Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
Once again, I’ve got for you the latest in ecommerce, marketing and retention so you can stay ahead of the game.
In this edition:
The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon over years of secretly inflated search-ad prices.
Williams-Sonoma's AI assistant converts shoppers 3x the normal rate.
Anthropic handed retailers a blueprint for their own shopping and merchant agents.
Sephora is joining TikTok Shop, the clearest sign yet the channel has gone mainstream.
Fashion's pure-DTC era is being declared over.
Let's get into it.
Platform Ecosystem
The FTC and 22 state attorneys general have sued Amazon, alleging it added a hidden surcharge to its search ad auctions back in 2019 that pushed advertisers to pay well above what the auction should have cost, with the biggest hikes timed to Prime Day and Black Friday.
Internal documents cited in the complaint show Amazon feared disclosure would damage advertiser trust; the agency says more than a million brands were affected.
Amazon rejects it, arguing cost-per-click was flat inflation-adjusted from 2019 to 2024 while conversion rates rose 24%.
These cases drag on for years and few brands can walk away from a nearly $70 billion ad platform, but if you run Amazon ads, this is the rare story where the outcome could land back in your account.
Sephora will pilot a TikTok Shop presence starting September 19, built around exclusive monthly "Sephora Drop Shop" product drops with creator content and a TikTok Live reveal.
When a prestige retailer treats TikTok Shop as core strategy rather than an experiment, the channel has officially graduated from indie-brand territory.
US live shopping is forecast to hit nearly $20 billion this year, up roughly 35%, led by TikTok and Whatnot (now valued at $20 billion), with TikTok's live shopping sales more than doubling in the first half of 2026.
It's still a fraction of China's projected $1.1 trillion, so the runway is long, just mind the fees (TikTok takes 6%, Whatnot 4-8%) and the real challenge, which is now visibility, not setup.
The Shopify Beat
Shopify is already live on Claude's new Commerce Agents.
The same day Anthropic launched Claude Commerce Agents, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein confirmed Shopify's reference implementation is already live: out-of-the-box agent tools for most merchants, building blocks for those who want to build their own. The platforms are racing to put AI shopping agents in merchants' hands (more on Anthropic below).
AI Search and Agentic Commerce
A rare AI story with real numbers: shoppers who use Olive, Williams-Sonoma's on-site assistant, convert at 3x the rate of those who don't, and its new Pottery Barn assistant resolves more than 70% of conversations without a human.
The kicker is that a personalized visit now generates roughly nine times the revenue of an average one, up from two times a year ago.
A warning, though: because here’s where brands are going to trap themselves. You see these numbers, and think “We should push everyone through our AI assistant, because they’ll convert more.”
Not necessarily. It’s likely that people convert more when they willingly use the AI assistant.
Think of it as a supplement to the customer experience, not the default.
Anthropic released reference blueprints for retailers to build their own AI agents, one to help shoppers find and buy, one to help operators with inventory, pricing and marketing, deployable via the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry or Google Vertex.
Two things matter for operators: the shopping agent runs inside your own site with payment staying with you, and the merchant agent needs human sign-off before anything goes live.
As I said above, be careful of over-indexing and making the agentic path the default path. That will just confuse a lot of your customers.
But by all means, start building. The infrastructure is getting stronger by the day.
DTC Brands
Everlane sold to Shein for $80 million, Outdoor Voices and Parade got absorbed, Allbirds reset, and the idea that online distribution plus values-led messaging was enough has aged badly.
Glossy's article argues that pure-DTC for fashion brands is dead. But don’t confuse that with DTC as a whole being dead.
Some counter-examples: Cuyana (90% sell-through, nearly 60% repeat customers) and Faherty (revenue tripled in three years, 78 stores, 700 wholesale doors). They’re winning with DTC, but as just one channel.
As one advisor puts it, customers don't see channels, they see brands. Think of what your brand needs to do as a whole; and don’t pigeonhole yourself into existing on one channel alone.
Quince, the digitally native $50-cashmere brand, badly underestimated its first sample sale: a four-block line and inventory gone six hours early, with 600 transactions at three items each.
The smart part is using a physical moment to learn what online data can't, which new categories people actually reach for, while a four-block line doubles as its own acquisition channel. Quince is now past $2 billion in sales.
Funding and M&A
Dollar Shave Club made its first acquisition, Gen Z body-care brand Truly Beauty, adding a mass-premium tier and pushing further into women's grooming. It's a small deal with a bigger signal: DSC is building a multi-brand platform a few years after private equity took it off Unilever's hands. Watch whether more scaled DTC brands start rolling up smaller ones.
Marketing and Retention
A year into its RedVest Media network, Ace added off-site incrementality measurement, influencer and social tools, a DoorDash ad partnership, and weather-triggered programmatic.
Two takeaways: 91% of its DoorDash shoppers have never set foot in an Ace store (a real acquisition channel hiding in a delivery app), and the weather triggers show retail media getting more contextual, grass seed after heavy rain, generators before a storm.
Retail Trends
Pre-alcohol gummies and drinks are showing up from big-box shelves to fine dining, pitched at young drinkers who still want to feel good the next day. Undo launched in 2025, raised a $1 million seed in August, and just rolled into 889 Target stores, merchandised alongside beauty and wellness rather than the dusty supplement aisle. It's a clean example of finding a new category in an old behavior.
Also This Week
State fairs are the hot new pop-up spot for brands like E.l.f. and Levi's — an unexpected, high-traffic offline channel for brand reach.
The Home Depot is extending AI assistance in its local stores — more evidence of where AI is actually landing in retail.
How Hershey's Katseye campaign courts Gen Z's desire for indulgence — a creative angle for consumer brands chasing younger buyers.
Axe is repositioning for a more mature audience while nodding to its Y2K roots — a legacy brand growing up with its customer.
How Wizard Wellness used a beauty playbook to disrupt the allergy aisle — cross-category tactics applied to an unglamorous space.
The Fed's Beige Book shows high-end spending holding as household strain deepens — a bifurcated consumer, with premium holding and mass under pressure.
Ollie's Bargain Outlets is plowing $15M into lower prices — another read on how price-sensitive shoppers have become.
J. Peterman appears to have folded — a storied catalog brand quietly shutting down.
Why brands are turning to older creators for authenticity AI can't fake — an influencer-strategy shift worth noting.
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
Where AI belongs in customer experience, and where it doesn't.
Eli Weiss makes the case that dumping everything into one giant "support" bucket is how brands get burned automating CX. Decide ticket type by ticket type.
A practical way to show up in AI search.
Kurt Elster shares an AEO tactic: replace your Shopify product descriptions with a metafield written for an LLM, since buyers now search in long prompts, not keywords.
One operator turned off 15% of the budget just to see what would break.
Rabah Rahil pulled the plug on the spend meant to surface his brand in AI answers, because the reporting could never prove it worked.
Five CRO tests you can skip testing and just ship.
Andrew Faris argues a handful of conversion changes work north of 90% of the time, so implement them and save your testing budget for the real unknowns.
Meta may be quietly rewarding partnership ads.
Sean Frank says he's seeing lower CPMs and better CACs from partnership ads and suspects Meta has a finger on the scale. Worth a test on your own account.
Brought to you by MobiLoud
The Retention Edge newsletter is brought to you by MobiLoud: the best mobile app builder for serious brands on Shopify, Shopify Plus, and every other ecommerce stack.
Unlike other app builders, which squeeze your brand into strict templates and struggle to replicate everything from your website in your app, MobiLoud lets you build custom mobile apps, powered by your existing tech stack.
Everything that works on your site works in your app. And you get to maintain two unique channels (website and app) from one place.
It’s the engine behind the VIP channels from brands like John Varvatos, Jack & Jones, Tadashi Shoji and many more.
If you want to see what your site could look like as an app, get in touch and book a free preview and consultation; no commitment, no stress.
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.