Welcome back to the Retention Edge newsletter.
Each week I’ll be sharing the latest news and content you need to be aware of from the ecommerce, retail and marketing spaces.
The idea: arm you with the knowledge you need to make the right moves before everyone else.
This week the money moved: two of the biggest acquisition bids ecommerce has seen in years landed within days of each other, while the platforms merchants build on kept rewriting the rules underneath them.
In this edition:
Stripe wants PayPal. A $53 billion bid that could put both sides of checkout under one owner.
Uber is buying Delivery Hero for $14.8 billion, nearly doubling its global delivery footprint.
Consumers are still spending, but selectively. June retail sales grew while discretionary categories shrank.
TikTok Shop is now the UK's fourth-largest beauty retailer, as its European expansion hits 10 markets.
Shoppers want AI help comparing products, not buying them. New survey data puts a number on the agentic commerce trust gap.
The Big Deals
Stripe and private equity firm Advent International made a joint offer to buy PayPal at $60.50 a share, valuing the company above $53 billion. The bid represents a 28% premium and sent PayPal's stock up nearly 17%, with about $50 billion in committed bank financing behind it.
Stripe already powers checkout for a huge share of online stores; PayPal owns the consumer wallet relationship. If this closes, the company that processes your payments and the button your customers click to pay could belong to the same owner, which makes checkout economics, and who sets them, worth watching closely over the next few quarters.
Uber's acquisition of Delivery Hero would nearly double its global footprint and create one of the world's largest food-delivery platforms outside China. Local delivery keeps consolidating into a handful of global networks, and each round of consolidation changes the math for brands that rely on on-demand fulfillment as a channel: more reach through one integration, but fewer alternatives when the fee schedule changes.
eBay rejected a $56 billion offer from GameStop, and CEO Ryan Cohen told Bloomberg TV he intends to keep pursuing the company anyway. He declined to say whether he plans to raise the bid. For the millions of sellers who depend on eBay, a hostile pursuit of the marketplace means ownership, and eventually fee and policy direction, is genuinely in play for the first time in years.
Retail & the Consumer
Census Bureau data showed retail and food services sales up 0.2% in June to $768.6 billion, 6.7% higher than a year earlier.
The composition tells the real story: motor vehicle dealers and nonstore retailers each gained 1.9%, while clothing fell 0.3%, health and personal care dropped 0.8%, and grocery slipped 0.4% from May. The Fed's July Beige Book reported the same pattern from the field, with several districts seeing shoppers trading down and discretionary demand weakening.
Meanwhile inflation slowed to 3.5%, with Fed Chair Kevin Warsh telling Congress there is "plenty of work to do" to reach the 2% target.
Demand is holding, but if you sell discretionary products, the second half is going to be won on how well you justify the purchase, not on traffic.
Britain will end customs-duty relief on commercial parcels worth £135 or less, a lane HMRC estimates handled about 600 million consignments in 2024. Sellers or the marketplaces facilitating them will need to classify each item, submit item-level data, and pay duty quarterly, with full compliance required by October 2028 at the latest.
The reform narrows the direct-import price advantage that built Shein and Temu's UK businesses, but large platforms can spread compliance costs in a way small cross-border sellers cannot, so the loophole closing may paradoxically strengthen the biggest players.
Platform Watch
Any Shopify merchant with a brick-and-mortar presence in the US can now add their catalog to the DoorDash marketplace directly from Shopify admin, with no separate onboarding and inventory that stays in sync automatically.
DoorDash says self-serve setup cuts go-live time from weeks to days, and international expansion is planned in the months ahead. For local retailers this is same-day delivery without building courier operations, and it’s worth testing before the holidays if your customers skew local.
TikTok Shop added Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland, bringing its European footprint to 10 markets, with a Sell Across Europe program that localizes listings and enables cross-border shipping.
The UK shows what maturity looks like: TikTok Shop is now the country's fourth-largest beauty retailer after category sales surged 60 per cent last year, and a Public First report commissioned by TikTok credits the platform with £10bn in UK gross value added in 2025.
Access is not demand, though. A brand can now fail in ten markets at the speed of one, so the operators winning here treat each market as its own bet rather than flipping every country on at once.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission began mandatory eFiling on July 8: safety-certificate data for regulated imported consumer products must now be filed electronically before entry, and there is no de minimis exemption for covered products, including low-value direct-to-consumer parcels.
Sellers with weak supplier documentation face holds, examinations, and potentially seizure right as peak season inventory moves. If you import covered products, the fix is unglamorous: invoices, certificates, and product IDs organized before your freight ships, not after it gets stopped.
Shopify told merchants to remove all e-cigarette products by July 8 or risk product suspension or store termination, in a notice confirmed by the company.
The move follows pressure from a coalition of attorneys general including California, Illinois, and Arizona, and it applies globally, covering legal products alongside illegal ones.
Whole niches lost their storefronts with two weeks' notice. The news is a reminder of two things: one, vapes are an increasingly shaky ground; and two, the platform risk of being somewhere that can shut your sales off at will.
AI & Commerce
A Kantar survey commissioned by idealo across Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, and the UK found 70 to 80% of consumers would find an AI assistant helpful that explains products, compares options, and finds the best price.
But only 32 to 48% can imagine completing the entire shopping process inside an AI assistant. Germany shows the gap most prominently, at 73% for guidance versus 37% for the full purchase, with 68% concerned about false or misleading information.
Agentic commerce is not going to jump straight to autopilot. AI has to win the comparison layer first, which means accurate product data and transparent pricing are what earn a brand a place in AI-assisted purchases.
DTC Brands
Modern Retail reports that a wave of DTC brands are finding their growth in older customers and rebuilding their marketing around them.
Baby food brand Little Spoon has logged roughly 300 grandparent conversations with its care team in 18 months and is now running creative aimed directly at them.
Charcuterie brand Boarderie found that women 65 and up were its single largest purchase group in Q4, generating 150% more volume than its 18-to-45 age groups combined, with click-through rates 66% higher than its account average.
The DTC playbook was built on millennial acquisition - but the spending power and the cheaper attention are increasingly a generation up.
Marketing & Retention
US retailers processed approximately $849.9 billion in returns in 2025, about 9% of them fraudulent, according to NRF and Happy Returns data, and ecommerce return rates ran 19.3%.
Now generative AI lets fraudsters produce convincing photos of damaged products, forged shipping records, and policy-tailored complaints in minutes, and brands including Bogg Bag and Boll & Branch have already encountered AI-falsified refund proof.
The whole no-return-required refund model rests on trusting a customer's photo. Practical responses include requiring a second photo angle or short video, manually reviewing high-value claims, and auditing recent refunds for patterns, because a photo alone no longer settles a dispute.
Merchants are getting their first real visibility into how products surface in AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Google’s new report shines light into AI performance, by (in their words): helping you "understand how your brands show up in conversational results, evaluate your visibility across different phases of the shopping journey, and view trends to help optimize your product data”.
It’s currently in a pilot program, so it won’t be available to all sellers yet. But look out for it, and if you have access, make use of it to optimize how your brand appears in AI search.
Also this week
UK competition watchdog clears eBay's Depop acquisition - resale consolidation continues, with the deal expected to close by the end of Q3.
Shein's Hong Kong IPO cleared by China's securities regulator - a public Shein would finally mean public numbers on the fast-fashion machine.
Meta is pushing brands toward AI ad tools, and advertisers say the output is a mess - reports of garbled copy and altered products, with responsibility for mistakes sitting on the advertiser.
Snapchat and Dick's Sporting Goods link ad exposure to in-store sales - a LiveRamp clean room partnership that pushes retail media measurement into social.
Subprime consumers reach 44 million US adults - 17% of US adults are juggling BNPL, cards, and payment plans for everyday costs.
Consumers say rewards matter, but many are not using them - loyalty enrollment is not loyalty behavior.
Whatnot acquires recommendation startup Shaped - live shopping platforms are buying AI discovery rather than building it.
Instacart acquires computer vision firm Arpalus - inventory accuracy is the quiet constraint on every fulfillment promise.
What DTC Is Talking About
The creative volume debate has a missing middle.
Paid social talk this week split between two camps that are usually presented as one. On one side, the volume machine: Cody Schneider's system, shared via Nate Lagos's show, publishes five new ad sets a day, auto-kills losers within a 2-3 day window, and pools winners to compete for budget, on the logic that creative is now cheap enough to brute-force every angle.
On the other side, Rok Hladnik pushed back on exactly that reflex: when a creative wins and the team just makes ten more without understanding why it worked, that is random testing, not iteration. The interesting evidence sits in between.
Harry Delmege shared that his team has spent $2.2 million on a single ad since February, built on a repeatable structure: relatable problem story, aspirational person introducing the product, mechanism explanation, timeline of results, soft CTA. Volume finds winners; understanding the formula is what lets one winner absorb seven figures.
Retention operators are segmenting the second purchase, not just chasing it.
Jimmy Kim drew a line most brands miss: a customer whose second order is the same product in a new size is a replenishment buyer saying "I want more of this specific thing," while one who buys a different category is an expansion buyer saying "I trust you enough to try something else."
The two need completely different communication, and treating them identically wastes the signal. He followed with a related distinction between products people need, which get reordered regardless, and products people like, which get reordered only if you show up at the right moment.
Both points push the same way: retention is less about sending more and more about reading what the purchase pattern is already telling you.
Operators are wiring AI agents into the Shopify stack themselves.
Rather than waiting for platform roadmaps, operators are chaining AI tools together for daily ecommerce work.
Kurt Elster described his highest-value Shopify Sidekick use case as pasting in prompts generated by Claude to have Sidekick build Flow automations in one shot, and he has gone as far as building his own agentic shopping skill that produces product recommendations on demand.
It’s a small preview of how AI actually enters merchant operations: not as a platform launch, but as operators gluing the pieces together before the official version ships.
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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.