Same Day Delivery (Of A New Tariff) The V Spot eCommerce Nearly News - Agentic AI and Supply Chain
The V Spot eComm Nearly News
Six (Well 8 this week) minutes of retail news you’ll never get back
You know that feeling when you’re at a wedding and someone gets the DJ to play Wonderwall? That’s tariff policy in 2026. Nobody asked for it, nobody wants it, the room goes awkward and yet here we are, all standing around pretending it’s fine while a man in a suit destroys the vibe. The Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs, and the administration responded in approximately the time it takes to microwave a frozen burrito new 15% global import surcharge, de minimis gone, and about 4,000 Shopify merchants simultaneously Googling “what is a bonded warehouse.” Good morning. Let’s do the news.
It is Friday, February 27th, 2026. Welcome to the V Spot, where the Supreme Court just torched a year of trade policy before lunch, the tariff replacement was live by dinner, Perplexity wants to do your shopping for you, and Forrester politely asked everyone to calm down about the death of the store. Six minutes. Let’s go.
THE SUPREME COURT BROKE TRADE POLICY, AND THE SEQUEL DROPPED THE SAME DAY
On February 20th, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that IEEPA, the 1977 emergency law Trump used to build his entire tariff architecture, does not authorise the President to impose tariffs. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, said the word “regulate” in a decades-old statute cannot carry the weight of a trillion-dollar trade agenda. Liberation Day tariffs, the fentanyl tariffs, the reciprocal tariffs, all of it, struck down.
Trump’s response time? Hours. Before most import brokers had finished their second coffee, a new 10% global import surcharge was signed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. By February 24th it was live, since revised upward to 15%, and it expires in 150 days, July 24th, unless Congress votes to extend it. Section 232 steel and aluminium duties remain fully in place. And the potential refund on $160 billion in IEEPA tariffs collected since 2025? A magnificent mess that nobody in government appears eager to resolve quickly.
For retailers and ecommerce operators, the practical read is this: the policy destination hasn’t changed, only the legal motorway. If you’re repricing, renegotiating supplier contracts, or rerouting supply chains, the 150-day clock on Section 122 is now the most important date in your calendar. And if you’re Irish or European watching this from across the water, the 18 trade deals negotiated under IEEPA are now in legal limbo too. The chaos, as ever, is the policy.
PERPLEXITY WANTS TO DO YOUR SHOPPING, AND IT’S FREE
On February 25th, the same day Samsung was launching phones in San Francisco, which we’ll get to, Perplexity quietly dropped something that should be getting a lot more attention in retail circles. In-chat shopping, powered by PayPal and Venmo, is now live for all US users. Free. No subscription required.
Here’s what that means in practice. You open Perplexity, you type “best waterproof jacket for someone who cycles to work in Dublin in February”, and yes, that is a deeply specific ask, and Perplexity finds the products, shows you the pros and cons, pulls in reviews, and lets you buy it. PayPal handles the payment. You never leave the chat. The merchant still owns the customer relationship, the returns, the loyalty, but the transaction just happened inside a search engine that isn’t Google, on a platform that wasn’t built for commerce eighteen months ago.
This is not a niche product launch. Perplexity claims shopping queries on its platform have jumped fivefold since it first launched “Buy With Pro” for paid users last year. And it’s not alone in this race. Amazon’s Rufus now has an “Auto Buy” button, you set a target price, it buys when the product hits it. ChatGPT has Instant Checkout via Shopify and PayPal. Google has agentic checkout baked into AI Mode in Search.
The V Spot covered Shopify’s “Agentic Storefronts” vision back in Week 4, the idea that your products need to be discoverable inside AI interfaces, not just on your website. This week that stopped being a vision statement and became a Wednesday afternoon product launch. The chat is the store now. Whether your inventory is showing up in it is a different question, and the answer for most merchants right now is no.
FORRESTER SAYS THE STORE ISN’T DEAD, IT’S JUST DOING $4.4 TRILLION
While everyone was watching the tariff drama on February 24th, Forrester quietly dropped a report that should be pinned to the wall of every boardroom that’s spent a decade predicting the apocalypse of physical retail. By 2030, ecommerce will account for 29% of US retail sales. The remaining 71%, $4.4 trillion, will still happen in stores. Total retail is forecast to grow from $5.2 trillion today to $6.2 trillion by the end of the decade.
Let me sit with that for a second. After fifteen years of being told the store is a buggy whip factory, it is still doing four and a half trillion dollars of business annually by 2030. A separate Salsify survey this week found the number of people shopping online daily has dropped from 21% to 9% year on year.
The nuance, and there’s always nuance, is that this is not a rejection of digital. It’s confirmation that the retailers winning right now are running physical and digital as one sport. The store is the content, the fulfilment point, the brand experience, and increasingly the thing your AI agent routes you to when you want to actually touch something before you buy it. As we covered with M&S and the UK high street a few weeks back, if your shop doesn’t look good on TikTok and doesn’t feel worth entering, you’re invisible in both worlds. The store isn’t dead. It just had to get interesting again.
TIKTOK BLINKS, SELLERS 1, ALGORITHM 0
TikTok Shop had a plan this week. A bold one. The kind that sounds great in a Notion doc and catastrophic the moment sellers see it in their inbox. Starting February 25th, they announced, all US local sellers would be moved off independent shipping and onto TikTok Shop Logistics Services. Mandatory. No exceptions.
The seller community reacted with the energy of a group chat that’s just been told the Christmas party venue has changed to a car park. TikTok rolled it back.
To be clear about what they were trying to do: this is the Amazon FBA play, executed in the style of someone who learned project management from a YouTube video. Get sellers dependent on your platform, take over fulfilment, own the data, own the relationship. It worked for Amazon over a decade of carefully boiling the frog. TikTok tried to do it before most of their sellers had finished setting up their ring lights. The retreat is tactical, not philosophical. The destination is still the same, a closed logistics loop where TikTok controls the end-to-end experience. If you’re building on TikTok Shop in the US, or watching this playbook arrive in Europe, this story is far from over.
One small win for the merchant class. Enjoy it. Then prepare for the next attempt.
That’s your six minutes. The Supreme Court killed the tariffs, Trump replaced them before lunch, Perplexity launched a shopping agent on Wednesday that wants to replace your browser, Forrester confirmed the store will outlive us all, and TikTok remembered that sellers have feelings, temporarily.
The week ahead: the Section 122 clock is ticking, the IEEPA refund queue is forming, and somewhere a customs broker hasn’t slept since February 20th. Send them a coffee. Or better yet, let an AI agent do it.
See you next Friday.