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

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