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I’m back! And it is really me this time. After travelling through a typhoon, two family members with the flu and tiny Japanese hotel rooms, I don't think I've come back the same person. But it's nice to get back into the ecommerce news.
Cheers
Bushy
We’re getting close to Online Retailer! If you are there the Tuesday night before, join us at our Good Sorts party with Thread Together. We already have teams from Aje, Seed & Sprout, Roses Only, Amart, VRG Girl, Koh, Culture Kings, THE ICONIC and more joining. Would love to see you there. Register here if you want to join.
This week’s ecommerce news you should know
1. Europe's €3 parcel toll is now live 🇪🇺
I never used to go to bed dreaming about tariffs. I hate this new sleep trend.
Last week the EU switched on a €3 flat fee on low-value parcels (items €150 or under) coming in from outside the bloc. The brutal piece is that it's charged per product category, so a mixed parcel cops the fee multiple times. It's aimed at Temu and Shein, but any Aussie brand enjoying those incidental European orders is now affected. It's temporary, running until 1 July 2028. Check your tax settings, brace for customs delays, and congratulate your favourite English friend for not being a part of this one.
Closer to home, Depop just made selling free in Australia. The old 10% seller fee is gone from 22 July. The catch is the 5% (plus up to a dollar) now lands on the buyer instead. Classic fee whack-a-mole à la eBay. Sellers keep more per sale, but watch what a buyer-side fee does to conversion on cheap items.
2. Meta's Muse Image wants your ad budget 🎨
Setting up Meta ads is the most monotonous job going, and the only laughs come from the AI "enhancements" (I'll never hit your Opportunity Score). That might be about to change. Meta just dropped Muse Image, its Superintelligence Labs image model, which will power image generation in Advantage+ Creative with greater realism and a better handle on promotion creative. It’s not in my account yet but should be there soon.
Interesting timing. Meta has also announced that ads created or edited with its AI tools will soon carry an automatic "AI info" disclosure label. That aligns with the EU AI Act's transparency rules, which land on 2 August and force AI-generated images to be clearly labelled as synthetic.
And from the company that gave us pokes and "it's complicated", meet Pocket, a new app for making "gizmos": vibe-coded little games, tools and general randomness. I don't really know what it's for. Doesn't matter. Our future generations don't need water if they've got gizmos.
3. Temu tops the charts. Websites aren't dead. 📊
The IAB dropped a double banger this week: the Commerce and Discovery Report and the Retail and Commerce Media State of the Nation. Both free downloadable PDFs.
Temu was the most-visited retail brand in May 2026 (18.2m), ahead of Amazon and Woolworths. Physical retail still won discovery, search engines won research, and online stores won comparison. So retail, Google and websites aren't dead just yet?
But over half of shoppers (54%) have now used an AI assistant to discover, research, or compare, with the top jobs being to compare prices, answer product questions, and compare products. Worth running your own products through Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT to see what surfaces.
On the retail media side, spend keeps climbing, but the most-used format is still the humble on-site static display ad. Yawwwwn.
4. Search Console soon tracks your social posts 🔎
Big one from Google Search Console, especially if you use search to drive to content. Google is adding platform properties so creators and site owners can see how their social and video posts perform in Search and Discover, covering Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. As Google becomes the place this content gets consumed rather than the platforms themselves, you'll finally see how it drives traffic beyond your website. It's rolling out to creators first, but expect to hook your own channels up soon.
While we're here, I've been doing a lot of deep SEO analysis in Claude and quietly shaking my fist at the $100-plus monthly bills from Ahrefs and SEMrush. Then I found DataForSEO, which serves up similar data with no front end and charges by API usage to pull rankings, keyword ideas and performance straight into Claude. So far so good. Less than $5 spent.
5. Klaviyo wants your followers and their DMs 💬
Teased at Klaviyo's Sydney event last month, Klaviyo Social Marketing went public this week. Two things make it interesting.
Firstly, it converts your Instagram followers into email, SMS and WhatsApp subscribers, and it captures DMs, comments and tags to enrich profiles and feed them back into Meta and Google. That runs directly against the walled gardens everyone's been building. Secondly, it doubles down on Klaviyo's whole pitch - full visibility of the customers you actually own. Smart move.
There's an interesting launch Kulani Kinis case study where the Sun Chasers ambassador crew handed over their socials at signup, pulling their follower metrics back into Klaviyo to personalise campaigns. $425k in six months, 64% of it attributed to Klaviyo. Keeping a close eye on this space, it'll move fast.
Meanwhile, what is it with all the fitness partnerships right now? Celsius signed Collingwood's Josh Daicos, Dove Men+Care jumped on Strava, and Kiehl's Australia is now HYROX's national skincare partner. Don't you know it's winter and we're allowed to get fat?
SPONSORED
Showpo's move off Salesforce onto headless Shopify is one of the best launches I've seen in 2026, and a site I keep bringing up as an example. Convert Digital has just published the full case study on how they pulled it off, and you can read it here.
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:
📈 Shopify Trending in June: Aussie consumers buying from Shopify merchants were up 16.9% year on year in June, a positive note heading into EOFY. Camping, winter gear and a good dose of World Cup fever led the surge.
🛠️ Jai built an analytics audit tool, Lumnio, that runs a real browser against your live site, intercepts every dataLayer event and cross-checks it against your GTM and GA4 setup. Five free audits for the crew.
🎁 Would you include a donation at checkout? Off the back of the GoGenerosity episode: at one store, one in six shoppers add a donation every single time, and mystery shopping found zero added friction. Or is anything extra in the checkout flow a hard no?
🤖 Is Fable actually worth it? The debate on whether Fable unlocks anything real for ecommerce work, or whether Claude on its own already does the job without chewing through the usage.
Not in the Add To Cart community?
How to Stop Treating Influencers Like Billboards | Jessica Hatzis, frank body | ATC Playbook #642
Influencer budgets aren't shrinking. They're climbing fast. The bit nobody's cracked is proving what you actually get back for the money.
It's not whether to spend on influencers and content creators, most of us are spending more every quarter. It's justifying it. Attribution gets messier the further the customer drifts from the platform, fees keep climbing, and the creator who printed money for a competitor last quarter does nothing when you book them. It can get awkward when your boss keeps asking: what did that spend actually do?
But most are measuring influencer success the wrong way.
A single post in a single feed on a single day was never how influence works, so optimising the one-off just gets you a slightly better one-off. Jessica Hatzis spent eleven years as CMO of frank body, the brand that basically wrote the social-led beauty playbook in this country, and now runs Willow & Blake. Her answer to "how do you get value out of influencers" isn't a bigger name or a sharper contract. It's how you create an ongoing relationship rather than a viral post.
“Influencers are living, breathing billboards online. People need to see something half a dozen times before they're actually going to care, and it needs to come from half a dozen credible sources."
Examples from this Playbook
💄 Jess from frank body runs "eventing" instead of one-off deals. Creators in jumpsuits smashing crockery with baseball bats, on brand, on camera. For a fraction of the cost of booking each of them individually, you walk away with a stack of content and six real relationships.
👟 Simon from Culture Kings put NBA players and rappers in the stores in person, again and again, until the talent became part of the brand's fabric rather than a one-off endorsement. Multi-touch from credible voices, at scale.
🏉 Grayson from Cherry Collectables built every live show around a reason to turn up that wasn't "we're selling today." Hosting the Select NRL world premiere moved 1,600% more product than any previous launch.
📹 Lauren from Motto Fashions treated the daily 4pm live streams as the source material for every other channel. One hour of live fed a week of social, and Motto grew 127% in twelve months on that loop.
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.
