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This week, my son told me that he’s been taking a green apple into the shower with him and then eating it under running water so he knows how an abandoned parrot in the Amazon rainforest feels. So you can say things are going pretty well at home.
Cheers
Bushy
This week’s ecommerce news you should know
1. ChatGPT ads are now self-serve in Australia 🤖
OpenAI's self-serve Ads Manager is now available to Australian businesses. You can now build and manage ChatGPT ad campaigns directly: CPC bidding, a Conversions API, direct ecommerce catalogue integration, and no minimum spend. It's live now and open to all Australian retailers.
Might be worth a little dabble, just to show your boss how ahead of the curve we are. Go on, give it a couple of hundred bucks in the next media budget. Look like the hero you deserve to look like.
2. DuckDuckGo is picking up your disgruntled searchers 🦆
After Google I/O last week, DuckDuckGo came out swinging, accusing Google of "force-feeding AI with no way to opt out." The response was immediate: US app installs jumped 30% week-on-week, and traffic to noai.duckduckgo.com is averaging 23% weekly growth. I've noticed DuckDuckGo creeping up the referral list in a lot of the analytics reports I've been looking at lately. It won't be a major cohort, but it's worth watching. A certain segment of customers are making a statement, and they're probably your most privacy-conscious buyers. They'll have to rename themselves DuckDuckGoGoGo if this keeps up.
Separately, UX research covering almost a million search sessions found that Google's AI overviews keep users anchored at the top of results regardless of what they searched for. Also, if Google's AI can't spell the word "Google", maybe they have a point.
3. The data on discounting is brutal reading 🍭
I was at the Klaviyo K:SYD event last week (yeah, I know you’ve seen it all over your LI feed), and the one that stood out was James Hurman's Sugar High report. Don't blame me, he's my intellectual man-crush. The research found that 70% of promotions generate a negative contribution margin. Brands with the highest discount rate have the lowest growth. And brands sending more than 8 promotional emails a year grew at half the rate of low-frequency senders over three years. No word on whether it's detrimental to put all eight of those in one Black Friday week. I think you'd be sweet. Literally. Sugar High. Get it? Get your copy here.
4. Meta extends your retargeting audience to two years 📱
Meta has expanded the maximum retention window for purchase event custom audiences from 180 days to 730 days. Big news if you have customers who don't shop with you regularly, you're in luxury fashion, you have high-ticket prices, or you're selling anything seasonal. No need to retarget straight away. You can be a bit more chill. Two full years to trigger that next purchase event.
They also released some weird shit that is no doubt going to make them a lot of money, even if it makes no sense to me: new subscription offerings for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including premium ringtones on WhatsApp. Your mum is gonna love it. And they're testing a Forums app that pulls all your Facebook groups into a standalone Reddit competitor. They did it with TikTok, they did it with Threads. Please don't hurt the Reddit nerds.
Almost half of Amazon shoppers who can't find your brand will buy a competitor. Hear all the findings from Pattern's 2026 Marketplace Report.
5. TV characters are the new influencer brief 📺
Some consumer psychologists say TV shows are becoming our new personalities. If that's the case, I'm a deckhand stewardess in the Mediterranean. Liquid I.V. partnered with Amazon Prime Video's Off Campus, the BookTok sensation. If you don't know about it, your wife probably does. They created an ad using the cast in character, shoppable ads within the programme, and a hockey-themed influencer event. Liquid I.V. is putting the thirst in thirst trap.
But is this the new standard? Not celebrities, not influencers, but the actual characters from the show your audience is obsessed with, in your ads so you don't take suburban mums out of their teenage hockey fantasies. Sickos the lot of you.
For a more wholesome take, Virgin Australia teamed up with Toy Story 5 for a themed Boeing 737-800, personalised "Toy Tickets" boarding passes for kids' teddies, colouring packs and 60-plus Disney titles in flight. That's a much more wholesome Buzz and Woody.
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:
🔌 A single MCP for eCom Founders Sean's built a tool that plugs your entire tech stack into one MCP connection. Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta, Google Ads, Xero — the lot.
🧠 The best AI workflow for knowledge work in May 2026 is... Cameron says Obsidian + Claude. Drops the CLAUDE.md file and walks you through it.
👤 How are you developing deeper customer personas? "She's 24 to 34 isn't a persona." Nathan's weekly challenge off the back of frank body's Jess Hatzis.
🛳️ Shippit's 2026 State of Shipping Launch Event Nathan's hosting the launch of Shippit's State of Shipping Report in Melbourne on June 4. RSVPs close tomorrow.
Not in the Add To Cart community?
How to Build a Creative Machine That Finds Winners | ATC Playbook #616
Meta finds the right customer. But it relies on you to give them the creative that can find them.
For most of the last decade, the performance marketing conversation was about audiences. Which targeting, which lookalikes, which exclusions. The media buying was the strategy and the creative was the fuel you fed it.
That thinking doesn't hold up now. Meta, Google and TikTok have automated most of what used to make a good media buyer. The audience targeting levers are largely gone. Which means creative has moved from execution to being the strategy.
"The major investment has just been in content production."
Justin Babet built Chief Nutrition from five grand a month in online sales to over a million a month. No food category experience. Just the same build-measure-learn thinking from three previous tech businesses applied to a new category. Over four years of doubling revenue, the biggest breakthrough wasn't in unlocking media spend. It was building a creative engine.
Examples from this Playbook
📱 Alice from Ovira merged the performance marketing and creative roles into one. Her argument: most performance marketers are bad at creative, and by the time a brief moves between two people, the moment is usually gone. One person in the ad account, making the content and running the spend at the same time. No handoff. No delay.
🐾 Mike from Scratch keeps new creative in a dedicated testing campaign, isolated from proven winners. Meta defaults to what it already knows works. If new creative is sitting alongside an established ad, it isn't getting a real test. Sixty to seventy percent of Scratch's sales now come from creative launched in the last two to three months.
🛋️ Paula from Freedom runs 30 to 50 creative variants per campaign using AI to generate variations, same team, no extra production budget. Her condition: equal starting conditions for every variant. Equal budget, equal airplay. Unequal exposure produces misleading signals and bad decisions.
