The PE death march - day 1.

S1 filings are not everyone’s Sunday evening reading. But they are interesting. The last one I really invested in was Allbirds - at that point, pre COVID, they had a pretty Utopian view of what a DTC brand profile looks like. Repeat customers were bringing strong second year revenue with multiple purchases per year. They shipped internationally and had a strong brand identity. But there were cracks - Supply chain nouse and analytical core were not there. Reformation is a darling brand for many. It is talked about in eComm circles in ALOT of corners of the earth. They are building their S1 filing, it is not complete but it is public.

There is a sentence in Reformation’s S-1, a legal document, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on the 25th of June, the kind of paperwork that usually reads like it was drafted by a fax machine having a panic attack, that describes the company’s in-store tech as “basically the Clueless closet in real life.” That’s not me reaching for a hook. That’s the filing. Reformation went public this month, ticker REF, and the most striking thing in 200-odd pages of risk factors and tariff disclosures is that they could not, even for the SEC, stop sounding like an Instagram caption. “Hi. We’re Reformation.” “Thanks ladies.” The whole document opens its eyes, looks at the regulator, and says as if.

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Britain spent the second quarter of 2026 staring at a thermometer. A near-record warm May, a World Cup kicking off in stadiums three thousand miles and five time zones away, the games landing in the middle of a British night so the fans credited with the demand bump were mostly asleep when it happened. You could not have designed a more on-brand summer for these islands: the one tournament being praised for stirring the tills is one almost nobody over here can stay up to watch.

And out of that came a number that everyone wanted to read as a recovery. The ONS clocked retail volumes up 1.2% in May, more than double what economists had pencilled in, with the online channel doing the heavy lifting at a 6.1% monthly jump, the largest since February 2025 and online’s strongest share of total spending all year at 28.8%. IMRG’s weekly index, narrated chart by chart on last week’s podcast, (Nice one Andy Mulcahy) told the same story from the other end: four weeks of positive year-on-year growth in a row, the first sustained run in a long while. Green shoots? It’s week 2 of the WC and the green shoots of optimism last week were met with reality this morning. Maybe its good that Bournemouth beach is closed? Day drinking after a game like that would not end well.

It just feels like It was a good fortnight in a trench coat.

Kevin Kelly has a line about how the big technological shifts tend to arrive less like decisions and more like weather, something latent in the conditions, waiting. The joke this quarter is that the weather was literal, and it did all the talking, while the things that will actually decide the next decade of commerce got bolted in under the floorboards where nobody bothered to look. So let’s do both. The surface first, because it is where your board is looking. Then the plumbing, because it is where your business is going.

The surface: A consumer who is resilient, not exuberant

Strip the heatwave and the football out of the IMRG numbers and you find the actual quarter, and it is not kind to the thing online retail was built on. Clothing is the patient. The ONS had clothing store volumes down 2.4% in April, their lowest since June 2025, with retailers themselves blaming variable weather, softer demand, and a consumer who has rediscovered the price tag. IMRG’s read agrees: menswear and womenswear did not so much as flinch at a heatwave, womenswear conversion is grinding along at roughly 2.2 to 2.5%, menswear at 1.8 to 2%, and clothing conversion overall has been drifting down since about 2021. The Black Friday spike that is meant to be a skyscraper on these charts now reads more like a bungalow.

Big-ticket is the other casualty. Furniture, sitting on an average basket of £300 to £400, has spent most of the year in negative growth, and the ONS keeps filing large appliances and furniture under “weak spot.” Garden is pure weather hostage, swinging from plus 68% in the hot weeks to minus 32% in the miserable ones, which makes it useless for trend and excellent for narrative. The one genuine green shoot is footwear, having a real 2026 after a poor 2025, kicking on into summer. Before anyone builds a strategy on it, note that “everyone bought trainers during a World Cup” is a story that ends the day the World Cup does.

The most useful tell in the whole quarter is the quiet one. On the total market, April orders fell harder than April revenue. Same money, fewer things in the basket. That is not a market buying more, it is a market buying carefully, trading up or down but definitely trading, and it lines up exactly with what the macro people are saying: the consumer is being held up by employment and real wages rather than by optimism, and younger shoppers just posted their least optimistic confidence reading in two years. Resilient, not exuberant. The difference is the whole game when you are planning autumn inventory and deciding how deep to discount. Welcome prime day to screw your plans.

That is the surface. Warm, choppy, weather-permitting. Now lift the floor.

Rail one: Someone is building the toll booths

While Britain debated paddling pools, the payment networks spent the quarter laying rails for a kind of commerce most merchants have not started selling into yet. In April, Visa shipped Intelligent Commerce Connect, a single integration that accepts payment across all the competing agent protocols at once. Mastercard pushed Agent Pay further out into the world, adding Hong Kong to its agentic network and folding its tokens into PayPal’s wallet. PayPal itself, having launched Instant Buy inside Perplexity late last year, is now wiring its merchants and millions of cards-on-file straight into ChatGPT.

Read that back. The card networks are not waiting to see whether you want an AI agent buying on your behalf. They are deciding, today, who gets to authorise it when it happens, and quietly installing themselves as the booth that collects the toll. McKinsey is dangling up to a trillion dollars of US agentic retail revenue by 2030, which is exactly the sort of number that turns a cautious roadmap into a land grab. An IBM study this year reckons 45% of consumers already use AI for at least part of the buying journey, and agent-driven traffic across the open web has grown more than 1,300% in nine months.

You can see it in the one platform that matters most to the people reading this. Shopify cleared its first hundred-billion-dollar GMV quarter in Q1, revenue up 34%, and Harley Finkelstein stood on the earnings call and called the company a “category of one” for selling inside ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google from a single system of record. AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores, he said, is up eightfold year on year, orders from AI search nearly thirteenfold. The market’s response to a near-perfect print was to mark the stock down on decelerating guidance, which tells you everything about the gap between what is being built and what is being believed.

Two cautions, because we cover AI as operators and not as boosters. First, the unsolved problem is fraud: an agent transaction strips out the behavioural signals fraud systems were trained on, and friendly fraud already eats an estimated $132 billion off merchants a year before agents make it worse. Second, the Karen Hao question, the one to ask of any “neutral” infrastructure story: who is building this, who funds it, and who collects at the gate. When Amazon blocked AI crawlers and watched 600 million listings vanish from AI results while Walmart hoovered up a fifth of ChatGPT’s referral traffic, that was not a technology story. That was a power story wearing a technology jacket.

This is the Agentic Storefronts thread we picked up back in Week 4. It stopped being a vision statement this quarter and started becoming a procurement decision.

Rail two: The teardown, running at three different speeds

If you have been ignoring the de minimis calculator on the Ostrich site, this is the quarter to stop. The single biggest structural change to cross-border commerce in a decade lands next Wednesday, and it lands in Europe first.

From 1 July 2026, the EU abolishes its €150 customs duty exemption and replaces it with a temporary €3-per-item duty, charged to the business rather than collected from the shopper at the door, with new mandatory product-identifier data following in November. This is the bit that should make every operator sit up: the duty is per line on the customs declaration, which means your ability to group identical items onto one line, and therefore the actual charge you pay, now depends on the cleanliness of your SKU, tariff classification, and origin data. Customs just made your product data discipline a pricing variable. The brands that treated SKU hygiene as a back-office chore are about to meet it at the border.

Here is the cross-Atlantic part, and it is a genuine three-speed divergence rather than a tidy global policy. The EU moves first and hardest, next week. The UK keeps its £135 relief through at least the end of this year and has only signalled removal around 2029, so for now Britain is the soft touch of the three, level-playing-field rhetoric notwithstanding. And the US, which kicked this whole sequence off by killing its $800 exemption last year, spent this quarter in genuine chaos: the Supreme Court ruled in February that the emergency-powers route to tariffs was never legal, the administration answered the same week by reaching for a different statute and slapping on a temporary 10% global surcharge, and the permanent de minimis repeal still does not fully bite until July 2027.

As we covered when the court broke trade policy and the sequel dropped the same afternoon, the chaos is not a bug in this story. The chaos is the policy. What it produces on the ground is an environment where landed cost is a moving target and the operators who win are the ones acting on real-time data rather than reacting after the cost has already changed. Shein and Temu built empires on the exemption that is now being dismantled in three markets at three different tempos. Watch what they do with forward-stocking and bonded warehousing over the next two quarters, because the answer is the new cross-border playbook for everyone else.

Rail three: The new front door is a from of entertainment

The third rail was articulated best not by an analyst but by a beauty founder on last week’s IMRG show. Sally from Rebel Rebel split the market into three buckets: speed and convenience, where Amazon and the marketplaces live; the omni-channel high street, where the post-COVID shopper still wants to touch and play and where the drugstores are quietly flying; and a third, newer bucket she pointedly refuses to call social commerce. She calls it entertainment commerce, on the logic that people arrive for the entertainment and shop almost incidentally, and that nearly nine in ten of them buy while they are there.

The numbers back the rename. eMarketer has US social commerce passing $100 billion this year, up around 18%, with TikTok Shop alone at roughly $23 billion in the US and $87 billion globally, having doubled in a year. It is the fastest-growing channel in modern retail history, and its engine is not search but discovery, products surfacing inside content rather than waiting to be looked for. Sally’s sharpest point was the halo: things featured on TikTok Shop are lifting sales in her other channels, physical and digital alike. The front door is moving, and it is moving to wherever attention already is.

This is the live edge of the discovery argument I made in Found in Translation. For twenty years ecommerce assumed a shopper who knew what they wanted and typed it into a box. Both new rails, the AI agent and the entertainment feed, assume the opposite: a shopper whose intent is formed in the moment, by a model or by a creator, somewhere upstream of your website. If you are not legible to the model and not present in the feed, you are not in the consideration set, and no amount of conversion-rate optimisation on a page nobody reaches will save you.

One aside, filed under the quarter’s better ironies. Asked how she actually uses AI day to day, Sally named Claude, repeatedly, as the tool drafting her presentations, writing copy, and helping build the websites. The agent that will one day check her customers out is still a vision. The assistant that already runs her week is sitting open in a browser tab. That gap, between the agentic future on the slides and the assistive present in the tab, is the truest picture of where AI in commerce actually is right now.

What this means for the merchant on the ground

Stop running the business off the weather. The hot fortnight pulled demand forward, which means some of your strong May was borrowed from a June and July that will look thinner for it. Plan the back half for a consumer who is steady and sceptical, not one who is coming back to the boil.

Then spend the time the quiet quarter buys you on the three rails, because two of them move from “coming” to “Tuesday afternoon” before the next Ostrich. Audit whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI mode can find and correctly describe your products, because that is now a traffic source growing in multiples, not a science project. Get your customs data, SKU structure, and country-of-origin in order before EU de minimis bites next week and turns sloppy product data into a line-item tax. And decide, deliberately, whether you are building a presence in the entertainment bucket or ceding that front door to whoever does.

The delivery point from that same IMRG episode threads straight through all of it. InPost’s argument was that giving the buyer a clear delivery choice up front, the way checkout already offers them a choice of how to pay, converts better and fails less often than forcing an option on them at the end. That is the friction-as-strategy idea we keep returning to: the deliberate, well-placed bit of choice is not a cost to be stripped out, it is the thing that earns the sale. The same logic now applies to every one of these rails. The winners will not be the ones who remove the most friction. They will be the ones who put the right choice in front of the buyer at the right moment, and own the door it sits on.

The weather will break. It always does, and when it does the clothing softness and the big-ticket freeze will still be sitting there, exactly where the sun briefly hid them. The three rails will not break, because they were never weather-dependent in the first place. So the question for the second half of 2026 is not whether the consumer comes back.

It is whether, when they do, they arrive through your front door or someone else’s checkout.

The V Spot · Vinny and Co Consulting · Tralee, Kerry. Surface data from the ONS Retail Sales bulletin (May 2026) and the IMRG weekly online index. Rails from Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Shopify Q1 results, McKinsey, eMarketer, and the EU customs reform guidance. Seen, as ever, through the eyes of a madman.

There is a number in the Mapp Fashion Intelligence Report that should be in your head more than it does.

Next’s Google exit rate: 84%.

Five out of every six visitors who arrive at Next via Google leave without buying. In the Mapp dataset, 397 retailers, 7 markets, 53.7 billion visits, that is the highest exit rate in the sector. River Island at 79%. Primark at 79%. Next at 84%. The report I wrote last month cited this as one of the “clearest signals of site-side discovery failure.” I stand by that characterisation. The discovery model that built UK online retail is breaking, and these numbers are part of the evidence.

Next reported Q1 full-price sales up 6.2% this morning, beating its own 4.0% forecast by £28 million. Online grew 10.1% in the UK. The LABEL platform, third-party brands hosted on Next’s infrastructure, grew 15.7%. Full-year pre-tax profit guidance raised to £1,218 million. Shares up.

So: highest Google exit rate in UK fashion. Best results. Profit guidance above £1.2 billion. How do those two things exist simultaneously?

The answer to that question is probably the most important thing happening in UK retail right now, and almost nobody is saying it clearly.

The rabbit hold revisited

The context matters. In The Rabbit Hole Got Deeper, I laid out the structural case for why UK online retail is in genuine difficulty. The IMRG data covering March 2021 to early 2026: conversion baseline drifting relentlessly downward, from around 4% to sub-1.6%, with March 2026 session conversion rates down year-on-year from 1.72% to 1.59%. CPA rising 22.53% in the same period.

The Mapp Fashion Report, 397 retailers, Sarah McVittie’s work, the most rigorous dataset available on UK fashion discovery economics, delivered the verdict underneath the chart. Paid search nearly tripled its share. Organic contracted 4.1 percentage points. The industry looked at a declining organic position and instead of asking why, reached for the credit card. Paid search added 3.2 billion visits, a 264% increase, while organic barely moved.

The financial consequence is the danger zone: brands running paid at 4-8% of their traffic mix produce average operating margins of 3.7%, improving in only 48% of cases. They are paying full auction prices for discovery they used to earn. The maths doesn’t work.

And in that same dataset, Next’s Google exit rate is 84%.

Huh?

Here’s why the 84% exit rate and the £1.2 billion profit are not contradictory. They are, to me, the same story.

Next’s Google exit rate being the highest in the dataset doesn’t mean Next has the worst site. It means Google is the wrong entry point for Next’s customer. A Next customer who arrives via Google is typically arriving with a specific, narrow intent, a particular search term, a competitor comparison, a price check. They didn’t start at Google because they wanted to browse Next. They started at Google because they were shopping the category. For that visitor, Next’s site is not where they want to end up. They bounce.

The Next customer who converts doesn’t arrive via Google. They arrive direct. They arrive via the app. They arrive because they have a Next account and a relationship with the Directory. They arrive because a friend mentioned it. They arrive because they just got a Next Finance statement and clicked through. They have, in the language of the Mapp report, brand gravity, and brand gravity doesn’t show up in the Google exit rate. It shows up in the direct traffic, the repeat purchase rate, the LABEL platform numbers.

This is the point about owned audience I made in the Rabbit Hole piece, and it is perfectly illustrated by the Next paradox. The brands that will be fine are the ones that built genuine direct relationships before the market changed. Next is the case study.

The 84% Google exit rate is a symptom of a brand that has successfully moved most of its customer relationship to channels Google cannot see.

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By Vinny O’Brien | The V Spot | March 25, 2026

Kevin Kelly once wrote that the internet was less an invention than a discovery. LLM is proving to be more Monty Pyhton than Shakespeare but it is Dramedy at its finest. If you’ve been trying to keep up with which AI platform is doing ecommerce shopping this week, you’re not alone. I’ve been struggling since late 2024, and I can confirm: the only consistent thing about AI commerce announcements is that they will be walked back, pivoted, relaunched, rebranded, and then presented at Shoptalk as if it were always the plan. If LLM announcements were famous 80s dances, Moonwalk it is.

The TL:DR version: a semi definitive timeline. Every announcement. Every cancellation. Every pivot disguised as a “strategic evolution.” Strikethrough text means it didn’t survive. Which is most of it.

Let’s do the news. All of it. At once. Again.

ACT 1: THE COURTSHIP (Nov 2024 - Jul 2025)

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone’s in love. Nobody’s checked the prenup.]

NOV 2024 Perplexity launches “Buy With Pro” , paid subscribers in the US can checkout inside search results. Shopify integration. Product cards. The whole nine yards.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Narrator: It was not, in fact, the whole nine yards.]

JAN 2025 OpenAI announces Operator agent. Etsy, Instacart and eBay flagged as early testers. The word “agentic” enters the retail lexicon and refuses to leave.

FEB 2025 Amazon launches Rufus shopping chatbot. 250M customers use it within a year. Jeff’s AI can recommend you a garden rake but not, crucially, complete the purchase on a competing site. Yet.

APR 3, 2025 Amazon drops “Buy for Me” , an AI agent that shops THIRD-PARTY brand websites from inside the Amazon app. Uses Nova and Claude under the hood. Encryption. Agentic checkout. The works.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Amazon’s position: We will use AI to buy things from other people’s websites. Also Amazon’s position: Nobody else’s AI may buy things from our website. The cognitive dissonance could power a small city.]

MAY 2025 Perplexity partners with PayPal for agentic payments. The words “next era of commerce” are used. Nobody flinches.

JUL 2025 OpenAI reportedly developing integrated shopping + checkout for ChatGPT. Commission-based revenue model. Shopify partnership deepens. The industry press loses its collective mind.

JUL 2025 OpenAI’s shopping feature is described as ‘coming soon.’

[EDITOR’S NOTE: ‘Coming soon’ in AI time is roughly equivalent to ‘we have a deck.’]

AUG 2025 Amazon blocks AI agents from scraping its site. Referral traffic from ChatGPT drops 18% month-over-month. Amazon simultaneously tells investors agentic commerce has ‘strong potential.’ Andy Jassy contains multitudes.

ACT 2: THE WEDDING (Sep - Nov 2025)

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone ships product. Nobody ships loyalty integration.]

SEP 29, 2025 OpenAI launches Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. Powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe. Etsy sellers go live. Shopify merchants “coming soon.” Users can buy ONE item at a time. No multi-item carts. No loyalty. Single. Item. Checkout.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The AI that can write your novel, pass the bar exam, and compose a sonnet can buy you exactly one candle. Progress.]

OCT 2025 ChatGPT hits 800M weekly active users. Shopify’s Harley Finkelstein calls agentic commerce the “new frontier.” Retail conferences spontaneously combust.

NOV 19, 2025 Perplexity fires back: free agentic shopping for ALL US users. PayPal integration. 5,000+ merchants. No transaction fees. Direct challenge to OpenAI’s paid model.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The AI shopping wars are now officially a thing. The phrase ‘AI shopping wars’ appears in 14 headlines in a single week. One of those headlines is mine. I am not proud.]

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I am Jack’s Smirking Revenge. Rick, we are on the same cycle. Can you name the character Ed Norton played in Fight Club? Me neither. Picture this. You’re on a plane, sitting next to a guy who works in claims assessment for a major automotive manufacturer. Quiet guy. Seems pleasant enough. Then he opens his laptop.

He pulls up a spreadsheet. Starts explaining his job.

“A car’s fuel tank spontaneously ignites on rear-end impact. We need to run the numbers. Is it cheaper to recall the cars, or just pay the settlements when people burn?”

That’s Ed Norton in Fight Club. That’s the whole moral architecture of the movie, delivered in a middle seat over a bag of peanuts.

And that’s essentially what The Works just did with its ecommerce operation. Except they ran the numbers and for once, withdrawal won. I wonder what would happen if everyone did this.

THE NUMBERS JUST HURT

Let’s do the claims assessment. According to Retail Gazette, since launching ecommerce back in 2012, The Works has seen more than 90% of its sales come from physical stores over 500 of them across the UK and Ireland with online remaining a marginal contributor despite more than a decade of investment. A decade. Of investment. For single-digit share. Worth getting outta bed in the morning.

In FY25 (year to May 2025), The Works posted a 58% jump in adjusted EBITDA to £9.5m but online sales dropped 12.1%, impacted by capacity constraints at its third-party fulfilment provider. Total revenue fell 2% to £277m.

Go back a year to H1 FY25, and online sales had already declined 14.7%, which the company attributed to a “planned reduction in promotional activity” plus operational difficulties at a third-party fulfilment centre. Planned. They were already pulling back.

The online channel wasn’t shrinking due to neglect. It was being strategically deprioritised because the numbers made the case. The decision to exit followed a review of the channel’s long-term viability, with ongoing operational challenges across two third-party fulfilment partners cited alongside what the business described as a relatively small and loss-making revenue contribution.

Now for the forward-looking actuary math: FY27 EBITDA expectations have been upgraded from £12.7m to £15m, with the group targeting medium-term EBITDA of at least £22.5m by 2030 specifically following the removal of ecommerce losses.

Here is the rub, as they say.

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Le Sunday Supplement is a new video series where I go through my inbox, find three things that actually matter, a paper, a report, a case study, something with real data in it, and tell you why you should read them. Not summarise them. Not replace them. Recommend them, with full credit to the people who did the actual work. Because someone put real effort into these and frankly they deserve more than a LinkedIn screenshot.

I am Vinny. I’m an ecommerce consultant based in Kerry, Ireland. I’ve been watching this industry eat itself and grow back stronger for roughly 20 years, which means I have opinions, a newsletter of questionable quality, and an increasingly finely tuned radar for what’s signal and what is noise.

This pilot episode covers three reports that caught my eye this week:

🔬 Stratably’s Q1 2026 Amazon Strategy Workbook — 155 brands surveyed, and the analytics gap alone is worth your entire Friday evening. If only 7% of first-party vendors are tying ad spend to their Amazon vendor negotiations, the other 93% are having two conversations that should be one. That’s not strategy. That’s two separate arguments happening in the same building.

📱 The Robin Report on TikTok Shop — $100 million-plus beauty brands are seeing double-digit growth in physical retail tied directly to TikTok Shop activity. e.l.f., Rare Beauty, NYX Professional Makeup. The halo effect is real and it is coming to a European market near you, whether you’re ready or not.

🛒 Acadia on Amazon Organic Strategy — Your product listing might be lying to an AI, and the AI now has the receipts. CTR. CVR. Impression share. Three things. None of them optional.

I use Claude to pull visuals together mid-episode, which I mention entirely without shame. I also reference eBay circa 2004 more than once. You’ll understand why when you get there.

If you’ve got a paper, a report, or a case study with actual data in it that you think deserves a read, email me at vinny@vinnyandco.com or find me on LinkedIn. I’ll read it. I’ll probably credit you better than you’d expect from a man who can’t even confirm what day it is.

⏱️ CHAPTERS:

00:00 — It’s Sunday. (It’s not Sunday.)

00:45 — What Le Sunday Supplement actually is

01:55 — Paper 1: Stratably Q1 2026 Amazon Strategy Workbook

03:10 — The 7% problem: ad spend and vendor negotiations

04:14 — Amazon’s AI is reading your reviews and judging you

06:03 — The analytics gap (and why 41% is the good news)

08:16 — Paper 2: The Robin Report — TikTok Shop’s halo effect on physical retail 09:56 — e.l.f., Rare Beauty, NYX: what beauty brands understand that most don’t 11:51 — Why this matters if you’re not in beauty (it still matters)

14:27 — Paper 3: Acadia — Your Amazon listing is lying to an AI

16:10 — CTR, CVR, impression share: the three things that own your ranking now 18:46 — Why this is never finished (the clock goes back to zero every time)

21:00 — See you next Sunday. (Probably Friday.)

CREDITS (give these people the click):

📊 Stratably — the best independent research house covering Amazon from the brand operator side. Behind a membership wall. Worth every cent.

📰 The Robin Report — daily retail briefing, daily email, daily podcast. Alex Nizenson wrote the TikTok Shop piece. Go read it.

🏆 Acadia — performance marketing agency out of Atlanta, and one of the most honest voices on Amazon organic strategy. Part 2 of a series. Start with Part 1.

🙌 Martin Heubel — the 7% vendor negotiation stat is very much one for him. If you’re in Amazon first-party and you don’t follow Martin, that’s on you.

New episode every Sunday. (Recording on Fridays. The Simpsons lied to me and I’m choosing to honour that.)

On …

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I used to be a valuable Inditex customer. I knew the merchandised rails from smallest size to largest and I was drawn in by the strong merch capabilities into Zara, or Pull and Bear. The clothes were atypical - tight fitting, very European. I was a gym bunny and young. Fitting came easy. Today, I meet Inditex in their H&M stores, clothes have no discernable shape, my muffin top grateful for the shame and poor eating it now so graciously hides.

Zalando I got to know during my eBay years. The darling as a pureplayer across the EU. It took the charge to ASOS. After some challenging years, the wheels are back on this darling and the lipstick is back on the pig. They have invested shrewdly and outsourced their logistics to ZEOS. Getting brilliant at their basics again. So simple in concept, yet difficult in design. As a part of my EU earnings reporting I compare these incomparable EU giants. They stand up and deserve to be counted.

Bean Counting

Both reported FY2025 results this week. Both hit records. Both face the same macro headwinds: currency drag, Shein pressure below, AI-driven discovery uncertainty above. And both are executing strategies that, five years from now, will look either visionary or expensive. This is what strategy is about and taking bets are where you earn your dinner. The difference is in what those strategies cost, what they’re worth, and what they signal about each company’s confidence in its own model.

Inditex is the most profitable fashion retailer in history. Zalando is building the AWS of European fashion logistics. The question isn’t which is better , it’s whether they’re converging on the same thing.

Head-to-Head: FY2025 at a Glance

* About You consolidation from July 2025 inflates Zalando headline growth. ** Pro-forma organic estimate. All figures FY2025 (Inditex: Feb 2025–Jan 2026; Zalando: Jan–Dec 2025).

Fig. 1 , Revenue and profitability in absolute terms. The scale gap is significant; the margin gap is historic.

Fig. 2 , Margin comparison. Inditex’s 58.3% gross margin at €40bn scale has no peer in global fashion retail.

Inditex FY2025: The Quiet Juggernaut

Third consecutive record profit. €6.22bn net income at a 58.3% gross margin. A business approaching €40bn in revenue growing 7% in constant currency while sitting on €11.3bn net cash. The challenge is that “good but not spectacular” is how analysts are reading the reported 3.2% headline , because currency headwinds swallow the story. They shouldn’t.

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I was having one of those conversations with my friend Hendrik Laubscher today, the kind where you start with “Why is nobody talking about this” and end up two hours later having basically mapped out a slow-moving crisis that most ecommerce operators haven’t fully clocked yet or maybe they have. Maybe they are just f*ckin’ sick and tired of more things to deal with. So let me share what we were noodling on not as experts, but as people who watch this space

On March 1, the US and Israel conducted military strikes on Iran. Iran’s response has included threatening to close, or at least severely disrupt, the Strait of Hormuz. That narrow strip of water is the jugular of global trade. Right now, the numbers are stark. According to Ocean Network Express CEO Jeremy Nixon, speaking at the TPM26 conference in Long Beach on March 2, roughly 750 ships are currently backed up due to the Strait of Hormuz closure, 100 of which are container vessels. That’s approximately 10% of the entire global container fleet effectively snarled. Not rerouted. Not delayed. Snarled.

Nixon was direct about what comes next: freight rates are going up. Exports from Asia, where the majority of ecommerce product originates, will feel the brunt. Major port hubs like Singapore will lose their fluidity. Bookings are halting. Cargo already sitting in terminals is going nowhere fast.

He also noted something that should make every operator sit up: if the Strait stays closed past 25 days, Middle Eastern oil production sites will start curtailing output because they’ll have nowhere to put the oil. At that point, Nixon said, a price of $100 per barrel becomes “quite possible.” For context, Brent crude is already trading between $80 and $83 a barrel this week against an average forecast for the year of $58.

Meanwhile, diesel prices in the US have been climbing every single week since January 12. As of Monday they hit $3.897 per gallon, up nearly 9 cents in a week alone. This is already layered on top of war risk pricing for Iran and Russian sanctions that were baked in before any of this escalated. And UK natural gas was up 93% this week alone - yep, 93%.

And as one analyst put it neatly: every day the Strait is closed equals several days of recovery time on the other side. You don’t just flip the switch back.

Looking for other impacts, I dug in. The February Purchasing Managers’ Index data showed input prices surging to their highest level since 2022, that COVID-era hellscape of container rates at $20,000+ and 14-week lead times that a generation of ecommerce operators is still quietly traumatised by. This was before the full escalation. The data was already pointing upward before the bombs started falling.

This matters because PMI is a leading indicator. It’s telling us that procurement teams were already feeling cost pressure in their pipelines. What we’re seeing now is an accelerant on a fire that was already smouldering.

So What Does This Mean For Goods on the Water?

Short answer: the cost of goods on the water is going up. But that’s almost the least of it.

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Into this landscape, this strange, agent-haunted, Rufus-on-strike, Jody-Ford-running-PayPal, one-man-billion-dollar-brand landscape, stepped Travis Hess.

Hess, departing his role as Commerce CEO in 2027, had a vision. The vision was, in its essence, very simple. There were thousands of commerce platforms. None of them were Shopify. This was, historically, a disadvantage. Hess proposed that it could, with the right framing, be an advantage. He had the hair and the social skills to bring people on this journey.

The WANS Alliance, We Are Not Shopify, though the acronym was never officially confirmed and Hess maintains it stands for something else, brought together every significant non-Shopify commerce platform under a single message: We are keeping commerce weird. The tagline was borrowed, loosely, from Austin, Texas, and applied to the global B2B and DTC commerce landscape with the specific energy of a movement that knows it needs to be underdog and has made peace with that.

The proposition was not technical. It was not about superior feature sets or better pricing or a more robust partner ecosystem. It was existential. For the thousands of mid-career ecommerce professionals who had built their identities around platforms that were not Shopify, who had careers and expertise and certifications and LinkedIn profiles explicitly not-Shopify-shaped, the WANS Alliance offered something more valuable than technology: it offered a common enemy and a common goal.

Not being Shopify. And that’s ok.

This united them. Middle-aged ecommerce workers who had spent years at competing platforms, who had written competing blog posts, who had attended competing conferences and handed each other competing business cards, they found, in the WANS Alliance, a sense of shared purpose that none of them had felt since the early days of their respective platforms, when everything was new and everyone was figuring it out together.

Markets reacted well. The UU Commerce solution, Ultra Unified, the branded version of the combined platform offering, launched to what analysts described as “genuine market interest” and what a more honest analyst might have described as “relief that someone was trying something.” The UU platform now accounts for 1.4% of all non-Shopify commerce operations, which sounds small, and is small, but is growing, and represents a staggering number of merchants in absolute terms, and has a community forum that is genuinely one of the more enthusiastic spaces on the internet.

Many a LinkedIn bio, as of March 2028, reads: “Building the future of commerce. Definitely not Shopify.”

This is, arguably, a mission statement for the ages.

The Death of Cannes, the Preservation of Vibes, and the Rise of Analogue Ads

December 2026 was when the advertising industry looked, really looked, at what was happening and made a collective decision that had the energy of a species realising it was on the endangered list.

The trigger was not one thing. It was a cascade. The agentic buying revolution meant that the path-to-purchase, the carefully constructed, deeply researched, enormously expensive ecosystem of touchpoints that advertising had built itself around, was increasingly bypassed entirely. Agents didn’t see ads. Agents didn’t feel brand affinity. Agents didn’t respond to a beautifully art-directed 60-second brand film by developing an emotional connection to a product. Agents compared prices and delivery windows and review aggregates and went with the winner.

In a world where the buyer was a machine, the audience for advertising had partially evaporated.

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Every year, sellers leave money on the table not because they have bad products, but because they had the right product at the wrong time. eBay’s 2026 Marketing Trends Calendar fixes that , and it’s built on real purchase data, not vibes.

What Is It?

eBay Advertising’s 2026 Marketing Trends Calendar is a data-driven, month-by-month guide to buyer behaviour across five core categories: Collectibles, Electronics, Fashion, Home & Garden, and Parts & Accessories. It’s built on eBay’s own first-party purchase data from December 2024 to November 2025, mapped against the cultural and seasonal moments that actually moved the needle.

Think of it as a retail media calendar with receipts.

The Numbers That’ll Make You Stop Scrolling

A few standouts that caught my eye:

• Sports memorabilia box and case breaks: +342% in October. World Series energy is very real, people.

• Standalone VR headsets: +362% in November. Black Friday doing Black Friday things.

• Wheels, tires and parts: +611% in October. Someone is very aggressively prepping for winter.

• Cubic zirconia: +483% in February. Valentine’s Day — where romance meets “close enough.”

• CCG sealed cases: +194% running January through June. The Pokémon card economy remains undefeated.

Who Should Read This?

If any of the below sounds like you, this one’s for you:

eBay sellers — obvious, but the timing insights alone are worth it. Knowing that gloves and mittens spike +198% in December means you’re stocking and promoting before the rush, not during it.

Retail and ecommerce marketers — even if you’re not on eBay, this is a masterclass in seasonality mapping. The framework is transferable.

Marketplace analysts and consultants — client decks practically write themselves when you have this kind of category-level demand data.

Brand managers and buyers — particularly useful if you’re managing clearance cycles or secondary market strategy.

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Me covering earnings is new. Vusion have long been on my radar and I admire them from a distance. I planned on reporting them to see how an EU born and listedn technology gets on, compared to US counterparts. it does not disappoint. At the same time, Mirakl, are making enormous waves globally. I have worked with them, like them and see holes. But they reported yesterday, it gave me an interesing outlook

France does not often get celebrated as a tech powerhouse. The narrative, fair or not, usually goes: Germany engineers it, the US scales it, China manufactures it, and France regulates it. VusionGroup and Mirakl are working hard to rewrite that story. Both are Paris-headquartered, both are in the business of making retail smarter, and both dropped results this week that deserve considerably more attention than they’re getting in English-language media.

One of them just crossed €1 billion in revenue for the first time, got Walmart to bet the entire 4,600-store US estate on their hardware, and is targeting €1.4 billion in 2025. The other quietly turned profitable, crossed $218 million in ARR, and just launched what could be the most important infrastructure play in agentic commerce. Neither is a household name outside retail circles. Both should be.

Having worked on and off with Mirakl over the past 18 months and watched VusionGroup at close quarters, most recently at NRF where they were arguably the most technically impressive partner a retailer could have signed up to meet, this analysis tries to give both companies the honest read they deserve.

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At one point, I remember in the earlier days, he called me to fully understand how ads worked, how they failed and why there was possibility in conversations to make things more contextual . He called me as I was consulting with an Ice cream brand in London, who specialised in protein ice cream. He described the possibility of a post work out treat but still getting the gains form the session.

Google ads has 4 - 7 touch points during that journey and brings you from ads, to maps to a website back etc. A conversational guide could lead you, in real time, to a vending machine, in the building, knowing it had stock and it’s price. Oh and as you are a gym member, you get 20% off these 2 brands this week. What was possible then is still not fully happening now. Not due to lack of the use case but the tech is not fully embedded ( this is changing) but adoption is not there yet. It is changing, but slowly. Also, this is not so different a scenario that is being purported to be the “new way”.

I say all this and yet I have said many times the existing way for commerce is not the best way, and I am yet to come up with that solution. What is emerging is a changing landscape through which to think about the interaction. Removing our human selves from this loop - this is the way we have always done it.

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“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”, Forrest Gump, 1994

There is what you are told and what you know. We tend to think in headlines, then live in our reality. As I read this headline today, I pondered all the way back to last Friday night. I was having dinner out and I looked at the drinks men…

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