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$101 billion in GMV for Q1, up 35%. Revenue up 34%. Share price dipped anyway because markets keep you humble. The AI numbers are interesting: traffic from AI-driven sources grew 8x, orders from AI searches grew nearly 13x, and most interestingly, catalogue-powered AI searches convert at twice the rate of general AI searches. Obviously off a low base but further proof AI search is speeding up.

However, Jaywing's GEO visibility study across Australian retail categories showed that the more search changes, the more it stays the same. In virtually every category outside of grocery, Amazon dominated AI search with AU giants Woolworths, JB Hi Fi, Harvey Norman and Chemist Warehouse following. The SEO/GEO/AEO message hasn't changed: brand scale, customer signals and authority still win. Dot point summaries at the top of blog posts won’t save you. Get your product catalogue in order anyway.

Amazon launched Amazon Supply Chain Services this week - essentially offering what they have mastered to others, regardless of whether they sell on Amazon. It is full freight, distribution, fulfilment, and parcel shipping, open to any business. P&G, 3M, and American Eagle Outfitters signed up on day one. UPS fell 10%, FedEx fell 9% on the day it was announced. They did it with cloud, they did it with ads, there’s no reason they won’t do it with logistics. They're also testing Prime shipping on external D2C sites without requiring an Amazon login. This means your customers could see the Prime badge at your own DTC checkout. Amazon burrows deeper into retail infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Australia Post is hiking fuel surcharges from June. We’re in a Cost Of Giving crisis. Watch those landed costs.

The day has finally come. eMarketer forecasts Meta at $243B in global ad revenue for 2026, edging Google's $240B for the first time ever. Meta’s average price per ad is up 12% in Q1, net income up 61% and $8B of that was a Trump tax benefit. Egh. Is it too late to go and study medicine?

Locally, Amazon Australia's ad revenue jumped 62% in 2025 to $392M. I'm sure they're all paying their fair share of tax.

PayPal's 2026 eCommerce Index (PDF) has some useful numbers: 63% of Australians shop online weekly, 48% have used AI for shopping, and 28% bought with social commerce. It’s a free PDF.

But then… PayPal came out as the most preferred payment method at 30%, ahead of credit cards at 23%, Apple Pay at 12%, and Shop Pay at 1%. 1%! Apparently, 76% of Australians are concerned about buying from a site that doesn't accept PayPal. It didn’t say if the 1,000 consumers were PayPal customers, but it didn’t pass the Bushy Pub Test.

Google Photos is rolling out a digital wardrobe feature. It trawls your Google Photo library, identifies clothing by category, and lets you virtually try on outfits via an AI avatar. Rolling out this summer. Creepy or cool, depending entirely on how curated your camera roll is. I won’t let fancy dress, Bali speedos and gardening attire define me.

But there is something to giving AI recommendations more context. Rithum research shows that shoppers who receive an explanation for why an AI recommended a product are 2x more likely to act without verifying elsewhere. The why matters as much as the what.

Some good news to end the week on. Click Frenzy has been picked up by Gabby and Hezi Leibovich, the founders of Catch, seven years on from selling it to Wesfarmers for $230M. They've bought the brand, the domain, and a subscriber base of 1.5 million from administrators, and plan to relaunch within weeks. Boredom will get you. Meanwhile, Power Retail has been acquired by Retail Global. Both brands went into liquidation in April. Great to see the chance for them to live on.

Grant Arnott, who founded Click Frenzy back in 2012, joins me on the podcast next Monday. It's a pretty confronting conversation. He takes us inside what actually happened.

If you work in ecommerce, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Inside the Add To Cart Community, you’ll find like-minded professionals, expert insights and live webinars. All for free.

This week’s discussions include:

🎉 Someone's soft-launching their first store today: share your advice
📮 Australia Post's fuel surcharge hike lands in June: how are you managing it?
📷 Capturing lo-fi and mid-fi content on shoots: what's your setup?
📧 Post-purchase surveys: what questions are actually getting responses?

Not in the Add To Cart community?

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Everyone knows paid social CACs have gone up. Fewer people have done the maths on what a store actually costs per acquired customer.

Physical retail used to be the endgame. It was something you earned after proving the model online. But due to accessible tech and different physical formats, it’s becoming possible a lot earlier. For some, physical retail isn’t a sales channel but it is a marketing play. When you do that, the payback math looks completely different.

Guy Nappa shared how threy went from zero stores to 30 stores in three years. He takes us through how he did it: define the store's job before signing the lease, model rent as a CAC not an occupancy cost, and build the opening playbook before you need to run it fast.

Examples from this Playbook

🛒 Guy from Oz Hair & Beauty was opening stores so fast they couldn't stop to do after-action reviews. The stores they opened after pausing and rebuilding the template were materially better.

🏠 Basil Karam from Life Interiors measured his first store by what it did to online revenue, not what it sold in-store. Monthly online sales went from $10k to $40k after it opened. The store's job was to drive the digital business.

🧳 Athan from July found store CAC ran at roughly half the cost of paid social, with retail hitting 20% of Australian revenue from a handful of locations. He treated rent as a CAC, not an occupancy expense.

📊 Simon Molnar from Flagship makes the attribution case: store KPIs need to include the online sales they drive. Customers who shop across both channels spend 80% more.

🏪 Danny from The General Store told us to talk to founders who opened stores recently, not ones who did it years ago. Cost benchmarks, tech stacks, and customer expectations from five years back don't map to what you're about to walk into.

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