☕ Your Ecommerce Coffee Break (Issue 200)

👋 Happy Tuesday! Here’s your latest ecom news roundup: Zero-click buying is here. AI now drives discovery. Amazon scales offline. Shopify ships new tools. This is what matters for 2026.

In Today’s Edition:

📰 Top Headlines: News, Marketplaces, and Platform updates
🎧 On the Pod: Beyond Discounts: The New Era Of Customer Loyalty
🗨️ Claus’s Hot Take: The 2026 E-commerce Flywheel

Grab your coffee—skim in 60 sec or read in 3 minutes.

📰 WHAT’S HAPPENING

📈 General Ecommerce News

• 2026: The year of ‘zero-click buying’ [read more]

• What to watch in retail for 2026 [read more]

• Amazon Builds Giant Retail Supercenters [read more]

• 37% of consumers start searches with AI [read more]

🛒 Platforms & Marketplaces

• Amazon Growth Strategies 2026 [read more]

• How Amazon Is Pulling Ahead of OpenAI [read more]

• Shopify merchants auto-enrolled in Copilot Checkout [read more]

• What’s new in Shopify [read more]

📱Social Media & Advertising

• 35 marketing ideas for 2026 [read more]

• 18 of the Best Brands on Instagram in 2026 [read more]

• Who owns TikTok in the U.S.? [read more]

• YouTube will let you filter Shorts out [read more]

🎙️ ECOMMERCE COFFEE BREAK PODCAST

Beyond Discounts: The New Era Of Customer Loyalty

In this episode, we explore how to fix loyalty programs that rely too much on discounts.

Jed Strong, the Enterprise Sales Director at Adjoe, explains how brands can move past simple transactions.

He shares how "rewarded engagement" allows customers to earn points by playing mobile games instead of just spending money.

🎧 Listen on: [Website] [Apple Podcasts] [Spotify] [YouTube]

Don’t forget to rate the ECB Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

🗨️ CLAUS’S HOT TAKE

The 2026 E-commerce Flywheel

Amazon to Shopify sounds great on paper. In reality, it usually breaks.

Why? Amazon gives you reach and instant trust. Shopify gives you ownership, better margins, subscriptions, and loyalty.

But pulling an Amazon buyer to an unknown Shopify store? High friction. Low trust. Big drop-off.

That’s the flaw in the old playbook.

TikTok Shop changes the equation.
Not because it’s another checkout.
Because it’s a brand awareness engine.

People don’t search on TikTok. They discover.

Creators show products in real life. Trust is built before the sale ever happens.

Once that trust exists, customers choose their path:

• Path 1: Buy on TikTok Shop. Fast. Impulse. Easy win.

• Path 2: Search your brand on Amazon. Less competition. Higher conversion.

• Path 3: Buy direct on Shopify. Subscriptions. No platform fees. The real prize.

The numbers back this up.
TikTok Shop crossed $500M in US sales on Black Friday 2025.
US social commerce is racing toward $100B+.
Gen Z doesn’t discover products on Amazon. They discover them in their feed.

The takeaway for 2026: Stop treating platforms as rivals.

Build the flywheel:

• TikTok Shop → awareness and trust

• Amazon → capture branded demand

• Shopify → own the customer and the margin

If you’re still Amazon-only, that’s now a risk. Your competitors are already building content libraries and creator relationships that compound.

Action:

• Launch on TikTok Shop in 2026. Start small. Learn fast.

• Or watch someone else own your future customers.

📰 PARTNER WITH US
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