#e-commerce

#e-commerce

Most companies have one path to success. Amazon has many. When it comes to e-commerce, Amazon is without equal. The company is the undisputed heavyweight champion of digital retail, with gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $790 billion in 2024. Despite the gargantuan size of its business, sales continue to grow, up 10% year over year in the third quarter. Amazon has risen through the ranks to become the world's second-largest retailer, behind only Walmart.

Walmart's digital business exploded 27% in Q3, driven by store-fulfilled delivery, marketplace expansion, and aggressive investments in digital infrastructure. The company spent $18.6 billion on capital expenditures this year, much aimed at logistics and technology supporting same-day delivery and pickup. CFO John David Rainey emphasized "enhancing the digital customer experience" during the earnings call. Costco's e-commerce grew 13.6% in F4, solid but far slower than Walmart's pace.

In late October, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a web browser with ChatGPT at its core. In Agent Mode, it can perform actions on your behalf, such as pulling together an online order. Elyse Betters Picaro, Senior Contributing Editor at ZDNET, tried it that day, successfully using it to place a same-day delivery order from Walmart. The experience was so positive that she then used it to buy Disney on Ice Tickets, which she said saved her some money and hassle.

Piles of folded sweaters and polo shirts cascaded into disorder, their tags boasting incremental markdowns that seemed to shout over one another. The escalator, unmaintained for close to a year, stood inert. Nervous-looking shoppers bouldered their way up its heavy corrugated steps in search of washrooms or the closest exit to the parking lot. All the beauty counters featured displays which had been denuded to East German levels of bare.

Pinterest is opening the floodgates for creators to monetize their content for the first time, permitting both the tagging of Ideas Pins with shoppable products and brand partnerships with sponsored content. The income streams are open to anyone with a business account, removing friction between the point of inspiration and a purchase decision by linking directly to in-stock items on the retailer's website.

"Our organization has become slow and inefficient," Heaf said. "Unnecessary complexity has reduced our speed and dampened our innovation."

The world's largest online retailer says this amounts to "computer fraud" when not disclosed. The clash between the two companies offers "an early glimpse into a looming debate" over "agentic artificial intelligence." Perplexity is among several tech firms, including Google and OpenAI, racing "to rethink the traditional web browser around AI," with automated agents that can complete tasks like emailing or shopping.

European Union finance ministers have agreed to impose customs duties on low-value parcels entering the bloc at some point next year, scrapping the long-standing "de minimis" exemption for goods under €150 (or $175). The move is seen as a way to slow the flood of cheap Chinese imports from platforms such as Shein and Temu. These goods now account for the bulk of the EU's 4.6 billion small parcels a year, more than 90% of which came from China.

Amazon's e-commerce business, which was shaky for several quarters, has made a major comeback. Revenue at its core North American business rose to $106 billion from $96 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Operating income dipped slightly to $5 billion. Revenue in its cloud business, which is considered its growth engine, rose from $27 billion to $33 billion year over year.

This growing exposure to foreign pricing, product range and service standards is subtly rewriting what people expect when buying locally. You now have instant access to global benchmarks, sometimes without even realising it. The simplicity of comparing multiple international sites in one place has normalised the idea that every transaction should be transparent, fast and competitively priced. The result is that British shoppers, once content with familiar high-street names, are beginning to demand the same level of choice and speed they experience from abroad.

While Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA ) has delivered almost 1,200% over the past three years, and Palantir Technologies ( NASDAQ:PLTR ) has outperformed even that, with gains of 2,370%. Yet one stock has surpassed both of them - combined. AppLovin ( ) has posted a jaw-dropping 3,980% return over the same period, and there is no reason to believe it won't keep on growing going forward.

When Chinese fast-fashion online retailer Shein opened its first boutique last week there were both protests and a crowd of shoppers. The brick-and-mortar shop inside the BHV Marais department store in central Paris hit a nerve and not just because it is in the home of haute couture. It was a love-hate response to company seen in many other areas.

VeJa is a company that creates guitar plugins simulating amplifiers for music production. They were selling exclusively on the MOD Devices platform but wanted to expand their reach with their own online store. The challenge? They had great products, a loyal niche following, but no website. Just a logo. And us. The brief was simple: Our bootcamp team of three had just 8 days to prototype a e-commerce platform that would help VeJa compete in a saturated market dominated by giants like Neural DSP and IK Multimedia.