This means you have got to be curious in the first instance and the skill then is in reading what happens. Removing the elements not working, amplifying those moments that work. It also requires contingency planning. More than any other years I heard the “Plan B” set up. What happens when our desired plan is failing - how do we change approach. It makes sense. As we get more channels, we need to accept some of our plans, or most may fail. Winning is in moments and not necessarily in full campaigns. When budgets are tight this type of approach is absolutely critical.

Customers are now more fragmented in their approach to channels and buying than ever before. It is kind of absurd to think we can act with absolute confidence in all our channels. Change in weather, celebrity endorsement, an overnight tariff fever dream. The macro environement is so far outside of our control, not only that but it is subject to change, almost by the hour. So teams that are successful are those set up for change as the constant. This is where AI is definitely helping. AI the tool, not AI the strategy. This was another emerging aspect of the conversation.

AI the tool can multiple our presence, can make subtle edits to ad copy, colour and so on with great ease. Many agencies are focusing on this type of tool build too. Culturally, we have moved Boxing Day sales and we are absorbing them into peak selling season (which has started) and this means we can spread our risk and our effort into a longer selling cycle. Customers (I am one) are spreading payments and purchasing over a more protracted period. So you have time to adjust, to adapt and to observe what is going on around you.

It was clear from the leaders in this discussion that empathy is key to buy in. It is a damn tough job these days and it may involve long and unfriendly hours. This has to be acknowledged and returned to people. The carrot and not the stick. Leaders need to be demanding due to the enormous pressures right now but knowing we are all in it together and there may be no right answer at the beginning are traits of leaders who will do better, make no mistake and those who will guide teams through tough days and will share in the joy of the good ones. Culture over strategy for the peak win 2026.

That is also the most accurate description I can offer of UK ecommerce’s growth plan for 2026.

Last Wednesday at ExCeL, Andy Mulcahy Strategy and Insights Director, IMRG opened IMRG’s Growth Summit under the banner Turning AI Into Measurable Growth. His deck had three kinds of data in it: IMRG’s benchmarking of what retailers are actually seeing, live polls of the retailers in the room, and what attendees said they wanted to learn when they registered. Andy shares this type of insight weekly on LinkedIn, I suggest you listen and read. He is also, a healthy skeptic of shiny new things. Given his world of data, this is a useful barometer. The set up for the summit was intriguing too, an old style set dance where everyone got to dance with everyone. Ably chaperoned by Andy himself. Conversation was deep and dark at times, and people in the room had the confidence to speak their mind when asked. Andy, knowing them, held them to task.

The day was dotted with workable, easy to digest insights and he shared that deck with on last week. I have some of my own thoughts.

THE BIGGEST CHANGES ARE THE ONES NOBODY WILL SEE

Asked which part of the online journey AI will change most, 76% of the room said product discovery. On-site search got 9%. Product pages got 4%.

Discovery is the visible bit, so fair enough. But every agent built so far has been designed around a human experience: a human browsing, a human comparing, a human hovering over the blue one. Agents don’t need any of that. They need structured data, clean attributes and something they can parse at speed. Semantic search already rewards pages that describe what a product is rather than how it feels, and metaobjects threaded through the product page are quietly turning the PDP from a shop window into a spec sheet. Four per cent think the product page is on the menu. I’d take the other side of that bet all day.

Andy’s own site search numbers hint at something shifting underneath. Search results bounce rate has climbed from under 10% at the end of 2024 to over 13% in Q2 2026. One reading, and it’s only one, is that shoppers are arriving with their minds already made up somewhere else, and your on-site search is the second opinion nobody asked for.

Ben Thompson would put it bluntly. In an agent-mediated world, your product page stops being a page for a person and becomes an API for someone else’s aggregator. The retailers polishing PDPs for human eyes are building beautifully for the last aggregator. This is a key distinction on why, this will likely be wrong in time. Our frame of thinking is based on designed systems that repeat the stages that we think through. In a similar way it is why ads dont always appear in the way we anticipate. Google has 100’s of signals it looks at for PMAX ads to determine the next best placement, we are asked for our budgets. Even before this evolution we were providing a narrow set of inputs to connect with google signals to try get us the output we wanted - ad performance.

The changes that matter most won’t show up in a screenshot. That’s precisely why they’re dangerous.

THE CHECKOUT ISN’T DYING. BUT IT’S BAGS ARE PACKED.

A real surprise If I am honest. But I did ask myself is the reason , it is dependable - if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. Checkout also scored 4%. Which is odd, because the most radical version of agentic commerce doesn’t have a checkout at all. There’s a shared token, an acceptance, and that’s it. No basket page, no form, no ‘are you sure?’ No friction. Friction is needed for humans IMO. We beed a healthy level of it. There was use cases here agentic works, and plenty where it does not.

Jen Wright of Rascal Ventures posed the question, later the same day, on a slide of its own: who owns the customer when the purchase experience is no longer yours to manage? Nobody in the checkout poll seemed to have heard it yet. But then, who owns it now. Shopify claim the best checkout out there and unless you are on Plus, there is nothing you can do only implement it.

In fairness to the 4%, the evidence of 2026 is on their side, for now. As we know back in May, OpenAI quietly shelved Instant Checkout in March, and Walmart found conversion inside ChatGPT roughly three times lower than sending people to its own site. The moment money moves is exactly where shoppers want a bit of friction. Some friction is load-bearing. Not all friction is created equally.

The cross pond POV. Strong Customer Authentication under PSD2, still sitting in UK law, means delegated agent payments carry more authentication friction here than in the States. The ‘token and a nod’ flow is a US-first reality. But if we are to grow, my contention is cross border, warts and all, is needed.

So the 4% aren’t wrong that their checkout page won’t change much. They’re wrong about whose it’ll be. Between Google and Shopify’s UCP, OpenAI and Stripe’s ACP, and the card networks’ agent programmes, checkout isn’t disappearing. It’s being relocated to infrastructure the retailer doesn’t own.

ZERO PER CENT. NOT A TYPO.

Loyalty and retention: 0%. Post-purchase support: also 0%. Not one retailer in the room thinks AI changes what happens after you’ve got the customer.

At this point, I put my pint down. On the registration form, Retention & Loyalty was the fifth most requested topic of the day, ahead of checkout, social commerce and creative AI. The same people desperate to learn about loyalty are certain AI won’t touch it. And asked which metric AI will improve most, 44% said conversion rate. Repeat purchase rate got 4%. Average order value got nothing at all. (editing now =: A thought occurred to me that many agencies are now selling loyalty and this may be in part why it is not spoken about. It is talked to, not about).

I mentioned in May in a post, Points Make Permission, Google’s Universal Cart was built on Wallet precisely because Wallet already holds your loyalty cards. UCP added identity linking so shoppers keep their benefits when buying through Google’s surfaces. Sephora launched in ChatGPT with its loyalty programme attached. The platforms have clocked something the room hasn’t: loyalty is the carrot that gets a wary shopper to say yes to the agent the first time. Found money. Member price. No card number to remember.Cheapest token they will ever get.

Meanwhile the SaaS loyalty platforms have spent years turning points schemes into first-party data engines, and first-party data is the only currency that survives an agent standing between you and your customer. Zero per cent says we’re dramatically underrating what those platforms already do, and dramatically underrating how hard Big Tech is working to sit in the middle of them.

If Google thinks your loyalty programme is worth intermediating and you think AI won’t touch it, one of you is wrong. It isn’t Google.

THE WEATHER BEAT THE ROBOTS

Andy’s own summary slide didn’t mince words: in 2026, growth was driven by heatwaves, not AI. His revenue chart shows it plainly. Online sales fell about 10% year on year in April, then spiked into positive territory through May, June and July as the sun came out and Britain bought paddling pools. The slide also carried a line every AI keynote should have to display by law: don’t get too carried away with it.

There’s something gloriously Bill Bryson about it. A nation that has spent a century talking about the weather finally found a use for it: it’s the most reliable growth lever in UK retail.

The AI numbers themselves are sobering. AI assistants account for 0.39% of revenue on average, and first-visit traffic from AI barely registers against search engines at 43%. AI assistant traffic converts at 2.3%, respectable but below email, paid search and affiliates, and only just ahead of organic search. Meanwhile 44% of the room bet on conversion rate as AI’s big win, when IMRG’s conversion chart has sat stubbornly around 3% every year since 2022. I cannot stress this enough. This was my Eureka moment. Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, is well, mad. Maybe this is where the agentic opportunity lies, maybe it is where all opportunity lies.

Then the channel data, where paid is very much doing the heavy lifting. Organic search’s share of traffic has fallen from around 21% to 18% in a year. Paid search now delivers 14.7% of revenue from 9.3% of traffic, and paid search, shopping and social together bring in roughly 23% of revenue, all creeping up. Organic Growth & SEO was the third most requested topic on the registration form. Retailers can feel the free traffic draining away, and they’re paying to top it back up.

Matt Stoller would point out that the CMA designated Google with strategic market status in general search last October, under the new DMCC regime. The regulator has formally decided Google is a gatekeeper. The industry has formally decided it’s the growth plan.

THE PRIORITIES LIST THAT ARGUES WITH ITSELF

The registration form tells you what’s on retailers’ minds. Top of the pile:

Personalisation & Recommendations (174),

Analytics & Forecasting (153),

then Organic Growth & SEO and Acquisition Channels tied (150),

with Retention & Loyalty (143)

and Performance Marketing (125) not far behind.

Sensible. Familiar. Measurable.

Now look at where AI has actually delivered. Asked where they’d seen the best ROI so far, 54% said written content generation, 41% chatbots, 39% visual content. One-to-one personalisation, the single most popular topic of the day, came in at 6%. We want AI to know our customers. So far it’s mostly writing our product descriptions.

Down the bottom of the interest list sat Cross-Border (70), Retail Media (70) and Customer Support & Experience (71), with Marketplaces (79) barely clear of them. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They are the net-new-money playgrounds. Retail media is the highest-margin line on the P&L of any retailer who’s bothered to build it. But it is not without its own set of challenges. Marketplaces are demand you don’t have to acquire one click at a time. You know my position on marketplaces. Yada, tada yada. Hurrah for ebay. Move. on. Cross-border is, by definition, customers you don’t currently have.

The strongest argument against me, and it’s a good one: ignoring cross-border might be rational. Brexit made EU trade painful. The US ended de minimis for everyone last August. The EU is moving to a flat duty on low-value parcels. Another one, yep. Cross-border got materially harder in eighteen months, and plenty of UK operators have the scar tissue to prove it.

But that’s not strategy. And many of the scars, were of their time. There is gold in tham there hills - there is money to be made if you want to look for it. . Merchant-of-record partners and marketplaces exist precisely to absorb that friction. And from where I’m sitting in Kerry, cross-border is just a Tuesday. Irish brands have always treated the UK as an export market; there’s no domestic 67 million to fall back on. The muscle UK retail let waste after 2016 is the one Irish retail has been using the whole time.Necessity means we have to. In todays PEST climate, we need necessity - mother of invention, right?

We are defaulting to the things we know. Somewhere only we know, if you like. It’s a lovely song. It’s a terrible growth strategy.

THE PEOPLE WHO ARE SURE THEY’RE SAFE

And then the final poll. Respondents picked one role most impacted by AI and one least. 42% picked the Ecommerce Director as least impacted. Not a single person picked it as most impacted. Customer Service topped the most impacted list at 26%, with content managers and merchandisers next at 17% each.

Consider who fills in these polls. Asking a room of senior ecommerce people whether the ecommerce director is safe is asking turkeys to vote on Christmas, and, keeping with the John Lewis theme, the turkeys have voted for a lovely Christmas. (and let’s hope it is, we need little wins).

Here’s the kicker. One slide earlier, 42% of the same room said the retailers who win with AI will be those that use it to support people rather than replace them. Then they pointed at customer service, the one function customers actually touch, and said that’s where the axe lands. We are planning to automate the relationship and protect the org chart. In an agentic world where the customer increasingly never visits you, the few moments of genuine human contact will be worth more, not less.

The most exposed role in UK ecommerce may be the one that feels the most comfortable. Squeaky bum time as Alex Feruson might say.

SO WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT OUR MINDSET?

Read the deck as one document and a pattern emerges. UK ecommerce expects AI to change the parts it can see, and it’s defending the parts it controls. It credits growth to the weather, pays the platforms for the rest, wants to learn about loyalty but doesn’t think AI will touch it, ranks its net-new-money channels near the bottom, and the people answering believe their own jobs are the safest in the building.

That’s not a technology problem. It’s a culture problem, the comfortable kind that feels like prudence right up until it doesn’t. If you run a UK brand, four things worth doing before peak:

• Audit your product data for machines, not people. If an agent can’t read your attributes, it can’t recommend you.

• Map your loyalty programme to the agent protocols. Decide now whether you want Google holding your members’ benefits, because the default is yes.

• Price one cross-border lane properly. One market, one partner, real numbers. Not a strategy deck.

• Ask your leadership team who is actually safe. Then ask someone who didn’t write the answer.

WHERE THIS GOES NEXT

Watch three things into 2027: how UK regulators treat delegated agent payments under SCA; whether UCP-style loyalty linking lands this side of the Atlantic, and on whose terms; and whether peak 2026 is once again won by the weather. If it is, we’ll know the robots still haven’t turned up for work.

Jen Wright left the room with four questions for an honest conversation. The fourth was the best: what am I not seeing? On the evidence of this deck, quite a lot. Somewhere only we know is a lovely place to visit. It’s a terrible place to grow.

Thanks to Andy and the IMRG team for the data, and to the retailers in the room for being honest enough to give it. That’s the hard bit. The rest is on us.

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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,…

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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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