Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
As usual, there’s been a lot happening this week. The Retention Edge condenses it all into a convenient digest for you.
Here’s a quick look at what’s in this edition:
Shopify puts every store inside Meta's Muse agent, while Amazon asks to be left out.
Your Shopify conversion rate is about to look different.
Amazon, Walmart and Target all run October sales in the same week.
Only 7% of fashion shoppers would let AI buy for them without approval.
Sephora, Best Buy and Boots all open TikTok Shops.
Let's get into it.
Meta's Muse Can Now Shop From Every Shopify Store
Shopify put Shop Pay inside Meta's new AI agent
Meta launched Muse, its personal AI agent, on Sept. 8. People talk to it in the Muse app or in WhatsApp, and it can buy things for them. On Sept. 21, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said Shopify is "partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores." Then PayPal signed on too, making it Muse's third checkout option in two weeks, after Stripe's Link at launch.
If you're on Shopify, Muse can now buy from your store, without you lifting a finger. It's US-only for now. The agent works with the product data that’s already in Shopify, so clean titles, variants and shipping details matter more than they did a month ago.
Amazon told Meta to keep Muse off its site
Amazon asked to be removed from Muse, telling Retail Dive it got no advance notice and never authorized the agent to shop there. Its position: apps that buy on a customer's behalf "should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate."
But really, underneath the PR speak, it’s because they want control over the customer experience.
That’s what Amazon is built on - and it’s what every combatant in the AI agent arms race is after. Controlling the buying experience end to end, from discovery through to purchase.
The Shopify Beat
Your conversion rate may look different after Sept. 21
Shopify changed how Analytics counts sessions. Default session views now focus on human visitors, bot traffic is classified more consistently, and valid shopper journeys stay visible even without a standard pageview. Sessions, conversion rate, add-to-cart rate, bounce rate and a handful of other session-based numbers may move. Orders, sales and customer counts don't change.
Shopify's advice is to treat Sept. 21 as a new baseline. If your conversion rate jumps or dips this week, check this before you credit or blame your last campaign.
Profit reports now count duties and shipping on the same order
Profitability data now includes both duties and shipping costs when they apply to the same order, and handles multi-currency orders better. Reports like "Profit margin by order" and "Average profit margin by market" may show new numbers. If you sell cross-border, your margins by market just got more accurate.
Shop Pay Installments now works across all your business entities
Merchants running more than one business entity in the US, Canada or the UK can now turn on Shop Pay Installments for every entity, not only the primary one. Useful if you run separate brands or regions under one setup.
Rollouts got a redesigned setup
The tool for scheduling launches, temporary events and store tests has a new setup flow. Timely, with October sales two weeks out.
Canada Goose's Canadian store is now on Shopify
Harley Finkelstein announced that canadagoose.com/en-ca just went live on Shopify. Another big brand picking the platform.
The Holiday Season Starts in October
Amazon, Walmart and Target all start their holiday push on the same week
Three of the biggest US retailers are taking it into their hands to extend the holiday shopping season.
Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days is coming up on Oct. 6-7: 48 hours of Prime deals across more than 35 categories. Target Circle Deal Days runs the same two days, with early access for Circle 360 members on Oct. 5. Walmart's sale runs longer, Oct. 5-11, and doesn't require a membership.
It’s not a new trend; the holiday season has been growing wider every year, with brands doing all they can to squeeze more out of the festive hype.
Accertify looked at more than 576 million Cyber Week transactions from 2021 to 2025. The share that happened before Thanksgiving climbed steadily, from 21.8% to 24.2%.
That’s not to say you need to start your Black Friday sale next week though. As a lot of retailers spread this out and dilute their sales windows, there could be value in pushing back and keeping to a strictly defined, limited time sales events that retain the feeling of urgency.
Creators are booking holiday deals in summer
Some creators started hearing from brands about holiday campaigns as early as July. Fall events like Prime Big Deal Days pulled some holiday shopping into October, so brands now treat August and September as prime awareness months. One talent manager told Modern Retail she got some of her earliest-ever requests for Q4 partnerships this year.
If you haven't lined up creators for Q4, you're competing for calendars that are already filling.
Gas prices are spiking again right before peak
US gas prices are up about 50% since the conflict involving the US, Iran and Israel began on Feb. 28, and some states just saw sharp new jumps. In Wisconsin, the average gallon rose 61 cents in eight days.
Most holiday inventory is already in the country, so the bigger risks are UPS and FedEx fuel surcharges and shoppers trimming gift budgets. Worth rechecking your shipping rates and free-shipping threshold before November.
What Shoppers Want From AI
Shoppers trust AI to advise, not to buy
Only 7% of fashion shoppers would let an AI assistant make purchases without their approval, according to an ACI Worldwide survey of more than 3,300 US and UK consumers. More than half (53%) are uncomfortable letting an assistant buy for them at all.
A separate SmartCustomer survey of nearly 1,200 US shoppers found 76% used AI to make purchases in the past year, but 89% don't fully trust its recommendations, and a third regretted a purchase based on one. Shoppers are happy to research with AI. They still want the final say.
Bad site search now sends shoppers to ChatGPT
In a Nosto survey of 2,000 UK and US consumers, 59% said they often leave online stores because the search is poor. When results are irrelevant, 62% say they'd likely go to Google, 53% to another shopping site and 40% to an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude. That last number rises to 50% for shoppers under 45.
Stitch Fix says AI try-ons are lifting spend
Stitch Fix's "See it on me" feature shows shoppers AI-generated images of themselves in the outfits they're browsing, built from a selfie. On the Sept. 23 earnings call, CEO Matt Baer said clients who use it show a "significant lift in 90-day Freestyle spend."
The company has shared more than 22 million of these images since launch, and revenue grew 4.2% in a quarter when the US apparel market was flat.
Amazon sellers can now run their store from Claude
Amazon launched a Selling Partner plugin that connects a seller's listings, inventory, sales and performance data to outside AI assistants, starting with its own Amazon Quick and, in beta, Anthropic's Claude. The assistant can act on the account, and the seller approves each action first.
Seller Assistant also now remembers each seller's pricing patterns and goals, and runs workflows in the background, like alerting you when a top product drops below four stars or adjusting prices when a competitive opening appears. The plugin is in beta for US sellers, and every primary account holder can sign up for 12 free months of Amazon Quick Plus until Dec. 31.
Sephora, Best Buy and Boots all just opened TikTok Shops
Sephora launched its TikTok Shop with a livestream hosted by Mikayla Nogueira and will add products in monthly drops. One POV Beauty holiday set isn't sold on Sephora's own site at all: its product page sends shoppers to TikTok Shop. Best Buy opened a storefront with brands like Dyson, Oura, Bose and Microsoft, and handles fulfillment and returns itself. Boots goes live in the UK on Sept. 28, starting with No7.
As one agency exec told Glossy, retailers would rather shoppers came to their own sites, but "the world doesn't really work that way." If you sell beauty or electronics on TikTok Shop, your competition just got bigger names with their own creator programs.
Brand Building
Spot & Tango is spending $3.5M on brand after years at $0
The fresh pet food brand spent effectively nothing on top-of-funnel marketing last year and grew on Meta, Google and TikTok performance ads. This year it's putting $3.5 million into out-of-home, connected TV and events, starting with extra-long dog illustrations in more than 570 New York subway cars.
Co-founder Dylan Munro's reasoning is one a lot of subscription brands will recognize: "Performance marketing can only take you so far."
Inside Stanley 1913’s evolution
An article on Glossy.co shares a look behind the curtain at how an $800 million brand operates.
The part that stands out - Stanley's Farm Rio collab hit nearly 50% global sell-through in its first week and filled six of its 10 best-seller spots. But Stanley measures collabs on what the customers they bring in buy next, over six months.
It’s part of a strategy that’s led to a much more diverse product mix, where their flagship product, The Quencher, at one point represented 80% of their mix. They’re now branching out to new areas; and judging their success on how many customers stick around and keep buying, which is something all brands should learn from.
Also This Week
More than half of DTC brands in a Tatari survey plan to spend more on Black Friday TV - 24 of 41 of Tatari's own clients, so a small sample, and one in five named AI chatbots as a priority channel. Read more →
Net-a-Porter is chasing its best customers, not more customers - sales grew 5.6% while active customers fell 11.1%, and the CEO wants roughly 3,000 more top spenders. Read more →
How Rothy's passed $211M in sales while other DTC shoe brands stumbled - patient, tested expansion into physical retail. Read more →
Common Thread Collective acquired TikTok Shop agency TBAR Partners - TikTok Shop know-how is moving into the bigger agencies. Read more →
Six banks, including Bank of America and Capital One, published principles for agentic commerce - covering transparency, safety, privacy, choice and interoperability. Read more →
Google dropped free product listings in the EEA - a Digital Markets Act change that hits anyone selling into Europe. Read more →
Google is testing product listings that click straight through to the merchant - instead of a side panel comparing retailers. Read more →
eBay affiliates can now create links inside its mobile app - affiliate tooling moves into the app. Read more →
ChatGPT's share of AI prompts fell from 70% to 50% in six months - Gemini rose to 30% and Claude to 11%, so showing up in AI answers is now a multi-assistant job. Read more →
Most shoppers plan to spend the same this holiday - 43% plan flat spending vs. 35% who plan more, and discounts and free shipping matter most. Read more →
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
AI traffic is growing fast, and it's still small.
Kurt Elster re-ran his numbers on the same 10 established Shopify stores he's tracked for two years. ChatGPT sent them 6,868 visits this August, up from 59 in August 2024, and AI still made up just 0.20% of August revenue.
Check your site before you blame your ads.
Ronak Shah shared two numbers from the same week at a supplement brand: one product page headline change lifted conversion 41%, while broken add-to-cart buttons and payment glitches roughly doubled acquisition costs on its top bundle. His fix is having AI run a test checkout every day, so a broken cart gets caught before anyone rewrites the ads.
RCS might be worth testing before everyone else does.
Ridge CMO Connor MacDonald told MarketingOperators he's seeing a 46% lift in revenue per message on RCS, the richer successor to SMS, and that "there's an early mover advantage here."
Human-written emails are back, and Black Friday means more sends.
Max Sturtevant, founder of email and SMS agency Well Copy, walked through his playbook at Commerce Roundtable: Well Copy turned off AI copy and brought humans back, and for BFCM he runs three different offers at 2 to 5 emails a day, resending the same email. He also argues sender name matters more than the subject line.
Your TikTok Shop bestseller might not be your website bestseller.
Ridge is known for its wallets, but MacDonald says its hero product on TikTok Shop is a $29 tracker card, and its most popular ads there "don't feature a Ridge wallet at all." Let each channel find its own winner instead of assuming your site's top seller will carry over.
The refund bot is coming.
Nikita Bier, formerly head of product at X, posted a mock prompt for a personal agent: find every Amazon purchase, call the manufacturer, demand a refund, threaten a bad review, escalate to the CEO, and "do not stop until you've collected $1 million in refunds." It’s a joke - or is it? I’ve seen a lot of people reposting this out of fear that tireless agents are going to completely derail the trust barrier that exists in customer support.
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That’s all for this week.
I’ll be back in touch soon, with 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.