations alive.

But the EU is a different beast. France already has a DST in place and has previously said it won't bow to US pressure. Germany and Belgium are planning their own versions. The core disagreement, whether large American tech companies pay enough tax on European revenue, has been running for years with no resolution in sight.

For ecommerce sellers operating across borders, this isn't abstract. A 100% tariff on goods from major EU trading partners means higher sourcing costs, more expensive imports, and consumers on both sides paying more for everything.

A few things worth discussing:

Do you think EU countries will back down the way Canada did, or is this a different situation entirely? If these tariffs do go into effect, which product categories do you think get hit hardest?

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.

Welcome back to another edition of EcomWatch Weekly!

Aside from watching my mother country play in the FIFA World Cup and acting like I personally contributed to every good pass, I also spent way too much time scrolling through Reddit, merchant forums, and ecommerce complaints this week.

Very healthy behavior.

But useful, because sellers were not exactly having a peaceful week.

Let’s get into it.

This week

• World Cup 2026 is turning into a very expensive ecommerce opportunity.
• A merchant let AI touch their ecommerce database, and it went about as well as you think.
• Vinted’s bizarre €30,000 toy listings triggered a criminal investigation in France.
• Retailers are now losing $5 for every $1 stolen to ecommerce fraud.
• Home Depot is selling customer data to brands that do not even sell at Home Depot.

The Big Story: The Commercial Costs Behind Football’s Biggest Event

World Cup 2026 is a massive ecommerce event with football attached.

The tournament runs from June 11 to July 19 across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, with 48 teams playing across 16 host cities. More than 6.5 million visitors are expected across those host cities, and billions more will be watching globally.

People will buy jerseys, flags, snacks, party supplies, TVs, travel gear, drinkware, collectibles, country-themed products, decorations, and basically anything that makes watching the match feel like an event instead of just sitting on the couch yelling at the referee.

The opportunity is huge.

World Cup-related merchandise revenue is projected to reach $4.1 billion globally, while the tournament is expected to generate $1.47 billion in economic activity for U.S. wholesale and retail alone.

But this is where ecommerce sellers need to pay attention.

The World Cup does not just create demand.

It makes attention more expensive.

Internet Retailing projects a $10.5 billion surge in global ad spend during the event, with retailers expected to capture a major share through programmatic and AI-driven placements. That means brands will not just be competing with other ecommerce sellers. They will be competing with everyone trying to buy attention while the world is watching.

Then there is the official sponsorship and licensing side.

FIFA’s licensing-rights sales totaled $769 million during the 2022 World Cup cycle, up 28% from the previous edition. That gives you a pretty clear idea of how expensive the official commercial layer around the tournament has become.

For smaller sellers, that matters because most cannot afford to play the official sponsorship game.

They need to play the smarter game.

That means building around fan behavior instead of protected branding.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Weekly Metric: Ecommerce Fraud Now Costs Retailers $5 For Every $1 Stolen

Fraud is no longer just the cost of one stolen order. It is the cost of everything that happens after it.

According to the 2026 LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud Study for Retail and Ecommerce in North America, retail and ecommerce companies are now paying more than $5 in total costs for every $1 they lose directly to fraud.

In the U.S., the figure is about $5.13. In Canada, it is about $5.23.

>

More than half of U.S. merchants in the study reported increased customer churn linked to anti-fraud measures. Some shoppers are leaving because security checks are making the buying process feel too slow, too suspicious, or too annoying.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

Tool of the Week: Dreamina

AI product image tools are getting more useful for sellers who need lifestyle visuals but do not have the time, budget, or physical space to run proper photoshoots every week.

One tool that came up in our research was Dreamina.

The basic use case is that sellers can take a plain product image and test it in more realistic settings. A desk. A bathroom counter. A kitchen shelf. Something that gives the product a little more context than a white background floating in the void.

That can be useful for social posts, ads, email graphics, blog images, landing pages, and creative testing.

But there is a catch.

Product images are sales assets.

If the AI changes the label, color, shape, texture, size, packaging, or product details, the image can become misleading very quickly.

That is why this kind of tool makes more sense for lifestyle creative than for main listing images.

A seller testing ad angles for a candle, supplement bottle, skincare product, mug, notebook, or pet product might get value from quickly seeing the product in different environments. But if the generated image changes the actual product, the seller has a problem.

SKU of the Week: Soursop Bitters

According to Exploding Topics, the search term currently has 165K monthly search volume and is up 324%. The topic is also marked as exploding, which is usually the part where ecommerce sellers either start researching suppliers or pretend they “saw this coming.”

Soursop bitters are herbal supplements made from soursop fruit and other natural ingredients. They are usually positioned around digestive health, detox, antioxidants, immune support, and general wellness.

Why is it growing?

This sits right in the messy but very active overlap between wellness, natural remedies, gut health, and TikTok-friendly supplement culture.

It is also the kind of product people do not always discover because they woke up and calmly decided to compare herbal bitters.

They usually discover it through:

• a wellness video
• a detox routine
• a gut health recommendation
• a friend who is suddenly very into “natural remedies”
• a creator holding a bottle and saying something vague but confident

Why should sellers care?

Soursop bitters has a few ecommerce-friendly traits.

It is small, repeat-purchase friendly, easy to bundle, and fits into a larger wellness routine. It can also sit next to related products like herbal teas, digestive supplements, wellness kits, detox bundles, and natural health products.

But it is also a category where sellers need to be careful.

Health claims can get messy fast.

A product like this should not be marketed like it cures anything, fixes everything, or replaces medical advice. That may work for a sketchy TikTok comment section, but it is not a great long-term ecommerce strategy.

Boring But Important

• PayPal added support for dozens more payment methods. More payment options usually means fewer checkout dead ends, especially for international shoppers who do not always want to pay the way American checkout pages expect them to.
• eBay revealed its July 4th shipment plans. Holiday shipping updates are not exciting, but they matter because missed delivery expectations turn into support tickets, bad reviews, and refund requests.
• Home Depot is selling customer data to outside brands. Retail media is getting bigger, but this story shows how customer data is becoming a product of its own, even for brands that do not sell inside the retailer.
• Online sellers are worried about the EU’s new mandatory button. Compliance changes often sound small until they force merchants to redesign checkout flows, update product pages, or explain new rules to confused customers.

The Watchlist

• Is it just you, or are sales actually down? A group of merchants weighed in, and the answer was not exactly comforting. Sellers are seeing weaker demand, slower conversions, and customers who seem more hesitant to buy.
• The biggest opportunity in ecommerce may not be B2C. B2B ecommerce still has clunky buying flows, outdated systems, and massive order value, which is exactly why it keeps attracting attention.
• Live commerce still has problems to solve. The format can work, but sellers need more than a camera and enthusiasm. Trust, timing, product-market fit, and audience behavior all matter.

Weird Commerce Corner: Vinted’s €30,000 Toy Listings Sparked a Criminal Investigation in France

This is one of those stories that sounds fake until it gets worse.

France opened a criminal investigation after social media users flagged suspicious listings on Vinted, the secondhand marketplace.

The listings reportedly included ordinary-looking toys listed for bizarre prices, sometimes above €30,000, along with descriptions that referenced children’s ages, heights, clothing sizes, and other unsettling details.

The story spread quickly on TikTok and other platforms.

Then France’s High Commissioner for Childhood filed an official report. Then the Nanterre prosecutor confirmed that a preliminary investigation was open.

So yes.

A secondhand marketplace toy listing became a criminal investigation.

Read the full story on ecomwatch.com

System Failure of the Week: Someone Let AI Touch Their Ecommerce Database Without Telling the Dev Team. It Did Not Go Well.

AI can write product descriptions, it can help with customer support, sumamrize reviews, and more.

What AI probably should not do without supervision is touch a live ecommerce database while the dev team is unaware.

That is basically the lesson here.

A merchant reportedly let AI interact with their ecommerce database, and the situation went sideways. The details are a good reminder that AI tools are only as safe as the permissions they are given.

The problem is not that AI is useless.

The problem is that people keep treating it like a magic employee instead of software that needs boundaries.

Before giving any AI tool access to business systems, merchants should ask:

• What can it read?
• What can it change?
• Can it delete anything?
• Is there an approval step?
• Are logs being kept?
• Can changes be rolled back?
• Does the dev team know?

AI is useful when it helps people move faster.

It is dangerous when it quietly becomes the person with admin access.

Honorable Mention: Phia

Phia is a fashion-meets-AI shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni.

The company recently raised a $35.5 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $43.5 million.

It helps shoppers find better deals, compare options, and discover secondhand alternatives without manually opening 17 tabs and pretending that is “research.”

That matters because online shopping is getting messier and messier daily.

There are too many marketplaces, too many prices, too many dupes, too many resale listings, and too many brands fighting for the same shopper. For fashion especially, discovery is still broken in a very specific way.

People do not always know exactly what they want.

They know the vibe, the budget, and they know that they saw something similar on TikTok three weeks ago, and now their brain has made it a personal mission.

For merchants, tools like Phia point to a bigger shift. Product discovery may become less dependent on shoppers searching manually and more dependent on AI systems deciding what is relevant enough to show.

That means brands may eventually need to think about:

• whether their product data is clean enough
• whether their pricing is competitive enough
• whether their brand shows up in AI-assisted shopping journeys
• whether their products can be understood by recommendation systems

If shoppers start asking AI where to buy something instead of searching manually, then the brands that win may not be the loudest.

They may be the ones whose products are easiest for AI to understand, compare, and recommend.

That’s all for this week.

A lot of ecommerce stories this week came down to the same problem: of systems getting more powerful, but also easier to mess up.

AI can help sellers move faster, but it can also break things faster. Marketplaces can scale listings, but they can also scale weirdness. Retailers can turn data into money, but customers may not love finding out they were part of the product. Big events like the World Cup can create demand, but they also raise the price of attention.

The boring lesson is still the most useful one.

Forward this to someone who thinks “just let AI handle it” is a business strategy, and we’ll be back next Monday.

Stay updated with ecommerce news, dramas and trends by subscribing to our newsletter https://substack.com/@ecomwatchweekly