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 March 16, 2026, the same morning that Iranian commanders reiterated the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed to commercial shipping, the same week that RAM prices completed a near-90% quarterly spike driven by AI data centre demand, the same fortnight that the MacBook Neo launched at a price point that rewrote what a premium laptop costs, JD.com quietly opened Joybuy for business in six European markets.

Nobody rang a bell. But something structural shifted. Martin Heubel thinks we have a genuine alternative to Amazon. This is not, he notes, Temu or Shein.

Crisis is not an obstacle to ambition. It is the precondition for it.

The Battlefield Before Joybuy Arrived

To understand what Joybuy represents, you have to understand the terrain it is entering, and the companies that shaped it.

Amazon arrived in Europe in 1998, a time when most Europeans still looked up prices in a Argos catalogue the size of a small novel. Over the following two decades, Amazon did what Amazon does: it built infrastructure first, retail second. Warehouses, logistics networks, Prime memberships, seller ecosystems, AWS-funded margin subsidies. By the time any credible rival thought to challenge it, the moat was essentially a sea.

Then came the second wave, and it arrived via a completely different philosophy. Temu launched in the UK in April 2023. Shein had been building its European presence for years prior. Both platforms shared a common operating thesis: manufacture in China, ship direct to the consumer under de minimis customs rules, price so aggressively that incumbents could not respond, and spend ferociously on social media to generate the kind of demand that traditional retail could not conjure with thirty years of brand equity.

It worked, up to a point. Temu reportedly spent over $2 billion on advertising in its first full year of US operations. Shein built a market cap at peak valuation that briefly surpassed H&M and Zara combined. Both platforms demonstrated that a significant cohort of European consumers would exchange wait times, uncertain quality, and Chinese provenance for low enough prices. The Primark generation, it turned out, had a digital successor.

But both models carry a structural fragility. They depend on de minimis exemptions that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are actively closing. They depend on long-haul shipping from China, which, as the Strait of Hormuz crisis has demonstrated, is not as reliable an assumption as it once was. And they depend on consumer tolerance for the perception of grey-market uncertainty, which constrains them to price-sensitive demographics and makes premium brand partnerships nearly impossible to secure.

This is the gap that JD.com, through Joybuy, has chosen to enter. Not from below, as Temu did. Not from a marketplace-first model, as AliExpress did. But from a first-party retail position that is, structurally, a direct challenge to Amazon itself.

The Shock Doctrine Strategy

The timing of Joybuy’s European launch is either extraordinarily fortunate or extraordinarily calculated. In practice, those two things are often the same thing.

Consider what the competitive landscape looks like for every incumbent European electronics and general merchandise retailer right now. DRAM and NAND prices have risen roughly 90% in a single quarter, driven by AI data centre demand absorbing the production capacity of the three companies, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, that together control 93% of global memory supply. PC manufacturers including Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer and ASUS have all warned of 15 to 20% price increases. Entry-level laptops under £400 are, according to Gartner, structurally unviable within two years.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed to commercial shipping since February 28. Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd have all suspended transits. War risk insurance premiums have reached six-year highs. The Cape of Good Hope reroute adds weeks to transit times and hundreds of dollars per container in costs. Any European retailer currently trying to restock electronics inventory is doing so at an extraordinary price premium, in a market where lead times have stretched and supply confidence has collapsed.

JD.com, as of this launch, has approx 60 warehouses and distribution depots across Europe. Their inventory was pre-positioned. Their logistics network, JoyExpress, is proprietary. Chinese-flagged ships have continued moving through the Strait while Western commercial operators anchored offshore. The vertical integration that JD.com spent a decade building in China now gives it a structural cost and speed advantage in Europe at precisely the moment its competitors are most exposed.

JD.com arrived with inventory already in the warehouse. Everyone else is still arguing with their freight broker.

The Shock Doctrine framing is not rhetorical flourish. Klein’s core argument is that the application of radical economic transformation works best when existing systems are in crisis, when the cognitive bandwidth required to resist change is consumed by the crisis itself. European retailers are managing supply chain disruption, component inflation, energy cost increases and consumer confidence erosion simultaneously. They do not have the strategic headroom to respond to a new entrant. JD.com knows this. The timing is not coincidental.

How Joybuy Differs from Amazon, and Where It Doesn’t

The First-Party Model

The most important structural difference between Joybuy and Amazon is one that Matthew Nobbs, Joybuy’s UK Managing Director, emphasised repeatedly at launch: Joybuy is a first-party retailer. It owns the inventory it sells. It is not, primarily, a marketplace for third-party merchants.

This matters enormously. Amazon’s marketplace model, which now accounts for the majority of units sold on the platform, has created a persistent quality and authenticity problem that the company has never fully resolved. Counterfeit goods, unauthorised resellers, review manipulation and grey-market inventory have eroded consumer trust in specific categories, particularly electronics and beauty. Amazon’s brand partners have increasingly complained that the platform’s structure works against them, allowing unauthorised third parties to undercut official pricing and damage brand perception.

Joybuy’s first-party approach is a direct answer to this. When LEGO, Apple, Samsung, L’Oréal Paris, DJI, and Braun appear on Joybuy, they appear as authorised partners with dedicated brand stores, full product ranges, official pricing, product launches. This is the model JD.com perfected in China, where it built a reputation as the platform global brands trusted precisely because it did not allow the marketplace-seller chaos that characterised Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall.

The Logistics Proposition

Amazon Prime set the standard for European delivery expectations. Two-day delivery became table stakes. Next-day became common. Same-day in major cities was the premium tier. Joybuy launched with same-day delivery as the baseline offer for orders placed before 11am, across more than 15 million households. JoyPlus, the membership programme, is priced at £3.99 per month against Amazon Prime’s £8.99. These are not incremental improvements. They are deliberate weapons.

The 60-warehouse European infrastructure enabling this took years to build and was not assembled in response to the current crisis. JD.com began its European logistics experiment with Ochama in the Netherlands in 2022. That was the proof of concept. Joybuy is the commercialisation of the learning from that experiment. The deep pockets, JD.com reported $27.6 billion in cash reserves as of Q1 2025, mean that subsidising this network through its early years of low utilisation is financially survivable in a way that it would not be for most competitors.

The Category Question

Amazon is everything. Joybuy, at launch, is a curated version of everything, tech, appliances, beauty, homeware, grocery. The brand roster at launch is revealing: Apple, Samsung, Sony, LG, Philips, HP, Lenovo, Hisense, TCL, Xiaomi, DJI, PlayStation, LEGO, L’Oréal Paris, Braun, De’Longhi, Emma, BRITA, Bodum, The Pink Stuff, Nutribullet.

Two things stand out. First, the electronics weighting is heavy, this is JD.com’s core competency in China, and it maps neatly onto the Ceconomy acquisition which brings MediaMarkt and Saturn into the physical estate. Second, the inclusion of brands like Emma (mattresses) and the full large appliance installation service signals that Joybuy is targeting the high-AOV, complex-fulfilment categories where Amazon has historically underperformed, the ones that require white-glove delivery, installation and recycling logistics that a warehouse-and-van model handles poorly.

The Physical Retail Dimension

The Ceconomy acquisition, 1,000 stores across 11 European countries, €22.4 billion in revenues, the MediaMarkt and Saturn brands, is the element of the Joybuy story that has received least analytical attention relative to its strategic significance.

Amazon has tried physical retail and largely failed at it. Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Books, Amazon Style, each experiment has been scaled back or closed. The company that built the most efficient online retail infrastructure on earth has, repeatedly, failed to translate that competency into stores that Europeans actually want to shop in. The reason is not logistical. It is cultural. European retail is, in many categories, a social and experiential activity. MediaMarkt and Saturn, despite the frequent jokes about aggressive in-store sales staff, are genuinely embedded in the consumer electronics purchasing culture of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and beyond.

JD.com, through Ceconomy, inherits this cultural embeddedness. The commitment to maintain Ceconomy’s operational independence, brand architecture and management continuity for at least three years is not merely a regulatory concession, it is a sensible strategy for a company that knows it does not yet understand how to operate European physical retail. Let the asset continue doing what it does well while the digital and logistics infrastructure is built around it.

Amazon tried physical retail and kept retreating. JD.com bought 1,000 stores that Europeans actually use.

The medium-term opportunity is clear. MediaMarkt and Saturn stores become fulfilment nodes for Joybuy’s same-day delivery network in the cities where they are located. They become click-and-collect points. They become experiential showrooms for the brands that have dedicated digital stores on Joybuy. They become the physical evidence of JD.com’s commitment to the European market that no purely digital player can replicate.

This is the omnichannel play that every consultancy has been describing to European retailers for fifteen years. The difference is that JD.com is not consulting about it. They are doing it, at scale, backed by a balance sheet that can absorb the losses required to establish the flywheel.

The Brands Caught in the Middle

For European and global brands currently selling through Amazon, the emergence of a credible first-party alternative with superior logistics, better brand control, and a Ceconomy-backed physical presence is strategically significant. The question is not whether to engage with Joybuy. It is how quickly, and on what terms.

The brands already on the platform, L’Oréal Paris, Apple, Samsung, LEGO, DJI, have made their calculation. These are not small accounts testing a new channel. These are brands that have experienced the limitations of the Amazon marketplace model first-hand and are hedging their distribution risk. LEGO in particular is a useful signal. LEGO’s brand protection standards are exceptional. They do not appear on platforms they have not thoroughly vetted. Their presence is an endorsement.

For DTC brands watching from the sidelines, the calculus is more complex. Joybuy at launch is a first-party model, which means JD.com is primarily buying and selling inventory directly rather than onboarding independent sellers. The marketplace layer, if it emerges, will follow. But early-mover advantage in securing brand store positions, favourable commercial terms, and preferential placement in a platform that is currently buying consumer attention through aggressive pricing is worth taking seriously.

The risk, of course, is the same risk that every Amazon seller discovered over a decade: platforms become competitors. JD.com’s Chinese private label capabilities are considerable. The moment a category becomes sufficiently large on Joybuy, the temptation to introduce a JD-owned alternative at a lower price point is real. Brands entering this partnership should be clear-eyed about that dynamic.

The Regulatory and Geopolitical Risk Layer

No analysis of JD.com’s European ambitions is complete without acknowledging the headwinds that are not supply chain or competitive in nature.

The Ceconomy acquisition received antitrust clearance from Germany’s Bundeskartellamt in September 2025. A foreign investment and national security review by Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs was still ongoing at the time of that clearance. JD.com’s commitment to operational independence and staff continuity is partly strategic communications management aimed at reducing the political friction of a Chinese company acquiring the largest consumer electronics retailer in Europe.

The geopolitical context has not improved since those commitments were made. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has placed US-China relations, already strained by trade tensions, under additional pressure. The fact that Chinese-flagged ships continued transiting the Strait while Western commercial operators withdrew is not going unnoticed in European capitals. JD.com launching a major European consumer platform on the same day that its ships are among the few still moving through contested waters is a compound signal that European regulators will process carefully.

The DSA and DMA regulatory frameworks give European authorities significant tools to scrutinise large digital platforms. JD.com is not yet large enough to trigger the most stringent gatekeeper obligations, but the trajectory is clear. If Joybuy succeeds, the regulatory attention will follow.

Where Does This End Up?

The honest answer is that nobody knows. JD.com has the capital to sustain losses for years while building market share. They have the logistics infrastructure that took Amazon a decade to assemble and that no other rival has matched. They have the brand relationships that give them legitimacy in the market segments where Amazon has failed. They have, through Ceconomy, a physical retail estate that is genuinely valuable.

What they do not yet have is the cultural trust that European consumers extend to platforms they have used for years. Amazon Prime is habituated behaviour for tens of millions of households. Changing that behaviour requires either significant price differential, meaningful service superiority, or both, sustained over time. JoyPlus at £3.99 versus Amazon Prime at £8.99 is a meaningful price differential. Same-day delivery as standard is a service claim. Whether delivery reliability at scale lives up to the launch promise is the test that the next twelve months will conduct.

The categories where Joybuy wins first are predictable: consumer electronics, where JD.com’s first-party model solves the authenticity problem that Amazon has never fixed; large appliances, where the installation service is genuinely differentiated; and any category where a brand with strong consumer recognition has grown frustrated with Amazon’s marketplace dynamics and is actively seeking an alternative with better brand control.

The categories where the fight is hardest are equally predictable: grocery, where Tesco, Carrefour, Albert Heijn and their peers have deep consumer loyalty and supply chains that Joybuy cannot yet match; fashion, which requires the kind of returns infrastructure and editorial curation that Joybuy has not demonstrated; and services, where Amazon’s Prime ecosystem, video, music, reading, creates a lock-in that no physical product catalogue can easily displace.

JoyPlus at £3.99 versus Prime at £8.99 is a declaration of intent.

Coda: Same Board, Different Openings

There is a chess analogy that applies here. Amazon and JD.com are playing the same game, European ecommerce dominance, but they arrived at the board having studied different openings. Amazon built the infrastructure first and the brand relationships second. JD.com built the brand relationships first, bought the physical infrastructure second, and is now deploying the logistics network it has been quietly constructing since 2022.

Both approaches can work. But they arrive at different positions on the board. Amazon’s position is dominant but increasingly under pressure from a platform that has learned from Amazon’s mistakes. JD.com’s position is ambitious but exposed to regulatory, geopolitical and execution risks that Amazon, after twenty-five years of European operation, no longer faces.

Naomi Klein would probably note that JD.com did not create the Strait of Hormuz crisis, the RAM shortage, or the moment of maximum competitive vulnerability for European retailers. But they were ready for it. They read the manual. They built the warehouses. They signed the brands. They launched on the day the ground was still shaking.

Whether the ground has shifted permanently in their favour is the question that 2026 and 2027 will answer. For now, the most important thing to understand is this: Joybuy is not a Chinese version of Temu. It is not a cheaper version of Amazon. It is a structurally different model, arriving at a structurally advantageous moment, backed by resources that allow it to absorb the costs of the market education that every new entrant must pay.

The joy, for JD.com, is that its competitors are currently paying a different kind of price entirely.

Vinny O’Brien is the founder of VSpot Media and an ecommerce consultant working with DTC brands and agencies across the US, UK and EU. The Ostrich Report is his marketplace retail and commerce intelligence publication.

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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As these platforms deepen their roots, they are challenging the ver…

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The 12-Year Glitch: What Happens When a Company Forgets How to Fight?

I’ll be honest: I can barely get my pants on in the morning without a minor tactical error. I am never going to be the CEO of a global organization. I don’t sit in these types of boardrooms, I don’t understand “transactional economics,” and I’m pretty sure I’m just a fart in the wind i…

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