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Shopify's Spring '26 Edition is out with 150+ updates. Why is 150 always the magic number? There's now a single dashboard view of how your products appear and sell across AI agentic storefronts. Sidekick now works with third-party apps, runs in the background after you log off, and is now on Apple Watch. Harley says it’s "like having a cofounder who never logs off." In truth, I think you just became the co-founder, and Sidekick became the founder. Hail our new Sidekick overlord.

Newly announced Campaign Autopilot lets you describe the campaign you want across email and advertising, and the system executes it. It’s interesting because Shopify hasn’t done much in the marketing space lately - and this is a big marketing automation play. Which reminded me: George Hartley, a previous ATC guest, released a video this week showing his AI reimagination of email automation with Nitrosend. I love this shit.

In other news/gossip, Shopify shareholders voted down a formal AI governance policy at the AGM. Fewer than 14% voted in favour. The board had previously described the proposal as "a solution in search of a problem." I'm getting that on a t-shirt for my next Security Sign Off meeting.

Google AI Max rolled out to all Australian advertisers at Google Marketing Live Sydney. Keywords now serve as a starting signal rather than a hard match, with the system expanding based on natural-language queries. This week, Google said, "the best ads must be answers. We're moving way beyond simply matching users' search queries." Just two years ago, their blog dismissed the hysteria around AI Overviews as a "jumping-off point to visit web content." Very curious.

It’s not all bad news for search traffic, though. Telstra claims (handcuffed to Google on stage) that they got a 74% increase in CTR and 36% reduction in cost per order with AI Max. Additionally, Adobe's Q1 data shows AI-driven traffic to US retail sites jumped 393% year on year.

Even more interesting, it was confirmed this week that Bunnings, Adore Beauty, Kogan, The Iconic, and Petbarn have all signed up to Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. You’ll be able to use a combined cart across all those retailers via Search, YouTube, Gemini, and Gmail in the next few weeks.

Meta announced live video ads at Cannes: take your Instagram Live and expand it to Facebook to reach audiences beyond your existing followers. Within the livestream, viewers can browse products, check prices, and buy without leaving the video. US live commerce partnerships are up and running. No confirmed timeline for Australia, which means we continue to live in a live shopping backwater.

Elsewhere: Snap launched Specs, its AR glasses, at $2,195 USD. The stock dropped more than 5% on the day. I cannot stop thinking about Evan Spiegel on national television, explaining the share price drop, wearing these monstrosities while they rip his ears off at the hinges. This world is wild.

In a time where it is tempting to let loose on lo and mid-fi social content, a sage lesson appears. HiSmile paid $138,600 in penalties after the ACCC found their team posed as "random shoppers" in social media videos, and their Glostik Tooth Gloss ads implied the product removed stains when it only concealed them temporarily.

The ACCC also took Grill'd to court for greenwashing. Separately, Ugg paid $39,600 for strikethrough pricing that didn't reflect genuine prior prices, and JB Hi-Fi is refunding $250,000 to around 200 customers for 'was/now' pricing where the 'was' price either never existed or was long gone. Even the ACCC has end-of-financial-year budgets to meet.

You know what is sexy? Digital twins. Unilever is scaling AI-powered digital twins across its global manufacturing network. They have 40+ digital twins operational over the next 18 months, using live shop floor data to predict failures and optimise output before problems reach the line. One site is already predicting 95% of process restrictions and cutting waste by 20%.

What I keep thinking about is the ecommerce version of this: a parallel virtual storefront running on a different operating model, tested against live customer data without touching the production site. Not a staging environment but a real simulation of what the business could look like under different inventory, pricing, or merchandising decisions. That's still mostly theoretical today. Staging sites will soon look like annoying relics.

And then there's this… South Korea has dopamine sites. Food Never Comes is an app that lets you scroll menus, build a cart, and simulate placing a food delivery order that will never arrive. No transaction and no food. Just the dopamine hit of placing an online order. Remember when I said this world is wild? Yep.

We’re hosting a free live ecommerce masterclass today with behavioural scientist Sonia Friedrich and Brooke Eichhorn from Behamics. Backed by 1.2 billion shopper sessions, they unpack why the same conversion tactic works for one customer and fails for another, and how to use behavioural signals across your site, paid media and CRM. There’s only a few seats left.

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:

🤝 The best way to handle affiliates (Shopify) Paulie is getting inbound interest from complementary brands that want to sell his product and wants to know the cleanest way to track affiliate referrals in Shopify without adding more apps.

⏮️ Is your re-engagement flow doing more work than your welcome flow? Dom Moretti from Tiger Mist / I.AM.GIA shared that their re-engagement flow with no discount is now outperforming their welcome flow. Nathan's challenge this week: go open your own re-engagement flow as a customer would, and count how many emails lead with a discount.

🎯 DPAs vs. Product Optimisations DPAs were crushing it last year. Now they're not. Zac is asking whether adding product carousel optimisations to non-DPA creative is cannibalising his dynamic ads and whether it's time to turn DPAs off entirely in one region to test it.

🪪 Are Social Media Managers an Essential Hire Now for DTC Ecom? Mitchell makes the case for why the social media manager is the most underrated hire in ecom right now.

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Most businesses reach for the marketing lever first. The inventory lever is almost always bigger.

Get the Playbook

When profits are under pressure, the first call is almost always about ads. The fastest fix is almost always in the warehouse. Most businesses holding too much of the wrong stock are sitting on their biggest margin opportunity but they just don't know where to look.

Talea Bader from SKUTOPIA has seen a $700 million business go from significant losses to tens of millions in profit, not by reworking their marketing, but by holding weeks of stock instead of months and making buying decisions with data instead of a hunch.

Examples from this Playbook

📦 Talea from SKUTOPIA started holding weeks of stock instead of months and making buying decisions based on data. The fix wasn't complicated.

📊 Carla from Profit Peak found that a star performer was barely profitable when they looked at delivered margin instead of gross margin. Gross margin flatters.

🧵 Hayley from Sheet Society built the business to significant scale before hiring a merchandise planner. Looking back: should have done it years earlier.

✈️ Lauren from Motto's approach to forecast risk: accept higher air freight costs as insurance against overbuying.

🍎 Susan from Smart in Planning tells us that idle stock is like fruit. Storage fees, capital locked up, markdown pressure all compound the longer it sits.

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Hey, if you’ve read this far, let me know what you think. Just hit reply and give me your deepest, darkest thoughts. Would love to hear from you.