👋 Happy Tuesday! Here’s your latest ecom news roundup: Google is coming for checkout. TikTok Shop is exploding. AI is rewriting how your customers discover and buy.

In Today’s Edition:

📰 Top Headlines: What Ecommerce Operators Need to Know
🎧 On the Pod: Why Your Meta Ads Are Failing (And How AI Fixes It)
🗨️ Claus’s Hot Take: Google Wants to Own Checkout for the Entire Internet

Grab your coffee — skim in 60 seconds or read in 3 minutes to stay ahead

📰 TODAY'S MUST-READS

📈 General Ecommerce News

🛒 Platforms & Marketplaces

📱Social Media & Advertising

🎙️ ECOMMERCE COFFEE BREAK PODCAST

Most ecommerce brands are scaling Meta ad spend… but profits are going down.

Why? Because better ad creatives alone won’t fix bad audience targeting.

In my latest Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast episode, I spoke with Tiago Costa, CEO of clustie.ai, and ecommerce brand owner Raphael Tomé about how AI is changing paid acquisition in 2026.

One of the biggest takeaways:

The brands winning today are not guessing who to target anymore. They are using data and AI to identify profitable customers before scaling spend.

If you're running Meta ads for your ecommerce brand, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

🎧 Listen now: [Browser] [Apple Podcasts] [Spotify] [YouTube] [iHeart]

📲 Want to listen on the go? Download our Android podcast app.

If you’d like to be a guest, or make a guest recommendation, please let us know here.

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🗨️ CLAUS’S HOT TAKE

Google just dropped what might be the biggest threat to Amazon since Shopify launched — and most brands are sleeping on it.

With Universal Cart, Google is no longer just a search engine.

They’re becoming the checkout layer for the entire internet. Shoppers can now discover products across Search, Gemini, YouTube, or Gmail — and complete the purchase without ever leaving Google’s ecosystem.

This is a game-changer.

The real shift happening right now:

Here’s my honest take:

Shopify brands with clean product data, strong feeds, and rich content will have a massive advantage. Amazon-only sellers? They’re at serious risk of losing control of the customer relationship.

I predict that within 18 months, 25-35% of new customer acquisitions for well-prepared DTC brands will flow through Google’s AI surfaces.

The brands that win won’t be the ones with the best ads.

They’ll be the ones with:

If you’re not actively optimizing for “AI agent optimization” yet, you’re falling behind fast.

The window to get ahead is right now — before Google’s flywheel really starts spinning.

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