Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
As with each week, lately, the leading stories all revolve around the agentic commerce/AI shopping race.
It’s a fascinating time to be around software and ecommerce. Mainly because no one knows where it’s going to go.
Social media is all over whether personal agents are useful right now, or whether booking flight tickets is not a big enough pain point to power a new category of tools.
But the biggest platforms are all building as if this is going to enter the mainstream in the not-too-distant future.
Google, Shopify, Stripe, Meta, OpenAI… all shipping something new every week related to this.
While I’m not sure I see agents being the primary way people buy things any time soon, I also have a hard time beliving all of these mega-companies are missing the mark on this.
My advice: prepare for the shopping agent apocalypse. That means doing what you need to do to show up when an agent does a search, but more importantly, investing in your own channels, your own customer relationships, as a hedge against the uncertainty of AI agents, and how they decide what to recommend.
It’s never been more important to have a customers who know you, and who want to buy from you specifically, not just whichever brand shows up first in their feed/search results/prompt response.
Strong retention is going to be one of the biggest success conditions of ecommerce in the upcoming years. Book it.
Now, onto what’s new in ecommerce this week:
Google's Universal Cart goes live across Search and Gemini, and Shopify opens its catalog to any AI agent.
Meta's new business terms let it crawl the websites tied to your account from Oct. 30.
ChatGPT ads triple in advertisers, but DTC brands aren't betting Q4 on them.
NRF expects holiday sales above $1 trillion, with inflation doing a lot of the work.
Poppi's earnout falls from an estimated $278 million to $12 million.
Let's get into it.
Agentic Shopping
Google's Universal Cart is live in the US
Google turned on Universal Cart for US shoppers across Search and the Gemini app. Shoppers can save products from different retailers in one cart, get an alert when a saved item drops in price or comes back in stock, and see promo codes and card perks when they pay. Checkout runs on Google's Universal Commerce Protocol.
The merchant side moved the same week. Google opened a Merchant Center hub where more US merchants can apply to add checkout to their listings in AI Mode and Gemini, staying the seller of record and choosing which products get a Buy button. One thing to plan for: if you discount for Black Friday, Google will tell everyone who saved your product.
Shopify opens its catalog to any AI agent
Shopify launched Shop MCP and shop.md, which let any AI agent search over 1 billion products in Shopify Catalog, build carts and check out with Shop Pay. A shopper signs in with Shop, and the agent completes the purchase only after they confirm the total and payment method. The agent never sees the card.
That replaces one-off deals like the one Shopify struck with Meta's Muse in September. It's free for developers, and orders placed by an agent appear in your Shopify admin like any other order.
The Shopify Beat
Shopify's numbers on AI shoppers
Shopify's new Entrepreneur Effect data says AI-referred sessions converted 80% better than organic search from April to June, with order values 14% larger and nearly twice as many first-time customers as other channels. AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores tripled year over year, and 75% of AI-referred sales came from stores selling specialized products. Niche catalogs are doing well here.
AI agents can now see your markdowns
Shopify now shares your compare-at price with AI shopping agents through Shopify Catalog, so a sale shows up as a sale. It's on by default for most stores and off for stores that use compare-at for MSRP.
Shopify Flow can buy shipping labels for you
Set the conditions (a tag, certain products, single-item orders) and Flow buys a label for each matching order as it comes in, with your chosen carrier, service and package. One less manual step before peak.
Bonobos moves its site and 48 stores onto Shopify
Bonobos.com and all 48 of its Guideshops now run on Shopify. Fit profiles sync between the site and stores, associates can pull a customer's web browsing straight into the POS cart, and purchases made within seven days of a store visit, online or in person, get credited to that store and Guide.
Run your store from a Gemini chat
The Shopify connector for Gemini lets you manage products, collections, inventory and discounts, and pull orders, customers and analytics, from a chat. There's no extra Shopify fee. It can't edit or publish your live theme, issue refunds or move money, even with write access turned on.
Pay overseas suppliers from Balance
US merchants can now send international payments to suppliers in 13 countries from the Shopify Balance mobile app, with fees shown up front. Not every Balance account has it yet.
Meta Rewrites the Rules
Meta's new terms let it crawl your website from Oct. 30
From Oct. 30, businesses that keep using Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for business accept Meta's updated commercial terms. They let Meta use automated tools to crawl the websites "associated with" your business account and use that content to train and improve Meta products. Legal experts told Nieman Lab there's no opt-out short of stopping business use of Meta.
Meta says the update only consolidates language from older terms, won't change how it crawls, and that robots.txt still controls access. If you'd rather keep your product pages and copy out of Meta's crawlers, check your robots.txt before the deadline.
Meta takes away placement exclusions on sales campaigns
Meta has removed manual placement controls from campaigns using the sales, leads, engagement and app promotion objectives. You can no longer keep those ads out of spots like Facebook search results or in-stream slots between Reels. Only awareness and traffic campaigns keep the option for now.
Meta's suggested workarounds: upload different creative for each placement within one ad, use placement value rules to bid up or down by placement, and set account-level exclusions by objective. If you used exclusions to dodge weak placements, value rules are now your main lever for Q4.
AI Search and Ads
ChatGPT ads are growing fast, just not for your holiday budget
The number of businesses advertising on ChatGPT roughly tripled to about 60,000 between late August and early October, by New Street Research's count reported by The Information, as OpenAI cut prices and grew its ad team. Ad revenue reached a $1 billion annualized pace in late August.
DTC brands are holding back for now. In Modern Retail's reporting, Measured's Terence Einhorn says early results have "generally... been pretty bad," and Superfiliate's Anders Bill says most brands aren't moving meaningful budget away from Meta or search yet. A small test budget, not a Q4 channel.
If your ChatGPT traffic dipped last week, check direct
After GPT-6 launched, ChatGPT links stopped carrying their utm_source tag and referrer, so visits landed in analytics as direct traffic. On about 500 pages, Adobe's Cedric Huesler found ChatGPT visits fell by about 31,000 a day while direct rose by about 26,000 on the same pages.
On Oct. 15 he confirmed it was a bug and the tags are back. So a ChatGPT dip in mid-October is most likely a tracking gap, not lost demand.
The Holiday Outlook
NRF says holiday sales will top $1 trillion
NRF forecasts November and December retail sales will grow 4.2% to $1.013 trillion. Last year it forecast $1.02 trillion and sales came in at $972 billion. Bain expects more than half of this year's nominal growth to come from higher prices, and Mastercard expects online sales to rise 11%.
Prices are still climbing. September's CPI rose 0.6% for the month and 3.7% over the year, and toy prices jumped 4.2% in a single month. Bigger dollar totals don't necessarily mean more orders, so expect shoppers to compare harder.
TikTok Shop's beauty boom is cooling
Beauty and personal care sales on TikTok Shop grew 39% year over year to $992.9 million in Q3, per Charm.io estimates, down from 96% growth in Q1. TikTok Shop's beauty GM still expects a bigger holiday than last year, driven by more brand-hosted livestreams and its new Auction Live format.
He also says brands now plan their TikTok Shop holiday assortments months ahead. Still strong growth, but the easy gains are behind it.
Brand Building
Poppi's earnout shrinks to almost nothing
PepsiCo now expects to pay about $12 million of the extra $300 million it promised Poppi's founders and shareholders, down from $117 million in June and $278 million in December, per its latest quarterly filing. PepsiCo bought the prebiotic soda brand for $1.95 billion last year, with the extra payout tied to undisclosed growth targets by Q3 2027. PepsiCo says Poppi's volume still grew by double digits last quarter.
For founders weighing an exit, it's a clear example: the guaranteed price is the price. An earnout depends on growth after you've handed over control.
Little Spoon lets its DTC data pick its next retailers
After a record-setting debut at Target, Little Spoon is adding about 570 stores at H-E-B, Wegmans and Harris Teeter this month. It used eight years of first-party customer data to choose: the Northeast is its strongest region, New Jersey is its top state per capita, and Texas is its second-largest state by customers.
It's also going deep rather than wide, launching 21 to 32 products per retailer instead of one hero SKU. That's the payoff of starting DTC: your order data already shows where retail demand is.
Also This Week
Amex wants a paper trail for agent purchases - Its Intent Intelligence Framework records what a shopper told an AI agent to buy, can block purchases that don't match, and keeps the record for disputes. Read more →
Meta bans ads that link to TikTok - Advertisers whose campaigns point to TikTok or other ByteDance apps are blocked in the US and six other countries. Read more →
Google Ads adds channel priorities - Mark Search partners and Display as low priority and cap their share of daily budget in Search, Shopping and Performance Max. Read more →
App Store adds seasonal creative assets - Brands with apps can add promo headers and search assets, and get them approved ahead of a campaign. Read more →
Bealls is launching an app - The off-price chain is tying it to loyalty and a connected experience across stores and online. Read more →
Walmart tests marketplace items in stores - Select third-party products stocked in stores, so they arrive in hours alongside grocery orders. Read more →
ChatGPT buys Christmas gift ads on Google - A sponsored ChatGPT result showed up for "christmas gifts for dads." Read more →
eBay: nearly half of shoppers buy secondhand monthly - Saving money is the top reason in its 2026 Recommerce Report. Read more →
Orita raises $7M - The AI segmentation tool, used by Spanx, AG1 and Caraway, is expanding beyond Klaviyo into SMS, direct mail, CTV and Meta ads. Read more →
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
Agents need a wallet, and the wallet might keep the customer
VGS's Terry Angelos laid out the "wallet wars": Stripe Link, Shop Pay and PayPal are racing to become the way AI agents pay. The catch for stores is that when a wallet pays with its own stand-in card, the shopper's rewards, purchase protections and relationship with the store can get lost along the way.
Twenty reasons your retention isn't working
Nick Shackelford posted a 20-point checklist of where retention breaks: a silent first seven days, no answer to "I have too much," churn peaks nobody has mapped, and retention treated as a Q3 project with no owner. His advice is to fix these before spending another dollar on acquisition this Q4.
Black Friday won't rescue a flat year
On Ecomm Cowboy, @heyitsalexP made the point that most BFCM sales come from people who shopped with you or found you in the previous three months. If sales have been flat all year, build the Black Friday plan around how the year actually went.
Sell a win, not a discount
Sarah Levinger argues that most Black Friday discount-hunters never buy from the brand again. Her alternative: tiered offers for the first buyers, bundles instead of price cuts on your core product, and keeping sold-out doorbusters sold out rather than restocking mid-sale.
A plain-English way into TikTok Shop
Ridge CEO Sean Frank couldn't make sense of TikTok Shop's maze of agencies, Discord groups and tools that seem to do the same thing, so he built a YouTube primer. He says they're now doing six figures a month there, in a category nobody thought would work.
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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.