Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
Here’s what’s happening in ecommerce, marketing and retention this week:
Amazon will now put the Prime badge on your own website, at no extra cost.
Shopify opens checkout to AI agents, and Google's AI Mode checkout is on by default for eligible stores.
A record $275.1 billion holiday forecast lands in the same week consumer confidence hits a 12-year low.
AI shopping answers favor big retailers, and advertisers still can't measure ChatGPT ads well enough to scale them.
New York City's click-to-cancel rule is live.
Let's get into it.
Amazon Wants to Manage Your Whole Business
You can now offer Prime delivery on your own website
Merchants using Amazon's Multichannel Fulfillment (MCF) in the US can now add fast, free Prime delivery as a shipping option on their own sites, at no additional cost. The Prime badge shows on your product pages, Amazon checks the shopper's Prime membership after they order, and the order ships from your inventory in Amazon's network. Shopify stores get it through the Amazon MCF and Buy with Prime app.
Amazon also launched a discount program that saves FBA sellers 15-25% on fulfillment fees for orders from their own sites, marketplaces and social channels. One merchant Amazon quotes says sales rose nearly 10% after turning on the badge.
Seller Central now manages your Shopify, TikTok, Walmart and eBay orders
Amazon is rolling out multichannel selling tools inside Seller Central. US sellers can connect their eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Walmart accounts, import those listings, see every channel's orders in one place, and fulfill any of them through Amazon in a few clicks. It's free, and Amazon says more than 95% of independent sellers in its store already sell on multiple channels.
Amazon says your off-Amazon data stays private to you. Even so, it's worth deciding how much of your business you want running through one dashboard, and whose dashboard it is.
The Shopify Beat
Shopify opened checkout to AI agents on every eligible store
On Sept. 28, Shopify extended WebMCP support to checkout. Browser-based AI agents, like Meta's Muse and Instinct, can now read a checkout, change the address or delivery option, and place the order once the buyer authorizes it, Shop Pay included. They use structured tools built on Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol instead of clicking through pages built for humans.
It's rolling out to all eligible Shopify merchants, so there's nothing to switch on. A week after Amazon blocked Muse, Shopify went the other way, and the same week it teamed up with Instinct, a personal agent people use in iMessage or WhatsApp that checks out with Shop Pay. The practical work stays the same: an agent buys from the product data, shipping options and policies you already have, so keep them accurate.
Google can now check out your products inside AI Mode, and it's on by default
Google has started letting shoppers buy from eligible US Shopify stores directly inside AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, using the same Universal Commerce Protocol. Shopify says it's switched on by default for eligible stores, so you may already have it without having chosen it.
You keep the customer and the order, but the checkout isn't your checkout. Shopify says some checkout blocks, product bundles, custom pixels and client-side Google Analytics tracking don't carry over. If that matters to you, the setting is under Sales channels > Agentic. Turn it off and shoppers still find your products in AI Mode, they just finish the purchase on your site.
Canvas lets you redesign your store by chatting with Sidekick
Canvas is a new design surface that lays out every page of your store in one workspace. You can click any element to edit it, or tell Sidekick what you want and watch the changes land in real time, from one section to a full redesign. It's rolling out to existing stores now, under Online Store > Themes. As Tobi Lütke put it, "it's all still powered by liquid," so Canvas edits your real theme code rather than a separate page builder.
At this time there are still limits. At launch, Canvas doesn't support third-party themes from the Theme Store, Markets, rollouts, translations, or app blocks and embeds, and themes edited in Canvas don't get theme updates.
Set shorter return windows for holiday items
You can now override your return window by market for specific collections, products or variants. Shopify's own example: 14 days for a "Holiday 2026" collection while your storewide default stays at 90. If an item matches more than one override, the shortest window wins, and final sale still beats everything.
Analytics gets notes and product attributes
You can now add notes to Shopify Analytics reports to mark a campaign launch, a creator mention or a supplier change, so the next person who sees a spike knows why. Separately, the color, material, fit and other attributes you set when you categorize products now work as filters and groupings in reports, so you can see which materials or colors sell without exporting.
The Holiday Outlook
Adobe expects a record $275.1 billion online this holiday season
Adobe forecasts US online sales of $275.1 billion from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, up 6.7% on last year. Cyber Week should bring in $47.5 billion, and a record 63% of Cyber Week spend is expected to come through phones. Adobe sees discounts reaching up to 30% off listed prices during Cyber Week.
That mobile share is the number to plan around. Most of your Black Friday customers will see your offer, your product page and your checkout on a phone, so test the full mobile path before your promo goes live.
AI-referred shoppers are now worth more per visit
Adobe expects AI traffic to US retail sites to rise 130% this season. It also found that visits referred by AI assistants now generate 43% more revenue than other traffic. Eighteen months ago it was the reverse: non-AI traffic was worth 128% more.
Keep the scale in mind: a fast-growing channel can still be a small one. What's changed is the quality of the visit. Over two-thirds of shoppers in Adobe's survey said they're less likely to return something they bought with an AI assistant's help.
Consumer confidence just fell to a 12-year low
The Conference Board's index dropped 6.7 points in September to 81.8, its lowest in 12 years, as fuel prices, borrowing costs and weak hiring weighed on households.
"Consumers are more disgruntled and squeezed in this economy than they felt during the 2020 pandemic," said Navy Federal Credit Union's chief economist, Heather Long.
So spending is forecast to grow while shoppers feel worse. Expect a lot of price comparison. Target just cut prices on about 2,000 home, apparel and accessories items, so if you sell in those categories, your shoppers are seeing new reference prices.
AI Shopping and Ads
ChatGPT can now show shoppers clothes on their own photo
OpenAI launched two shopping features worldwide on Oct. 1. Virtual try-on lets people upload a selfie or full-body photo and see how clothing or an accessory might look on them, from a new Try On button in ChatGPT's shopping results. Favorites saves products to a library for later.
It's a move toward discovery. TechCrunch notes OpenAI already had to pivot from its earlier instant checkout feature, which didn't perform well. For apparel and accessories brands, that means clear product images matter in one more place.
AI shopping answers lean heavily toward big retailers
A study for Lightspeed Commerce ran 20,000 shopping prompts through ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. With web search off, ChatGPT and Gemini recommended large national chains 63% to 70% of the time, and small or independent stores about 10%. Offered one big retailer and one smaller store with no size labels, the models picked the bigger one 90% to 94% of the time.
Smaller stores did get cited, about as often as big ones. They just rarely got the top recommendation, and the more specific the product question, the more the big retailers won. Adding the word "independent" to a prompt more than doubled small-store recommendations, which tells you how much the shopper's wording decides who shows up.
ChatGPT ads are still too hard to measure for real budgets
Advertisers told Digiday that ChatGPT's ad reporting doesn't hold up yet. One agency, Accuracast, saw ChatGPT report about 100 clicks where its own tracking showed 20. Conversion data lags 24-36 hours, and reports carry no demographic or prompt data. One executive described clients spending $10 million a month on Google and under $100,000 on ChatGPT.
If you're testing ChatGPT ads this quarter, keep it a test and judge it with your own tracking, not the platform's numbers.
Platform Moves
Amazon is putting sponsored prompts inside its AI shopping chats
At its unBoxed event, Amazon launched Branded Conversations: a sponsored prompt that opens a multi-step shopping conversation styled with the brand's colors, fonts, imagery and product descriptions. Brands shape what the AI says through Conversational Briefs, where they describe features, use cases and products often bought together. The ads console itself is now called Amazon Ads Agent.
Amazon also announced review-request ads for products with fewer than 1,000 reviews. They nudge recent buyers to leave a rating, with no incentives allowed, and run on a cost-per-click basis. For a new launch on Amazon, that's a paid way to get past the empty-reviews stage.
Meta's Muse agent now works for merchants too
Meta launched Muse for Small Business, a version of its AI agent that connects to Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Canva and your Meta ad accounts. You can ask it to build a growth plan from a year of sales, draft next week's ads or flag odd expenses, and it waits for your approval before anything goes live. It's free up to a usage limit, then $20 to $100 a month.
Shopify's own Muse connector went live the same week, so you can ask Muse about your orders, inventory and analytics. Not everyone is sold: Kurt Elster said "Zuck's agent does not get near my stuff."
For a small team, a free assistant that already sees your store, email and ads data is worth a look. Just remember that the agent drafting your Meta ads is built by the company selling you the ad space.
TikTok Shop adds box-free returns
TikTok Shop integrated Happy Returns, UPS's returns company. Shoppers start a return in TikTok Shop and drop the item at one of nearly 10,000 Return Bar locations with no box or label. It works whether you fulfill orders yourself or use TikTok's fulfillment, and Pacsun is already offering it.
Easy returns make a first purchase feel less risky, and TikTok Shop is now big enough to matter: about 2% of US online retail spend, up from 1.2% a year earlier, per Consumer Edge. If you sell on TikTok Shop, check whether you can turn it on before the holidays.
Two Things to Check Now
New York City's click-to-cancel rule is in effect
As of Oct. 1, New York City can go after businesses that make subscriptions hard to cancel. Violations include not explaining the terms clearly, delaying cancellation, not disclosing auto-renewal and not telling customers about changes. Fines start at $525 per violation. The FTC's national version was vacated by a court in July 2025, before it took effect.
As the city's announcement put it: "If a company can take your money with one click, you should be able to get your money back with one click." If you have subscribers in New York, make canceling as easy as signing up. A hard-to-find cancel button doesn't keep customers anyway.
Most Shopify and WooCommerce product pages fail a basic accessibility check
Accessibility specialist Dave Davies scanned 59,400 Shopify and WooCommerce product pages and found 64% had at least one critical accessibility failure. The most common: low-contrast text (80% of pages), links a screen reader can't describe (53%) and images without alt text (27%). Overlay widgets didn't solve it: 62% of the 1,691 pages using one still failed.
These are cheap fixes. Before Black Friday, check the contrast on your sale badges and buttons and add alt text to your product images.
Brand Building
Perelel passed a $100 million run rate (mostly on subscriptions)
Prenatal and women's health supplement brand Perelel crossed a $100 million run rate in August and has been profitable since the end of 2024. DTC makes up 85% of its sales, and 90% of those are subscriptions. Amazon is the other 15%, after growing 4x in 18 months. It just hired Rare Beauty's former CMO, Ashley Murphy.
A brand built on repeat orders, using Amazon as a second channel instead of the main one. That model still works.
Cakes is building its own media company after going viral on TikTok
Cakes, the beauty brand started by twin sisters Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai, grossed $100 million in sales in three years and is known for its founder-led TikTok videos. Now it has launched Cakes Media, starting with a 57-minute YouTube documentary that will be clipped for short-form, with a second season in development.
The reason is cost. Reaching people on paid social "is getting more expensive to do," the founders told Glossy, so they want an audience that comes back without paying for it each time.
Caraway turned a lawsuit from its competitors into marketing
Groupe SEB and Meyer sued Caraway in February, alleging false advertising about PFAS in cookware. Caraway's response was to make the fight public: a "Join the Fight" tab on its homepage, a petition with more than 50,000 signatures, billboards near Groupe SEB's New Jersey office and weekly LinkedIn posts from CEO Jordan Nathan.
It's a risky play. But when a brand stands for one clear thing, a public fight over that thing can be the best story it has.
Also This Week
Hanna Andersson is joining Amazon in October - and 90% of what it sells there will be unique to Amazon, pulled from its archive of best-sellers. Read more →
eBay opened Promoted Stores Custom ads to every eligible store seller - pick up to 1,000 listings and send clicks to livestreams and influencer storefronts. Read more →
Costco's digital sales topped $33 billion, up more than 20% - delivery partners bring in younger members who, per its CEO, "grow into higher-spending members." Read more →
Walmart's CEO promised not to personalize prices - including through its Sparky AI assistant, whose users spend 40% more per order. Read more →
Nike's revenue fell 4%, but running grew for a sixth straight quarter - the company expects full-year revenue to fall by high single digits. Read more →
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
The offer that converts worst can make your best customers.
Ronak Shah described a founder whose one-time purchase option converted about 20% better than a monthly subscription, which in turn beat annual by about 20%. But one-time buyers barely came back, while about 70% of annual buyers stayed past the trial. The brand started leading with annual and took recurring revenue from 10% to 20% of sales.
Ridge halved its support cost per order while orders grew 50%.
Ridge CMO Connor MacDonald shared the numbers two years after moving customer service under marketing: first reply time down from 22 hours to 5, all-in CX cost under $0.30 an order and satisfaction at 95%, with the same headcount. Self-service does most of the work, and AI now handles almost 40% of tickets on its own, at 93.6% satisfaction against 94.2% for the human team.
The brands scaling fastest don't have a better CAC. They wait longer to earn it back.
Max Sturtevant, founder of email and SMS agency Well Copy, compared notes for a $2 million-a-month client: the brands growing to $10 million a month had the same CAC, "potentially even higher," but accepted a payback period of 4-6 months or more, against the client's 2.5. A longer payback only works if customers keep coming back, so retention sets how hard you can push.
Give AI a communication problem, not a business problem.
Jimmy Kim's advice: AI can't fix "repeat purchase rate is 20%," but it can help with the problem underneath, like "customers don't know when to reorder." The same goes for a high return rate, which he rewrites as "customers are surprised by something after delivery."
DTC is splitting into value brands and quality brands.
@ron_ecomm argues the market is splitting in two: low-price brands that win on supply chain, and premium brands that win on product. Premium has to be genuinely better now, because value brands are getting "extremely good at quality (aka Kirkland)," and a nice coat of paint on an average product, the DTC 1.0 move, no longer holds up.
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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.