Insight

6 min read - In the first week of August 2026, three significant AI deployments landed within days of each other. Dunelm launched "Ask Dunelm," an AI-powered shopping assistant built with Google Cloud, now live in its iOS app. Morrisons rolled out Evercheck AI-powered self-checkout technology across 200 stores. And across the Atlantic, Kohl's deployed a Gemini-powered...

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9 min read - When the world's largest payment network spends $2.4 billion on a single acquisition, it is worth asking what they are buying and why they could not build it themselves. On 3 August 2026, Visa ...

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11 min read - In five days, Google is changing how its Smart Bidding system behaves when campaigns are limited by budget, and the eCommerce advertisers who stand to lose the most are, counterintuitively, the ones whose campaigns are currently performing the best. Starting August 17, campaigns using Target CPA or Target...

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9 min read - On 23 July 2026, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act into law. As the ...

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10 min read - There is a growing problem in AI-powered search that most eCommerce businesses have not noticed yet: AI platforms are citing your content as a source but never mentioning your brand name in the answer. Your information is being used to help shoppers make purchasing decisions, but those shoppers have no idea it came from you. ...

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11 min read - Every eCommerce business tracks conversions. Most can tell you which channels, campaigns, and ads drove those conversions, at least according to their attribution model. But here is the uncomfortable question most attribution dashboards cannot answer: would those customers have bought anyway? That question...

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10 min read - Michaels, North America's leading arts and crafts retailer, just launched "Ask Mike," an AI-powered shopping assistant built with Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. What makes this story noteworthy is not the technology itself. It is the speed, the approach, and the early results, all of which carry practical lessons for eCommerce...

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10 min read - Nike announced on Tuesday that it is consolidating more than 1,000 digital storefronts across China's marketplace platforms down to a handful of official channels. By January 2027, the brand's online presence in China will rest within the Nike app, Nike.com.cn, and flagship experiences on Tmall, JD.com, and Douyin. Everything else closes. ...

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63 min read - Most eCommerce stores today run three to four analytics tools simultaneously. Gartner's...

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11 min read - On 21 July, Search Engine Land published a cluster of articles that, taken together, paint a picture of a fundamental shift in how eCommerce brands need to think about search visibility. The convergence of research on ChatGPT topic ownership, category framing in AI recommendations, schema markup for AI search, and Google's rollout of Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite...

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12 min read - On July 24, 2026, Mastercard's revised standards for scam merchant monitoring, sometimes called SMMP, took effect. The rules, laid out in Mastercard's ...

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12 min read - On 20 July, Google confirmed via the Google...

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11 min read - New research from Gartner reveals a striking disconnect in how consumers interact with AI for customer service: customers are now three times more likely to use a third-party generative AI tool such as ChatGPT or Claude than a brand's own chatbot. More telling still, while third-party AI tool usage has doubled in the past year, brand chatbot adoption...

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13 min read - Google AI mode is becoming a commerce platform, and the EU just ordered Google to open its data On July 16, two announcements landed within hours of each other, and together they sketch out eCommerce's near future. Google began rolling out Connected Apps in AI Mode, letting US users complete shopping, design...

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10 min read - A striking statistic emerged from retail industry research highlighted by Retail Dive...

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9 min read - The National Retail Federation's latest forecast says back-to-school spending is set to reach record highs in 2026. At the same time, nearly two-thirds of consumers have already started shopping for the season, and affordability is their number one concern. If that sounds contradictory, welcome to the paradox defining modern retail. The numbers...

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11 min read - Search Engine Land published a deep dive this week on hydration and SEO that every eCommerce team should read carefully. While the concept of hydration, the process by which server-rendered HTML becomes interactive in the browser, has been a developer concern for years, its implications for search visibility have never been more significant...

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10 min read - A convergence of data points from the past 48 hours paints a picture that eCommerce merchants can no longer ignore: AI-powered platforms are rapidly replacing traditional search as the primary discovery mechanism for products, tools, and brands. The implications are profound, immediate, and largely underestimated. ...

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10 min read - Google has confirmed it is investigating reports of reviews going missing from Google Business Profiles, a problem that has been simmering since late 2025 but escalated sharply in early July. As ...

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8 min read - Two pieces of research published on July 2 paint a detailed, and somewhat uncomfortable picture of how AI is fundamentally reshaping product and brand discovery. When read together, they form a clear directive for eCommerce merchants: the discovery landscape is shifting beneath your feet, and the brands that survive will be the ones that own their data...

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