Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
Here’s what’s happening this week in ecommerce, retention and DTC marketing that you need to know about:
Shopify and Adobe released updated numbers on AI search - it converts better and adds demand, but only if your product pages are machine-readable.
TikTok Shop cleared $50B in H1 and opened its warehouses to orders from any channel.
Rhode sold $27M direct in a single day with a 70% repeat rate, one of several brands showing direct-and-social up while wholesale slips.
Shopify is ending Delivered Duty Unpaid on Aug 24 - a checkout change cross-border sellers need to plan for.
Whatnot raised $545M at a $20B valuation as live shopping keeps scaling.
And much more, as you’ll read below.
We’ve got the full details for you, as well as the latest highlights from DTC social.
Let's get into it.
AI Search and Agentic Commerce
On its Q2 call, Shopify said AI-driven traffic and orders to its stores tripled year over year, and president Harley Finkelstein called AI a "complement to search, rather than a substitute for it."
Traditional search sessions are still up 1.3x over two years and hold roughly a third of storefront sessions. This is the opposite of what AI did to publishers.
Here’s an interesting detail: half of all AI-referred sessions land directly on a product page, which is 2.5 times the rate of traditional search, and 75% of AI-attributed purchases in Q2 happened outside the top 100 categories.
Agents work across many constraints at once - dimensions, use case, fit - instead of one keyword. So if you sell something specific to a specific need, AI might be a great thing for you.
Adobe's latest data shows AI traffic to US retail sites converting 42% better than non-AI traffic in March (a record - and a full reversal from a year earlier when it converted worse).
Those visitors also stay 48% longer and browse 13% more pages.
The catch: much of the retail web still isn't machine-readable.
Adobe scored the sector and found homepages average 75% readable, category pages 74%, and product pages just 66% - meaning LLMs might not be able to read a third of the content on your product pages.
Similarweb tracked what happened when ChatGPT started showing brand links more prominently in its answers.
One week in May, referral traffic from ChatGPT jumped 157%, and traffic landing directly on brand homepages more than quadrupled. This pattern held: it wasn’t a one-day blip - and the visits were a little stickier: page views per visit rose from 3.8 to 4.7.
This shows one of the most interesting parts of AI search and LLMs. These platforms are still so new, and in the process of inventing themselves, and tweaks like these can make a meaningful difference to your visibility and traffic.
Keep this in mind. Swings in LLM traffic are not always a result of anything you’re doing. The ground underneath you is constantly moving, and smart operators don’t let their success live or die on these shifts.
A survey of 1,800-plus consumers from RTB House found 44% now trust AI tools when making purchase decisions - ahead of influencers, newspapers, TikTok and Instagram, though still behind friends and family at 59%. Nearly six in ten US shoppers credit AI with surfacing brands they didn't know existed.
On letting agents buy for them: 42% of US millennials would allow an AI agent to spend up to $250 on their behalf if they could return it within seven days. Strip the returns safeguard and that drops to about a third. And 35% across generations still want a human to review the transaction first.
People still want guardrails in place when it comes to agentic commerce. But I think we’re seeing trust grow, slowly but steadily.
Digiday verified screenshots of a new ChatGPT ad format that shows several products in one carousel at the bottom of a conversation, pulling from retailers' product feeds the way Google Shopping does.
Until now a ChatGPT ad meant one advertiser, one product. Right now the carousel shows items from a single retailer, but the mechanics are already built for more.
OpenAI reportedly has a $2.5 billion ad revenue target for 2026, and the timing points at Q4. If you're already running feed-based campaigns, this is one more surface to plan for heading into the holidays.
Shopify stores now expose WebMCP tools that AI agents can call directly - searching your catalog, updating the cart, and going to checkout in the shopper's own tab. It's live on every Liquid storefront and the Hydrogen preview, with nothing to install.
Without this, agents have to read your page code and simulate clicks, which is slow and breaks easily.
It's an emerging standard, currently limited to Chromium browsers through an origin trial, with Shopify shaping the spec alongside Google and Microsoft. For merchants, it's the plumbing that makes the agentic commerce numbers above possible.
Platform Ecosystem
Momentum Works and Tabcut report TikTok Shop's global GMV hit $50.3 billion in the first half of 2026 - a 92% jump year over year, with the platform on track to top $100 billion for the year.
US GMV so far sits at $11.8 billion and has doubled year over year, making the US TikTok Shop's single biggest market ahead of five Southeast Asian countries.
Just over half of that GMV flows through the Shop tab, about 40% through video, and the rest through live. For context, the report notes Amazon does roughly $200 billion in GMV a quarter; a long way for TikTok to go to catch up.
But you don’t necessarily need to be Amazon-level to be taken seriously as a legit channel. TikTok Shop is well past this point.
Fulfilled by TikTok now offers multichannel fulfillment, so sellers can use inventory stored in TikTok's network to ship orders placed anywhere, not just on TikTok Shop.
That puts TikTok directly alongside Amazon's FBA and Walmart's WFS as a 3PL, not just a marketplace. Unlike those two, TikTok leans on logistics partners rather than owning warehouses, which lets it scale faster but adds dependency on third parties.
The practical upside for sellers is leverage: three marketplace fulfillment networks now compete for your storage-and-shipping business, and you can often ship one channel's orders from another's inventory. More competition on fulfillment usually means better rates and terms for you.
On August 24, Shopify Managed Markets stops supporting delivered duty unpaid everywhere it supports DDP. Markets that use or inherit DDU move to DDP automatically, which means international customers pay duties and taxes at checkout instead of getting hit by the carrier or customs on delivery.
That's better for the buyer - no surprise bill at the door - but it does raise the price shown at checkout, so watch your international conversion after the switch.
If you specifically want customers to keep paying on delivery, you have to turn off Managed Markets before the 24th. Otherwise there's nothing to do.
Amazon demoed Alexa for Shopping photographing a refrigerator, working out what's missing, and assembling the list.
The strategic point, per PYMNTS, is that Amazon is trying to move grocery competition away from stores and local fulfillment - where Walmart is strongest - and onto the AI layer that decides what a household buys before anyone types a search. PYMNTS Intelligence found 74% of AI users during summer sale events bought at least one product mainly on an AI recommendation.
Amazon's play is vertically integrated: own the assistant, the history, the recommendation, the cart, the fulfillment. Walmart's is distribution - be available across many AI interfaces and win on price and nearby inventory.
A London court dismissed Shein's copyright claims against Temu over product photographs and upheld Temu's counterclaim for damages, covering listings Temu had to pull while a Shein injunction was in force.
Shein had argued Temu copied its images "on an industrial scale"; PDD-owned Temu said Shein was simply litigating to slow a competitor.
A separate Shein claim that Temu locked fast-fashion suppliers into exclusive deals goes to trial next year, and the two are suing each other in the US too. If you sell in categories these two touch, the fight over who owns product imagery is worth watching - it shapes how aggressively marketplaces police copied listings.
DTC Brands
E.l.f. said Hailey Bieber's Rhode drove $27 million of DTC sales in one day off its summer collection launch on Rhodeskin.com, acquiring 90,000 new customers that day - with over 70% of sales coming from existing customers.
Rhode contributed $160 million to E.l.f.'s quarter, and E.l.f. thinks it could be the fastest beauty brand ever to reach $1 billion in annual net sales.
The number that matters isn't the $27 million, it's the 70% repeat rate on a launch day built around a celebrity founder. Hype gets you the spike; a customer base that shows up again is what turns one day into a business.
The Crocs brand passed $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, up over 4% year over year, with DTC up 13% to $559 million even as wholesale fell 5%.
North America grew 0.4%, small, but enough to snap five straight quarters of decline. Heydude is still soft, down 6% to $179 million, though its DTC grew 7% helped by TikTok Shop and a record Prime Day.
The pattern across both brands is the same one showing up everywhere this issue: direct and social channels growing while wholesale shrinks. Worth asking where your own mix is going.
Birkenstock posted fiscal Q3 revenue of EUR 720 million, up 13% reported and 15% in constant currency, with DTC growth of 14% (16% in constant currency) outpacing its wholesale business. It added 13 owned stores in the quarter and raised full-year guidance to 15% constant-currency growth and adjusted EBITDA of at least EUR 710 million.
Same theme, different category: a brand with deep wholesale roots leaning into owned retail and digital, and telling investors that's where the momentum is.
After passing $1 billion in net revenue, the digitally native activewear brand plans up to 20 new international stores over the next year - entering India, the UAE, Colombia, Peru and Central America - plus 25 more in the US. It's citing three straight years of double-digit same-store sales growth as the reason to lean harder into physical retail.
A brand that started online opening this many stores is its own signal. For DTC operators, stores keep looking less like a departure from the model and more like the next chapter of it.
Ben Goodwin, who cofounded the high-fiber, low-sugar soda brand Olipop, steps out of the CEO role on Aug 17 and moves to executive chairman and head of innovation. Christian Patiño Webb, CEO of hydration brand Electrolit since 2022, takes over, with the company scouting for markets outside the US.
A handoff like this often comes after something breaks. Doing it while the brand is still climbing, and moving the founder to the innovation bench while a career operator runs scale and distribution, reads as a move from a position of strength.
Marketing and Retention
This piece offers an interesting look into how Stanley 1913 is adopting AI without losing human touches where it’s important.
Its marketing built brand awareness through visual, influencer-led content - great for humans, thin for LLMs, which pull from text on the open web. So the brand is adding product-level FAQs, care instructions and usage guides around real questions people ask AI: gifting, hydration, travel, hosting.
As Chief brand officer Kate Ridley put it: their occasion content was heavy on imagery and light on copy explaining why something made a great gift.
This is the operator's version of the Adobe and Shopify stories above. More than four in ten US adults now use AI chatbots to search (Pew), and a strong social presence won't surface if the underlying product detail isn't written down somewhere a model can read. If your best content is all visual, this is your to-do list.
Funding and M&A
Live-shopping platform Whatnot recorded its billionth order and raised a $545 million Series G, valuing it at $20 billion. It's added 650,000 new users a week, already passed last year's full $8 billion GMV, and more than doubled its count of sellers with over $1 million in lifetime sales.
Fashion is now its biggest category by volume, and it's estimated to hold about 60% of the live-shopping market across Europe and North America.
Procter & Gamble is acquiring Thorne, the practitioner-trusted supplement brand, for $3.8 billion, CEO Shailesh Jejurikar told CNBC.
It slots into P&G's health and wellness division alongside Metamucil, Align and New Chapter, and follows Unilever's purchase of gummy brand Grüns earlier this year.
Thorne built its reputation the slow way. Founded in 1984, it went public in 2021, was taken private by L Catterton in 2023, and crossed $500 million in revenue in 2025, most of it from shoppers under 40 and a surge in direct sales.
Also This Week
DoorDash says agentic traffic is low, but AI gains are not - CEO Tony Xu says outside agent order volume is still small; DoorDash's own AI tools build a grocery cart in under two minutes as Q2 revenue rose 36% to $4.5B.
eBay rides luxury, collectibles and AI to 15% growth - Revenue and GMV each up 15% (GMV $22.4B); eBay raised full-year guidance and leaned on authentication plus AI listing tools.
Behind True Religion's path to $1B - The denim brand expects $550M in revenue this year, up from $470M, and enters TikTok Shop in September while quintupling its influencer program.
Shopify Messaging now supports WhatsApp marketing - Merchants can run WhatsApp campaigns from Shopify with templates, catalog media and pay-per-message pricing.
L.L. Bean launches a loyalty program with charitable perks - Members earn 1 point per $1 (150 points = $5), get free shipping over $50, and vote on where $250,000 of the retailer's charitable giving goes.
Target builds a digital-twin platform for inventory - Its in-house "Proxima" system simulates supply-chain decisions before applying them; a 63-item pilot lifted on-shelf availability 2.5%.
Signifyd: ecommerce fraud pressure up 33% - Account-takeover attacks rose 78% and card-testing 175% year over year as AI lowers the cost of attacks; fraud is no longer just a checkout problem.
Walmart finally lets advertisers exclude search terms - Negative keywords come to Walmart Connect sponsored products, letting brands stop paying for irrelevant or purely branded queries.
Jumia raises $50M led by the IFC as it nears first profit - The African marketplace expects its first-ever profit in Q4, 15 years after launch, with the World Bank's IFC putting in about $25M.
Wendy's stock jumps on a possible Trian takeover - Shares rose more than 14% after the FT reported Nelson Peltz's Trian is preparing a bid to take the burger chain private, following six straight quarters of same-store declines.
Gorilla Commerce lands its bath mats in 2,600 Walmart stores - The Amazon-native home brand, with revenue in the couple-hundred-million range, took its Gorilla Grip mats into physical retail after two years on Walmart's marketplace, testing a repeatable marketplace-to-shelf playbook.
Hims & Hers says its first gummy prescription drives higher adherence - 88% of surveyed customers take the hair-growth gummy daily; a reminder that removing friction at the point of use, not just the point of sale, is what makes a product stick.
High-income shoppers are carrying Wayfair's Q2 - Overall revenue rose 7.5% to $3.5B, but the upscale Perigold banner grew more than 35%, a K-shaped read as affluent shoppers keep spending through housing-market uncertainty.
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
Subscription churn is a pacing problem, not a price problem
Nick Shackelford argued that most cancellations have nothing to do with product or price and everything to do with pacing, blades or bottles stacking up faster than people use them, while the only control the brand offers is a CANCEL button in the billing reminder. His fix is to put delay, skip, swap, and change-frequency options directly inside that email so a subscriber can slow down instead of quitting outright.
Durable goods trade on EBITDA, and it caps the exit
Sean Frank broke down Samsonite's acquisition of Béis as a great-but-capped outcome: the brand did everything right, roughly $200M in revenue, profitable and cash-efficient, but hard goods trade on EBITDA (he pegs it near 7x) rather than the revenue multiples that let a supplement or beauty brand of the same size sell for far more. It's a useful reminder that your category, not just your execution, sets the ceiling on your exit.
Segment reorder emails by real usage cadence, not a flat day-30 send
Jimmy Kim made the case that the repurchase window opens earlier than most brands assume, roughly five days before a customer runs out, and that a single blanket "time to reorder" send fails both ends of the curve: it nags the light user who still has 40 days of product while missing the heavy user who already ran out and bought elsewhere. Track actual consumption or simply ask customers how long a unit lasts them, then time the reminder to their cycle.
Broad-match trust is dying, so creative has to earn it
Sarah Levinger pulled from the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer to argue that generic broad-target ad templates are losing their pull as most consumers retreat into an "insular" trust mindset that only extends to their immediate peer circle. Her counter is to build creative around trust signals instead, calling out exactly who the product is not for, leaning on micro-creators over celebrity endorsements, and being radically transparent about where a competitor actually wins.
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That’s all for this week.
I’ll be back in touch soon, keeping an eye on what’s happening in the ecommerce and retail world, so you can keep yours on growing your business.
Until then,
Pietro and The Retention Edge Team
PS: shoot me a DM on LinkedIn if you’re interested in what a custom mobile app could do for your brand.