Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
Today we’re sharing the latest that’s been going on from in and around the ecommerce world, and breaking down what it means for the operator (you).
This week: AI shopping agents showing up in the numbers, the platforms quietly rewriting seller economics, and the marketplace still owning your customer’s first purchase.
In this edition:
Walmart's Sparky AI agent is driving baskets about 35% bigger, the clearest proof yet that agentic commerce moves real revenue.
Meta is assembling a full feed-to-checkout stack, going head to head with Shopify and Stripe for the transaction layer.
Marketplaces capture 44% of first purchases from new brands, far ahead of retailer sites and social.
Google Ads keeps getting pricier as returns fall, turning paid search into a margin test.
Levi's turned a World Cup stunt into a stronger DTC quarter, with direct-to-consumer now past half of revenue.
Let’s get into it.
AI Commerce
Walmart says app users who interact with its Sparky AI shopping agent spend roughly 35% more than those who don't, and about half of all app users have now used it. In the quarter ending April 30, the value of goods sold attributed to Sparky rose 150% year over year and units sold through it quadrupled, while weekly active users climbed more than 110% quarter over quarter.
The more interesting detail is where the lift comes from: 85% of Walmart's shopping still happens in-store, and shoppers who use the app while in a store spend 25% more on that trip.
Agentic commerce has moved past the demo phase, into a tool that’s driving measurable revenue - across multiple surfaces.
Less than three weeks after launching its advertising pilot in the UK, OpenAI is already hiring regional ad teams for France, Germany, Ireland, and Singapore, which would bring the program to ten markets.
The direction this is going is clear: as more product research starts inside a chatbot, ChatGPT becomes both a new paid-acquisition surface and a new place brands have to be visible.
It’s worth closely watching how this evolves, because this could easily be the new number one channel for ecom advertisers.
Sensor Tower's State of Web 2026 finds that Amazon shoppers who use the Rufus AI assistant convert at nearly twice the rate of those who don't, and that Rufus-assisted sessions tend to run longer rather than shorter before a purchase.
AI assistants are winning the research moment, the stretch of consideration that used to play out on Google or Reddit before someone settled on a product.
As Amazon pushes Rufus deeper into comparisons and recommendations, the lever for sellers is clean, complete product data, not a faster checkout.
Marketing & Retention
Dollar Shave Club already produces about 90% of its advertising in-house, and chief brand and innovation officer Laura Higgins wants AI to push that share higher rather than hand work back to an agency.
Her team used Claude and the AI video tool Higgsfield for the brand's July 4th campaign, taking a brief to first draft in two to three days and the full campaign live within a month; an upcoming "Ball Spray" launch will be entirely AI-made, while a military-themed campaign uses only real footage.
Higgins frames this way: AI "isn't the strategy, it's an execution device." The real lesson for lean teams isn't the tooling, it's the org design it enables, using AI to absorb the overflow that would otherwise justify an agency retainer while keeping speed and control in-house.
Sportswear brand Forme offered customers a full cash refund if the US men's team reached the World Cup final, then covered its own downside by hedging the payout on prediction market Kalshi, through promotions platform PlayAbly.
The team lost to Belgium, so no refunds went out, but Forme still reported a 4x week-over-week jump in menswear traffic and nearly 20x to its top men's styles.
The mechanic is kinda crazy: a prediction market let the brand run an offer bold enough to spike demand while capping the financial risk if the long shot actually came in.
It's a structure other brands can copy for high-stakes guarantee promos, though it only pencils out when the odds are genuinely stacked against the payout.
Channable's benchmark, drawn from 1.38 billion euros of verified spend across more than 10,000 European advertisers, shows Google Ads cost-per-click up 15% year over year across Shopping and Performance Max, while average return on ad spend fell 43% on Standard Shopping and 46% on Performance Max over the same period.
Paid search is becoming more of a margin test these days: when clicks cost more and convert for less, the channel’s only a viable long-term growth lever if you’ve already got strong unit economics and a strategy that’s dialed in.
Retail & Commerce Trends
A Dynata survey commissioned by Radial found that marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart capture 44% of first purchases from a new-to-someone brand, against 10% on retailer sites like Target and just 3% on social channels like TikTok Shop.
Marketplace usage is up for 38% of shoppers versus last year, led by millennials and Gen Z, and nearly 39% say they trust a brand more when it sells across multiple destinations, rising to 56% among Gen Z.
For DTC brands agonizing over where to acquire first-time customers, the data gives a clear takeaway: you’ve got to meet your customers where they are.
Walmart and Sam's Club rolled back prices across grocery, household, outdoor, toys, and apparel, with cuts ranging from a few cents to about $5 on staples like ground beef, corn, and Lay's chips.
It lands with food-at-home inflation still near a three-year high. When the largest retailer in the country resets its price floor, it moves the value benchmark everyone else gets measured against and tends to pull promotional pressure forward across the category.
If you sell anything price-sensitive, expect the comparison shoppers make to get sharper through the back half of the year.
Platform Ecosystem
Meta is launching checkout on Facebook and Instagram this summer, built on one-time virtual cards developed with Mastercard and Visa so payment details never reach the merchant.
Alongside it, Live Video Ads are rolling out across all markets (with US partners including CommentSold, Firework, and TalkShopLive turning livestreams into ads), and the affiliate program is expanding into India, Brazil, Mexico, and Southeast Asia via Flipkart, Mercado Libre, and Lazada.
It really looks like Meta is assembling the whole path from discovery to payment, which puts it in direct competition with Shopify and Stripe for the transaction layer.
For DTC brands, more of your checkout, payments, and affiliate economics may soon run through Meta, which is convenient and a deepening of platform dependence at the same time.
Meta AI now lets brands generate room visualizations with a tool called Muse Image: a shopper uploads a photo of their space, Meta places products from the brand's catalog into it, and routes the purchase back to the brand's site.
It draws on the same product data Meta already uses for ads, and the company is explicit that brands investing in catalog quality now will be best positioned as AI discovery scales.
This lands the same month Amazon added an AI image generator to its app and Stitch Fix rolled out AI outfit recommendations. The through-line for operators: the quality of your catalog is crucial; brands with clean, clear and detailed product images will be able to take the biggest advantages from the latest tech innovations from these platforms.
From September 30, Amazon will require professional sellers to maintain a Business Hour Delivery Rate of at least 90% on seller-fulfilled Amazon Business orders, meaning packages have to arrive during the buyer's operating hours.
Sellers still below the bar by October 30 risk having their offers deactivated for Amazon Business customers, though FBA and retail offers aren't affected.
If you sell to businesses on Amazon it's worth auditing your B2B fulfillment windows before the deadline lands in Q4.
Shopee is shifting responsibility for reporting taxes on affiliate and influencer commissions onto Brazilian sellers from August 1, while TikTok Shop's Brazil arm raises fees from July 15, lifting commission on sub-R$50 items from 6% to 10% and hiking its flat per-item fee by 50%.
Both follow fee increases earlier in the year from Shopee and Mercado Libre. Brazil isn't the story so much as the pattern: marketplaces that spent years buying growth are now repricing seller economics to chase profitability, and fee creep plus new compliance burden lands on the seller. It's a leading indicator of how take rates tend to move everywhere once a marketplace matures.
Marketplace Pulse finds that turnover among Amazon's top 10,000 sellers is running at almost exactly the rate it did seven years ago, but underneath that stability is a split: Chinese sellers now dominate the broad top-10,000 base while established US brands hold the very top 100 positions.
Holding a top spot has only gotten harder. For US DTC brands, it's a useful frame for thinking about where you can actually defend a position on Amazon, and where you're competing against a long tail of Chinese sellers on volume and price.
DTC Brands
Levi Strauss posted Q2 net revenue up 8% to $1.6 billion and net income up nearly a third to over $87 million, with direct-to-consumer sales growing 11% and now making up 51% of total revenue.
The brand credited a World Cup campaign, covering stadium logos, that became its most-viewed social effort ever with roughly a billion press impressions. It's a reminder that brand-building and channel mix still move the P&L: the stunt earned attention, but the DTC-first pivot is what turned it into margin.
On is looking at how to expand its automated LightSpray manufacturing beyond Switzerland and South Korea, weighing production in Europe and the US, and framing it explicitly as a supply-chain advantage.
It's an early sign of a premium DTC brand treating automated, nearshored manufacturing as a competitive moat rather than a cost center, a logical response as tariffs and supply-chain uncertainty make "where and how you make it" a strategic question again.
Herbal-tinctures brand Apothékary raised $16M ($10M in venture capital plus $6M in debt) as part of its Series A, from a syndicate that includes Shiseido's LIFT venture arm, roughly 50 angels, and RSF Social Finance on the debt side.
Founder Shizu Okusa, a former Goldman Sachs trader, has now raised about $32M in total and is targeting $40M in 2026 sales, with recent retail wins at Ulta, Whole Foods, and The Vitamin Shoppe.
On its own it's one raise, but as a signal it says something about where investor appetite still sits in a tighter market: functional wellness and ingestibles keep getting funded while plenty of other DTC categories can't get a meeting.
Funding & M&A
Wonder, the meal-prep and delivery company that owns GrubHub and Blue Apron, is raising hundreds of millions at a $9B valuation in what could be its last round before an IPO, with Marc Lore adding $200M of his own money.
The detail worth noting is the "IPO ratchet": investors get extra shares if the IPO prices below 1.5 times this round, a downside-protection term that signals both ambition and caution.
It's a marquee commerce raise and a rare window into how late-stage deals are being structured in a market that still isn't taking valuations for granted.
Klarna applied to establish an FDIC-insured bank in Utah, a move well beyond its buy-now-pay-later roots.
A charter would let it fund loans with customer deposits and pull more of its payments and lending in-house, reducing its dependence on partner banks, and it follows a similar step by fintech Mercury.
For merchants, BNPL is a live conversion lever at checkout, so a more vertically integrated Klarna could eventually reshape the fees, terms, and promotional offers you're able to pass along to shoppers.
Also This Week
AI referral traffic is poised to reshape the Amazon funnel (Modern Retail) — agencies are scrambling to measure how ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini traffic drives Amazon purchases.
Amazon drops the Featured Offer eligibility requirement for EU and UK sellers (ChannelX) — from July 20 the eligibility gate goes away for EU/UK sellers; how the Buy Box is selected (price, speed, performance) doesn't change.
Amazon plans a $25B+ eight-part bond sale to fund its AI buildout (Shopifreaks) — its last debt issuance of 2026; the AI arms race as a balance-sheet event.
TikTok Shop UK's books category is up 250% (ChannelX) — discovery commerce moving beyond impulse buys into repeat categories.
Back-to-school demand shifts to mass merchants as high-income families cut back (Retail Dive) — a Deloitte read on channel shift and softer spend.
Wix and Elavon partner on unified-commerce tools (Shopifreaks) — another platform pushing into online-plus-in-person.
Marketers adopt AI for social and retail media but hesitate on influencer and CTV (Digiday) — where AI is and isn't landing across channels.
Sam's Club taps Weight Watchers to expand membership perks (Modern Retail) — membership retailers bundling health services as a retention lever.
Garage is opening 20 profitable stores a year as Gen Z returns to the mall (Glossy) — profitable physical retail expansion against the digital-native grain.
Temu's European ad presence halves as SHEIN nears exit (PPC Land) — parcel-fee pressure showing up directly in paid-search behavior.
What DTC Is Talking About
I spend way too much time on social media, so you don’t have to.
Here’s a quick summary of what’s being talked about on DTC social media.
Alex McEachern of Intelligems argues the "CRO" label quietly caps testing at the landing page, when pricing, shipping, your offer, and checkout are all just as testable. Same tools, bigger lens; he frames it as a growth-experiment mindset rather than conversion-rate optimization.
Kurt Elster released nine free, MIT-licensed agent skills that chain in the order an agency actually works a client: find problems, fix the catalog data, enrich, grow. An early look at agencies turning their process into agent workflows.
Harry Delmege on treating creator content as fully scripted, brand-written production instead of handing creators loose bullet points. As paid acquisition gets harder, his bet is that controlling the message end to end is the leverage.
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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.