Welcome back to the Retention Edge.

This week in ecommerce and retention: a big retail earnings run told a two-speed story about the consumer, tariff refunds started showing up as lower shelf prices, and the plumbing for AI-driven shopping kept getting built out while the actual buying still lags the hype.

In this edition:

Let's get into it.

Walmart beat on sales but the stock fell 9%, and tariff refunds are about to hit shelf prices

Walmart's revenue rose 5.9% in the quarter and global ecommerce jumped 23%, but the market wanted more. US comparable sales grew 2.6%, short of the 3.5% Wall Street expected, resulting in their stock closing about 9% lower.

At the same time, CFO John David Rainey told CNBC that Walmart was eligible for roughly $2.9 billion in tariff refunds, with just under $100 million left to collect, and that it plans to put that money straight into lowering prices starting this quarter.

Global advertising revenue also climbed 38%, another reminder that Walmart's fastest-growing businesses are the ones that don't involve selling groceries.

Target's turnaround picks up steam, with a big assist from tariff refunds

Target’s outlook this quarter was a little brighter. Comparable sales grew 3.8% against the 2.4% analysts expected, digital comps rose 8.7%, and same-day delivery grew more than 25%. Their stock rose 4% and is up more than 55% this year.

A chunk of the good news was one-time: a $994 million pretax benefit from tariff refunds flowed through the quarter. But CEO Michael Fiddelke was careful to say two good quarters isn't the goal, and Target is doing the unglamorous work underneath, lowering prices on more than 10,000 items and reworking laggard categories like home.

Ecommerce made up 17.1% of US retail in Q2, still growing at nearly twice the pace of retail overall

The Census Bureau put online at 17.1% of US retail sales in Q2, up from 16.3% a year earlier. Seasonally adjusted online sales hit $340.2 billion, a 12.2% gain, against just 6.7% growth for retail overall.

The data also shows that Americans are shopping online more often - and, notably, 42% of people are using their phones while inside a store, up from 30% early in 2024.

Commercial conversations in ChatGPT more than doubled in a year

Profound classified a year of ChatGPT conversations and found the share with commercial intent rose from 13.9% to 19.2% between June 2025 and June 2026. Because the user base grew at the same time, the absolute volume more than doubled, to an estimated 28 billion commercial conversations a year.

Shoppers are becoming increasingly comfortable going to LLMs for product recommendations. ChatGPT users are averaging 41% more commercial conversations than a year earlier - a rate of 0.54 per week.

Visa and Mastercard join a new alliance to set the rules for agent payments

Stablecoin infrastructure company Rain launched the Agentic Payments Alliance this week, with Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana and Remitly among the founding members.

The pitch is that no single company should get to decide how an AI agent is authorized to spend on your behalf, so the group wants to hammer out identity, authorization and fraud standards while the category is still forming.

The release leans on a McKinsey projection of $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global agentic commerce by 2030. That number is a forecast, not a fact. But the card networks putting their names on a standards body tells you where they think this is going.

TikTok Shop is pulling in higher-ticket brands as shoppers get more comfortable buying

TikTok Shop's reputation is impulse buys: cheap beauty, wellness, fashion. That's changing. Multi-brand seller Spreetail told Modern Retail its above-ground pools and spas grew 125% year over year on the platform, with outdoor furniture up 275% and lawn and garden up nearly 150%. A study from agency Envision Horizons found 51% of respondents had bought something costing $100 or more on TikTok Shop.

The driving forces behind these changes are trust and logistics. As bigger names like Skims and Pacsun show up, credibility follows, and TikTok has shrunk its delivery windows to two days for some sellers.

It still isn't a pure checkout destination. One founder noted his TikTok Shop customers usually buy a single item while his own site sees bigger baskets, so he still sees it mostly as a discovery channel. But from all the stories I keep reading, it’s shifting steadily into a legitimate commerce channel.

The FTC puts personalized pricing on notice

The FTC is seeking comment on a draft enforcement policy statement about personalized pricing, meaning the use of someone's personal data to set a price based on what the company thinks that individual will pay.

The commission was clear it can't ban the practice outright. What it can do is treat the undisclosed use of personal data to set prices as an unfair or deceptive practice under the FTC Act. In the chairman's words, when a shopper sees a listed price they expect it's the same price everyone else sees, not an estimate of their willingness to pay.

If you run any kind of individualized pricing or dynamic discounting keyed to customer data, this is the signal to check what you're doing and how clearly you disclose it. The public comment window is 30 days once the statement is published.

Ferrero buys granola brand Purely Elizabeth for a reported $850 million

Elizabeth Stein started making muffin mix in her New York apartment 17 years ago. This week she agreed to sell Purely Elizabeth, now a roughly $250 million granola and oatmeal brand on track to top $300 million this year, to Nutella owner Ferrero for a reported $850 million, more than 4 times sales.

Stein stays on as CEO, which she said mattered to her, and the brand is now in more than 30,000 stores. The deal follows Ferrero's $3.1 billion purchase of WK Kellogg last year, part of a clear push by the chocolate giant into the breakfast aisle.

BaubleBar turns college fandom into a year-round growth engine

BaubleBar's collegiate business is up more than 50% year to date. It launched the category in February 2025 with 12 schools and now works with 25, selling school-specific charm bracelets and accessories through campus bookstores, Fanatics, Dick's and its own site, with roughly half of collegiate sales coming through wholesale.

The insight from co-founder Daniella Yacobovsky is that licensing buys you access to a community that already cares, whether that's a school, a sports team or an entertainment IP. But access alone doesn't sell, so the brand researches the chants, foods and landmarks that make each fan base specific rather than slapping a logo on a product. It's also tracking whether a first collegiate purchase leads into the rest of the catalog.

Fabletics is running the same play, doubling its College Shop from 100 universities to 200. The broader idea is worth stealing: borrowing an existing fandom can be a cheaper acquisition channel than building one from scratch, if you do the homework to earn it.

Here’s what DTC's been talking about on social media this week.

Retention is the real lever on CAC, not a stricter acquisition target.

Taylor Holiday made the case that customer acquisition cost falls as returning-customer revenue grows as a share of the total, so building retention over time does more to bring blended CAC down than tightening your acquisition efficiency ever will.

Batch-and-blast email is a chef serving every table the same plate.

Jimmy Kim argued that the fix isn't new creative but new plating, using the same assets personalized per subscriber at send time, so you stop bleeding engagement from sending everyone the identical message.

Your personal taste shouldn't decide which ads launch.

CJ Slattery pushed back on brands being precious about creative, since you can't actually know whether an ad is a winner, background noise or a dud until the auction spends on it, so the move is to launch more and let performance decide.

The best promise wins the market, not the best product.

Andrew Faris shared a principle he's building into his creative strategy, borrowed from Ezra Firestone: the brand that makes and keeps the most compelling promise beats the one that merely has the better product.

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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.