Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
I’ve said it before, but the pattern keeps coming up in my research for this newsletter, so I’m going to say it again.
Everyone wants to own your customer journey.
TikTok started out as just a channel. People found products in TikTok videos, then went somewhere else (often Amazon) to buy them.
Now TikTok wants the whole purchase journey to happen on its platform, from discovery through to payment.
It’s what every LLM is trying to do too, and what Amazon built a trillion-dollar business on.
There are a few things to note here:
There’s a separate race on to own the backend infrastructure. Shopify, Salesforce and now even Amazon have shown they want to become the OS for merchants selling across channels.
The more control the platform takes, the less you have. The customer’s main impression is that they bought from TikTok, not so much from your brand.
These platforms don’t care who people buy from. They have no stake in whether you keep showing up.
I think this is the biggest emerging challenge for ecommerce brands right now. Everyone’s focused on showing up in AI, which is important, no doubt. But the bigger challenge is making sure you show up independently of AI and all these other channels, which are basically the new big-box retailers.
I’m fascinated to see how this plays out over the next 6+ months.
With that, here’s what’s in this edition:
TikTok adds one-click checkout inside the For You feed, plus an AI shopping assistant.
A default Shopify setting enrolls your store in every new AI shopping app.
Shoppers use AI to research, not to buy: only a third have trusted an agent to make a purchase for them.
Prime Big Deal Days grew about 9%, and mobile passed half of online sales.
ASOS's own app was used to push a hacker's message to its customers.
Let's get into it.
The Battle to Own the Checkout
TikTok wants the whole sale to happen inside the feed
TikTok is adding two shopping tools. Shopping Assistant is a chat agent that answers questions about sizing, shipping and availability, and remembers what a shopper is looking for. Buy Direct lets people buy from a brand in one click, straight from the For You feed, without leaving the app. TikTok says it's building both with Shopify, Salesforce, Stripe and others.
For brands, that's a shorter path from video to sale. It also means more of the customer relationship, and the data that comes with it, stays inside TikTok.
A shared rulebook for shopping agents is on the way
Meta and Sierra announced Personal Agent Protocol on Oct. 6, an open standard for how personal AI agents deal with businesses. Walmart, Shopify and Stripe are among the partners. An agent can start as a guest to check stock or a returns policy. To touch an account, the customer signs in and chooses read-only or write access, and the business decides what agents can do through its website, its APIs or its own agent.
Today most agents click through stores the way people do, and one of Amazon's complaints when it blocked Muse was that the agent doesn't identify itself. Sierra plans to publish the first version of the spec later this month.
The Shopify Beat
Check the setting that signs you up for every AI channel
In your Shopify admin, under Sales channels > Agentic, a setting called "Allow Shopify to manage for me" is on by default. It gives AI shopping apps your products through Shopify Catalog, turns on direct checkout where it's supported, and enrolls your store in new AI channels as Shopify adds them. That's how eligible stores' products reached Meta's Muse on Sept. 8, the day it launched. It's also why an "Other channels" row, for startups building experimental shopping agents, may already be switched on.
Slobodan Manic, who did a write up for Search Engine Journal, thinks most stores should leave it on, since ChatGPT, Google, Copilot and Meta charge no fees today. Either way, it's worth knowing which apps are selling your products.
Test your Black Friday offer before you commit to it
Discounts now work in Rollouts. You can launch an offer to part of your online store traffic, test a new discount against your current one on conversion, or schedule it to go live alongside theme and checkout changes. Scheduling works on Basic and up; A/B tests need Grow or higher.
One catch: a test that reaches only part of your traffic runs on the online store only, so your ads and product feeds can show a different offer than some shoppers see.
Shop now recognizes shoppers before they reach checkout
For shoppers with a Shop account, Shop can now identify them while they browse your store. Checkout loads faster, sign-in is one tap, the Shop Pay button shows the card they last used, and carts follow them across devices and between the Shop app and your store. Shop will also remind them about carts they left behind.
Cart and activity sync are on by default, so expect it to show up in your cart recovery numbers.
Store policies that keep themselves up to date
You can now let Shopify write and maintain your returns, shipping, contact, terms of service and legal notice policies. Automated policies update as your store settings change, and you turn them on one policy at a time. It pairs well with last week's return-window overrides. You're still responsible for what the policies say.
Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew now work in checkout
Shopify improved support for right-to-left languages across the admin and storefronts, including checkout, customer accounts and Horizon themes. Product page translations still run through the Translate & Adapt app. Worth a look if you sell into the Middle East, Israel or Pakistan.
The Agentic Era
Shoppers ask AI for ideas, then buy it themselves
Shopify's holiday research says 65% of shoppers will use AI for at least one shopping task this season. Though only a third say they've trusted an AI agent to buy on their behalf. People are researching with AI and still making the final call.
Stanley 1913 says it's had five times as many AI-referred orders in the US as the same window last year. Cottonique, a hypoallergenic apparel brand, says its AI-referred sales grew 276% year over year.
Part of that comes from adapting the way brands are describing their products, in a way that makes more sense for the agentic era. As Cottonique’s co-founder puts it: "Nobody with eczema types 'hypoallergenic bra.'"
In ChatGPT, the product card is the storefront
A study commissioned by ReFiBuy watched 40 US shoppers complete 224 shopping tasks in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. In ChatGPT, 84% of final product choices came from product cards, the visual listings with an image, price and key details. When two or more cards appeared, shoppers picked the first one 43% of the time.
If your product never makes it into a card, it's mostly out of the comparison.
The Holiday Outlook
Prime Big Deal Days grew about 9%, and mobile passed half of sales
Adobe says US retailers drove $9.86 billion in online spend during Amazon's Oct. 6-7 event, up 8.5% from last year. Numerator says the average Amazon household spent $114.01, up 9%. Most of it was small stuff: 68% of items sold for under $20.
Two numbers matter for your own channels. Mobile made up 52% of online sales. Social drove just 7% of revenue but grew fastest, up 40%, and Adobe says shoppers converted 11 times more after seeing influencer content than from social networks overall.
Shoppers plan to spend less, and trust discounts less
Simon-Kucher's holiday survey of 1,501 US consumers puts the average household budget at $1,018, down 5.5% from last year and back to 2024 levels. Middle-income households are cutting the most.
The bigger shift has to do with trust. Only 22% say advertised discounts fully reflect real savings, down from 46% last year. And while 55% plan to use AI for holiday shopping, mostly to find deals and compare products, only 16% of them would let it make the purchase. Simon-Kucher's read: a deeper discount doesn't automatically look like better value.
Free resource: Black Friday & Cyber Monday Statistics
We put together a new report with all the numbers you need to know about from BFCM 2025, and the trends and predictions that show you what to expect this year.
Our report pulls together data from Adobe, Salesforce, Shopify, the NRF and others, with trends going back to 2017.
Last year, US shoppers spent $44.2 billion online over Cyber Week, mobile drove 56.4% of online holiday sales, and visitors from AI assistants converted 31% better than other referral traffic. This BFCM, we’re predicting a new record - but a slowdown in growth compared to the last few years.
Brand Building
Shapermint built a $10 million TikTok Shop business on women over 35
TikTok Shop is usually treated as a Gen Z channel. Shapermint, whose customer has always been women aged 35 to 65, is on track for about $10 million in TikTok Shop sales this year. It works with more than 5,000 active affiliate creators, and 60% of its top performers are over 35.
There aren't many TikTok Shop affiliates who specialize in intimates, so after starting out with agencies, Shapermint built its own team for creator outreach and community.
Three brands that passed $100 million without investors
Glossy talked to three companies that grew past $100 million in revenue without outside money. Aviator Nation started with an $8,000 bank loan, and founder Paige Mycoskie still runs inventory and sales reports every week. SwissWatchExpo buys every watch outright and has been profitable every year. EZContacts puts its effort into getting more from existing customers instead of spending more on ads, and pulls in about 150,000 blog visitors a month.
The common thread is discipline about cash, inventory and margin.
Also This Week
Tariff refunds start reaching importers who sued - US Customs has begun paying IEEPA tariff refunds on finally liquidated entries, but for now only to plaintiffs who submitted a valid importer of record number by July 30. Read more →
California curbs website-tracking lawsuits - from Jan. 1, 2027, only the state attorney general can bring CIPA pen-register claims over tracking on websites and apps; wiretapping claims stay open to private plaintiffs. Read more →
Google tests AI-picked promo codes in AI Mode - a new Direct Offer asset lets Google's AI choose which incentive to show a shopper, as a one-time code under a sponsored result. It only runs on AI Max or text customization campaigns. Read more →
eBay raises its currency conversion fee on Oct. 14 - from 3% to 3.25% for US sellers, charged when eBay converts funds for listings or sales on another eBay site. Read more →
ASOS's app was used to push a hacker's message - on Oct. 6, app users got an "ASOS HACKED" push notification. ASOS says third-party platforms it uses to message customers were accessed without authorization, and names and contact details may have been exposed. Read more →
Look at your store the way a TikTok visitor does - open your site on a phone in an incognito window to see what a cold social visitor sees: no login, no cart, often an in-app browser, and every pop-up between them and the product. Read more →
ChatGPT will test ads during image generation - photo-led ads that show while ChatGPT creates an image, starting with a first batch of US advertisers. Read more →
Muse is most of the agent traffic hitting websites - HUMAN Security says Meta's agent accounts for an average of 72% of the daily AI-agent requests it sees. Read more →
Amazon ad budgets rose ahead of Prime Big Deal Days - media buyers told Digiday client spend on Amazon Ads is up 15-40% on last year, with more of it moving into DSP and video. Read more →
Twitch adds a Shopping section for Amazon Live sellers - a new destination near the top of the homepage, launched as Prime Big Deal Days began. Read more →
Bambuser becomes a Meta Live Video Ads partner - brands can run their own livestreams as Meta ads and send viewers to a shoppable player on their own site. Read more →
Budget and founder-led beauty brands lead DTC traffic growth - Similarweb data shows Huda Beauty's site traffic up 59%, with dupes helping drugstore and digital-native brands. Read more →
Brands are making microdramas - Crocs, David's Bridal and StockX are producing short episodic series, a format Omdia says brought in $11 billion globally in 2025. Read more →
Evri moves into US delivery - the UK carrier agreed to buy Cross Border Connect, which handles UK-US shipments and returns. Read more →
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
Four dashboards, one $80 order
Chase Dimond broke down how a single $80 order gets claimed by TikTok, your email platform, Meta and Google at once, so the dashboards add up to $320 while the bank gets $80. The number he trusts more is MER: total revenue divided by total marketing spend.
Your most-opened emails are the ones nobody touches
Jimmy Kim pointed out that order confirmations, shipping notifications and "out for delivery" emails get 80 to 100% opens, yet almost nobody has touched them since a developer set them up.
More subscribers, less profit
Ashvin Melwani shared a test that pushed subscriptions over one-time purchases. Conversion rose 10% and 40% of buyers subscribed, but AOV fell 23% and profit per session fell 12%. His question: what would you do?
Automated refund requests are already arriving
Ridge CMO Connor MacDonald says Ridge has already seen fully automated, well-written refund requests, and he expects them to "literally 1000x over the next 24 months." His advice: get CX teams and processes ready now.
From $25K to $447K a month on Whatnot
Kurt Elster told the story of BattlBox, which did just under $25K in its first month of live selling on Whatnot and $447K in August. Orders there average $64 to $70, against under $20 on TikTok Shop. As owner John Roman puts it: "You don't open up the Amazon app to look at content." The full episode has the playbook.
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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.