E-commerce Performance & Innovation Club (EPIC) Monthly News (April 26)
The name EPIC began as our Ecommerce Performance and Innovation Conference, held on 11 June 2025 at the National Space Centre in Leicester to mark Anicca’s 18th birthday. Over a hundred retailers, brands and tech leaders joined us for a day on AI, Shopping Ads, Retail Media, Amazon and TikTok Commerce. We are reusing the name for this new monthly news roundup, the Ecommerce Performance and Innovation Club, which brings the same audience a regular read-out of what is moving in e-commerce. Thirty-seven stories this month across seven sections, from macro forecasts to the regulators setting the rules of the agentic commerce era. We will be running this on the last working day of every month, and if the news flow keeps up, we will move to a weekly cadence later in the year.
1. Ecommerce: big picture & trends
Five macro data points UK and European commerce teams typically reference for 2026 board packs. Sprout Social on social-commerce trends, eMarketer’s AI Commerce thesis, US single-digit growth normalisation, the NRF US forecast, and Brazil marketplace dynamics for any UK brand eyeing Latin America.
2026 Social Media Ecommerce Trends & Statistics: The Ultimate Guide
Sprout’s annual social-commerce report shows 47 per cent of consumers have made a direct in-platform purchase in the past year. TikTok Shop leads on under-25 conversion rates; Instagram leads on average order value; Pinterest leads on category research and high-intent click-through. Social discovery now precedes search for 38 per cent of Gen-Z buyers. The report also flags creator-led commerce as the single fastest-growing acquisition channel for fashion and beauty in 2026. Influencer-driven sales now account for 17 per cent of TikTok Shop GMV.
The AI Commerce Opportunity
eMarketer’s thesis on where AI will move the dial in commerce in 2026. Top categories: personalisation at scale (the largest near-term ROI), conversational discovery, automated merchandising and pricing, and brand-new attribution models for assistant-led purchases. The report flags measurement as the single biggest near-term gap. eMarketer also draws a line between operational AI (already paying back) and agentic AI (still pre-revenue for most retailers in 2026). The thesis is intentionally skeptical of the hype cycle.
2025 U.S. ecommerce sales mark fourth straight year of single-digit growth
US Commerce Department data shows online retail grew 8.7 per cent in 2025, the fourth consecutive year of single-digit growth. Pre-pandemic, online routinely grew 14 to 16 per cent year-on-year. Penetration is now 22.7 per cent of total US retail sales, which Digital Commerce 360 notes is high enough that the law of large numbers takes over. Categories like apparel and electronics are now over 35 per cent online, while groceries are only 14 per cent. Analysts cited in the piece argue category-by-category penetration ceilings are now visible.
NRF is forecasting U.S. retail sales to grow 4.4% in 2026
The US National Retail Federation forecasts retail sales growth of between 3.7 per cent and 4.4 per cent in 2026, up from a final 4.0 per cent print for 2025. Online and non-store retail is expected to grow 7 to 9 per cent, more than double the bricks-and-mortar pace. NRF’s chief economist Jack Kleinhenz attributes the bullish view to wage growth, low unemployment and easing inflation, but flagged proposed import tariffs as the single biggest downside risk for the second half of the year. The forecast assumes consumer-confidence indicators stabilise around current levels.
Brazil Ecommerce Market Shares 2026
Brazilian retail e-commerce will add US$22.54 billion in sales over the next two years, with Mercado Libre and Amazon together capturing more than half the total gain. Local marketplace Shopee is growing share against Magazine Luiza and Americanas, both of whom have struggled with category-share erosion since the pandemic peak. eMarketer also notes that cross-border merchants face tighter import-tax rules from the Brazilian Receita Federal, which will compress margin for low-AOV imports. Mobile commerce is now 71 per cent of all Brazilian online retail.
2. Big brands & retailers
Etsy, Walmart, JD Sports, THG, Mountain Warehouse and Titan all moved this month. The most striking story is Etsy’s new CEO calling for “really great human service” from sellers, the most direct counter-narrative to agentic commerce we have heard from a marketplace boss this year. Walmart’s annual report puts e-commerce as the company’s biggest growth driver and its retail-media business as a stand-alone profit centre.
JD Sports chair quit after failed push to remove CEO – reports
Andy Higginson resigned as JD Sports chair in late April after the board failed to back his move to remove CEO Régis Schultz, according to Financial Times reporting. JD Sports has been under continuous pressure on the pace of its US expansion and on digital-channel performance, particularly mobile conversion. Schultz remains in post and a chair search is reportedly underway. Higginson is the second high-profile UK retail chair to step down in a publicly fractious split this year. JD Sports’s share price was largely flat on the news.
THG reports ‘strong start’ to year as beauty sales rise
Online retail group THG reported its strongest Q1 sales growth since the pandemic, led by the Beauty division up 9.6 per cent year-on-year. Nutrition (Myprotein) was broadly flat. THG Ingenuity, the company’s commerce-platform-as-a-service business, also grew, with new clients reported in the period. CEO Matthew Moulding said the company’s full-year guidance has been “modestly raised” on the back of the Q1 trade, and that cost-base improvements should flow through to second-half margin. Group-level revenue grew 5.1 per cent overall.
Mountain Warehouse swaps decade-old ecommerce system, launches on BigCommerce
UK outdoor retailer Mountain Warehouse launched a composable, headless ecommerce store on BigCommerce, replacing a decade-old custom system that had become a barrier to mobile-first design changes. The new stack uses BigCommerce Catalyst (the company’s Next.js-based React framework) with Algolia for search and merchandising, and Klevu for product recommendations. Mountain Warehouse cited speed-to-market for AI experimentation and mobile-conversion improvement as the main drivers. The cutover took 14 months end to end. Initial KPIs reported: 22 per cent faster page loads and 8 per cent uplift in mobile conversion in the first four weeks.
Etsy CEO calls on sellers to refresh inventory, provide ‘really great’ human service
Kruti Patel Goyal, who took the CEO role in January after a 15-year career at Etsy, used the Q1 earnings call to ask sellers to refresh stale listings and double up on human customer service. Etsy returned to GMV growth in Q1 2026 after seven consecutive flat or declining quarters. Goyal positioned Etsy’s seller-led service as the company’s defence against agentic shopping: the argument is that AI agents pick on price and feature-fit, while Etsy buyers come for human craftsmanship and seller-direct conversation. The platform also rolled out a new seller-coaching tool.
Walmart’s annual report shows e-commerce boom
Walmart’s 2025 annual report shows e-commerce as the single biggest growth driver, contributing more revenue increase than physical-store comparable sales for the first time. International e-commerce grew 31 per cent year-on-year. Walmart Connect ad revenue grew 28 per cent and is now a stand-alone profit centre that Walmart breaks out separately. The company also called out AI integration with Anthropic Claude as a key 2026 initiative, alongside the Vizio acquisition driving its connected-TV ad business. Walmart Marketplace third-party seller count grew 35 per cent.
Titan launches dedicated B2B ecommerce platform to power India’s corporate gifting
Indian conglomerate Titan launched a dedicated B2B platform for corporate gifting across its watches (Titan, Fastrack), jewellery (Tanishq) and eyewear (Titan EyePlus) brands. The platform offers bulk pricing tiers, tax-compliant GST invoicing, a partner-account portal, and post-purchase reporting. Titan estimates the Indian corporate-gifting market at US$2 billion and growing at double-digit rates as Indian companies expand. The launch is initially India-only, with the company evaluating Middle East rollout for late 2026.
3. Platforms, marketplaces & tools
TikTok Shop, Tradebyte, WooCommerce, Rezolve, nFuse and the Practical Ecommerce monthly tool roundup (covering both April fortnights). The shift this month: B2B platforms (nFuse, Rezolve) raised funding or made structural moves, while consumer marketplaces leaned harder on safety, IP protection and integration with social and content channels.
Marketplace Leaders Take the Stage at Tradebyte’s ECD Munich 2026
Tradebyte (the Zalando-owned marketplace integrator) announced its 2026 European Commerce Day (ECD) conference for late June in Munich, marking the event’s tenth anniversary. Confirmed speakers include leaders from Zalando, About You, Otto, Decathlon and several DTC brands. The agenda focuses on cross-border European expansion, AI-driven catalogue automation, and how marketplace integrators are repositioning for the agentic-commerce era. Attendance is expected to be 850-plus, the largest ECD to date. Tradebyte also announced new platform-side AI features for catalogue normalisation.
nFuse raises $2M to let small retailers order via WhatsApp
Bulgarian B2B startup nFuse raised US$2 million from Eleven Ventures and LAUNCHub Ventures. The platform lets small independent retailers place wholesale orders through WhatsApp and SMS without learning a separate ordering portal. Pilot customers are in food and FMCG distribution across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, with a UK launch pencilled in for Q3 2026. The platform also handles payment terms, delivery scheduling and returns through the same conversational interface. CEO Plamen Iliev previously co-founded a regional logistics startup.
WooCommerce Stores Can Now Sell Products Via YouTube Videos
WooCommerce launched native YouTube Shopping integration. Merchants can tag products in videos, link directly to checkout, and sync inventory automatically. Launch is rolling out across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and twelve other markets. Merchant tagging happens in YouTube Studio with no plugin required; transactions stay on the WooCommerce store with attribution flowing back through standard analytics. The integration also covers YouTube Shorts. Shopify already had this feature live; the WooCommerce launch closes a long-standing gap.
New Ecommerce Tools: April 2026 (Practical Ecommerce, both fortnightly editions)
Practical Ecommerce ran two April editions of its fortnightly tool roundup, between them covering the full month. The 1 April issue covered product-image automation, UGC platforms, box-free returns, BNPL, marketplace integrations, shipping intelligence, cross-border tools and affiliate platforms, with launches from Loop Returns, Bolt (one-click checkout improvements), Shopify Magic (product-content generation), Klaviyo and several smaller players, notably a UGC-rights-management tool aimed at fashion brands and an AI shipping-cost optimiser pitched at multi-carrier shippers. The 15 April issue covered cross-channel marketing, B2B procurement, agentic-marketing platforms, shoppable-media, payments, AI product descriptions and shipping intelligence, with launches from Klaviyo (improved AI segments), Attentive (SMS agentic flows), Adobe (Commerce Summit announcements), Stripe (agent toolkit pre-release), a B2B punchout startup, an AI returns-routing tool, and two notable EU-launched VAT-MOSS and OSS automation tools.
Rezolve AI Goes Directly to Commerce.com Shareholders with Proposal
Rezolve AI (NASDAQ: RZLV) launched a direct-to-shareholder bid for Commerce.com after the latter’s board declined to negotiate. Rezolve proposes a stock-and-cash combination it values at over US$700 million. The pitch is that combining Rezolve’s AI shopping engine with Commerce.com’s merchant base creates an “agentic commerce powerhouse”. The Commerce.com board called the bid “opportunistic and undervalued”. Rezolve has set a tender-offer window through mid-May. The story is a rare hostile-bid drama in the otherwise consolidating agentic-commerce sector.
TikTok Shop, IPOPHL reinforce commitment to brand protection and safer marketplace
TikTok Shop signed a renewed agreement with the Philippine Intellectual Property Office (IPOPHL) for IP protection across the Philippines. The platform also ran an IP Bootcamp for sellers. Counterfeit-takedown response time has dropped from 72 hours to 24 hours; brand-registry sign-ups grew 40 per cent year-on-year. TikTok also publicly committed to extending the IP cooperation model to Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore through 2026. The agreement covers proactive seller monitoring, takedown coordination, and direct rights-holder communication channels.
4. Marketing & retail media
The biggest April story by article volume: Walmart accounts for three of the month’s top retail-media moves. Add Google’s AI Max Dynamic Search Ads upgrade, eMarketer’s Q2 KPIs and Adweek’s measurement piece, and the picture is clear. Retail media is now the front-line of digital-advertising spend, and the open-web search budget is migrating into retailer-owned channels faster than most planning models account for.
Online marketing strategies for ecommerce companies
Pan-European overview of 2026 online-marketing strategies for ecommerce: SEO, PPC, social, retention, retail media, and marketplace advertising. The piece includes regional benchmark data for spend share by country (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, the UK and the Nordics). UK and German marketers are most likely to be running retail-media-led plans; French and Italian are more PPC-led; Polish and Nordic are the most social-led.
Retail Media Silos, Measurement, and Misconceptions Continue to Stymie Growth
Adweek’s POSSIBLE conference panel highlighted three persistent retail-media barriers: data silos between brand and retailer (each side guarding its own first-party signals), measurement standards that vary across networks (no consistent ROAS definition), and a persistent misconception that retail media is incremental rather than substituting other channels. Speakers from Kroger Precision Marketing, Albertsons Media Collective, Mars and Unilever all flagged measurement as the bottleneck blocking another doubling of spend. The IAB’s draft retail-media measurement standard is now in industry consultation.
Walmart opens first-party data to advertiser partners
Walmart Connect is opening first-party shopper data to advertiser partners through a clean-room model, removing a long-standing complaint that Walmart was holding signals back. Initial partners include The Trade Desk, Pacvue and several agency holding-companies. Brands can now match their CRM against Walmart purchase history at SKU level, build look-alike audiences against actual purchaser cohorts, and run incrementality tests with proper hold-out groups. The clean-room architecture is built on Walmart’s own infrastructure rather than a third-party clean-room provider, which is unusual.
Walmart Targets Small Businesses With Streaming Ad Marketplace
Walmart launched Connect Select, a self-service streaming-TV ad marketplace aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. Minimum spend is US$500. Inventory is pulled from Walmart’s Vizio acquisition (Vizio CTV plus the FAST channels Walmart now owns), targeting uses Walmart’s first-party shopper data, and placement also runs across the Walmart app’s home and category screens. The company says SMB onboarding takes under 30 minutes and includes a guided campaign-setup wizard. The launch was first to the US; UK and Canada rollout is “under review.”
We are upgrading Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max
Google announced AI Max is moving out of beta and replacing Dynamic Search Ads as the recommended approach for unstructured search inventory. AI Max uses Gemini for query matching, asset generation and bidding decisions in real time. Existing DSA campaigns will auto-migrate over the summer; advertisers can opt out for now but the opt-out window is time-limited. The migration includes new creative-control settings (brand voice, keyword exclusion, asset approval) that DSA did not expose. Google is also adding negative-asset controls for brand-safety teams.
Search and Retail Media Search KPIs Q2 2026
Q2 2026 KPIs: retail media now captures 21.7 per cent of US digital search-advertising spend, up from 18.2 per cent a year ago. Amazon Ads alone grew 24 per cent year-on-year. Google’s share of total search dropped two percentage points. Walmart Connect grew 38 per cent. eMarketer attributes the shift to retailer-owned audiences having stronger purchase signals, plus the AI-driven shrinkage of open-web search clicks (AI Overviews now answer 12 per cent of US search queries without a click-through to publishers).
AI Creative Tools in Google Ads
A practical walkthrough of Google Ads’s AI creative features: asset generation, image variants, headline rewriting, the Performance Max ABCDs framework, and the new asset-feedback signal Google introduced earlier this year. The piece flags where AI works well (variant production at scale, A/B-style testing of headline alternatives, image-aspect-ratio adaptation) and where it does not (brand-voice consistency, regulated-industry copy, claims that need legal sign-off). Includes worked examples for an apparel and a SaaS account.
Inside Walmart’s creator-driven social commerce playbook
Walmart’s head of content, influencer and commerce shared the company’s social principles and detail of the Walmart Creator program, which is now four years old. Creators earn commission on driven sales; Walmart provides tagging tools, an analytics dashboard, dedicated account managers above a sales threshold, and a creator-summit programme. The program now has more than 50,000 active creators across the US, with the top 1 per cent driving the majority of attributed sales. Walmart also runs paid creator campaigns alongside the commission-only base.
5. New tech & infrastructure
The pipes underneath agentic commerce are being laid. AWS and OpenAI announced an expanded Bedrock partnership; Anthropic and Amazon committed to 5 gigawatts of new computing capacity; Stripe pushed harder on becoming the AI economy’s payment layer; and Revolut launched its UK consumer AI assistant. Underneath the headline launches is a clear pattern: the major US infrastructure players are aligning around a multi-model, agent-native, payment-aware future.
Revolut launches its new AI assistant AIR to UK customers
Revolut launched AIR (AI by Revolut), an in-app AI financial assistant for UK customers. AIR can categorise spending, flag unusual transactions, suggest savings actions, answer balance and policy questions, and explain individual transactions in plain language. Built on a mix of in-house models and third-party LLMs (Anthropic and OpenAI). Initial rollout is to all UK Revolut customers (around 8 million). EU rollout follows in late Q2. Revolut also flagged future merchant-facing features.
AWS and OpenAI announce expanded partnership to bring frontier intelligence to Bedrock
AWS and OpenAI announced an expanded multi-year partnership making OpenAI’s frontier models, including the GPT-5 series, available natively in Amazon Bedrock. Bedrock customers can now mix Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Mistral and Cohere models in the same enterprise-grade environment, with single-vendor billing, security and data-governance controls. The deal includes a commitment from OpenAI to make new models available on Bedrock at the same time as via the OpenAI API direct, removing a delay that previously frustrated AWS-native enterprise customers.
Stripe presses ahead with building economic infrastructure for AI
Stripe announced new agentic-commerce primitives at its Sessions conference: agent-authenticated checkout, programmable disputes, and a Stripe Agent Toolkit for developers building AI-led purchasing flows. The company positioned itself as “the payments layer for the AI economy.” CEO Patrick Collison described the building blocks as analogous to the role Stripe played in the early internet-payments era. Adyen and Klarna are moving in parallel directions; Visa Intelligent Commerce and Amex ACE address the same problem space from the card-network angle.
Anthropic and Amazon expand collaboration for up to 5 gigawatts of new computing capacity
Anthropic and AWS extended their computing partnership, with Amazon committing up to 5 gigawatts of new data-centre capacity for Claude training and inference workloads. The deal includes new US sites in Indiana and Mississippi, uses Amazon’s custom Trainium2 chips alongside Nvidia silicon, and is Anthropic’s largest single-customer computing commitment to date. Both companies framed the deal as enabling continued Claude scaling through 2027 and as providing supply assurance for enterprise customers facing capacity constraints elsewhere.
Cash App launches ‘pay later’ feature for P2P transfers
Block-owned Cash App launched a BNPL option for peer-to-peer transfers, letting US users split a payment to a friend over four instalments. Block emphasised in-app debt-spiral protections, including a hard cap on outstanding P2P-BNPL balance per user, mandatory repayment-schedule reminders, and a friction flow that warns users if they are approaching their cap. Initial rollout is to existing US Cash App users with positive transaction history. Block has not announced UK or EU plans.
6. Agentic Commerce
The signature story of the month. American Express launched the ACE Developer Kit with industry-first protection for registered AI-agent purchases; Visa announced parallel intent. Marketing Week, The Drum, CX Network and Hospitality Net all published serious analyses of what happens when AI does the buying. Brands that have not started thinking about agent visibility now are already behind, particularly in categories where structured product feeds favour feature-fit over brand-narrative.
What happens to brands when AI goes shopping?
Marketing Week’s feature on agent-led purchasing examines how brand-building changes when the buyer is a model rather than a human. Industry voices include Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Mars CPG leaders. The recurring concern: agents optimise for price and structured feature-fit, eroding brand premium for any product that competes on intangibles. The piece flags three defensive moves: investing in genuinely differentiated functional benefits, building first-party customer relationships outside the agent loop, and shaping product feeds to communicate brand attributes that survive the structured-data translation.
Amazon’s Rufus really remembers me, so now I am letting it do my shopping too
Commerce-media columnist Kiri Masters writes a personal essay on her seven-month experience using Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant. Initially uncanny, Rufus now reliably shows relevant products with the right size, brand and reorder cadence, and Masters has stopped browsing Amazon’s traditional category pages for repeat purchases. She argues Rufus is “winning the agentic shopping war by default” on Amazon’s storefront, with Amazon competitors not yet within striking distance. The piece is intentionally first-person and avoids analyst framings.
Advertising and AI: What Ethical Risks Does Agentic Commerce Pose?
Orange’s research arm published an analysis of the legal framework for LLMs in commerce: algorithm transparency obligations, model-liability questions, and consumer-rights gaps when an AI agent makes the purchase rather than the consumer. The piece argues current EU consumer law was not written for agent-led transactions and will need targeted amendment around three issues: who is liable when an agent buys the wrong item, how distance-selling cooling-off rights apply, and what disclosures the merchant must present to a non-human buyer.
Instacart, Uber Eats integrate with Anthropic Claude AI platform
Instacart and Uber Eats are now both directly accessible from Claude’s app, letting Claude users place grocery and food-delivery orders without leaving the assistant. Anthropic confirmed both apps are live in the US, with UK availability following. The integrations use Anthropic’s app SDK and show the apps in Claude’s tool menu, with order-placement, delivery-tracking and reorder all handled in-conversation. Both Instacart and Uber Eats have separately confirmed the integrations are core to their 2026 distribution roadmaps.
American Express debuts Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit; Visa announces parallel scheme
Amex launched the ACE (Agentic Commerce Experiences) Developer Kit on 16 April, plus an industry-first protection scheme for registered AI-agent purchases. Card-not-present fraud rules are extended to agent-initiated transactions; merchants can register specific agents with Amex and receive bespoke dispute-handling. The kit includes APIs for agent authentication, transaction-intent declaration, and merchant-side acknowledgement of agent-initiated transactions. Pilot merchants include selected luxury, travel and B2B categories. Visa announced a parallel scheme in the same week (Visa Intelligent Commerce, giving merchants a way to verify and authenticate agent purchases), with implementation models that differ: Amex is closer to a registered-agent whitelist; Visa leans more toward open-protocol authentication. Mastercard is expected to follow later in Q2. CX Network covered both schemes together on 23 April.
Ascott Invests in AI-Ready Infrastructure to Scale Agentic Commerce
Singapore-based Ascott (180,000 serviced apartments globally across 60 brands and territories) announced a multi-year programme to make its inventory, pricing and policies machine-readable for AI travel agents. Ascott explicitly cited Booking.com and Expedia’s own agent integrations as the trigger: if intermediaries are exposing AI-readable APIs, suppliers either match them or risk losing distribution. The programme also covers loyalty-data exposure and direct-booking-incentive structures designed to compete with agent-led OTA recommendations.
7. Regulations & rulings
Thin this month, with only one direct UK regulatory story. Worth noting that the TikTok x IPOPHL story (Section 3) and the Orange ethics piece (Section 6) both touch this section. We will fatten this in May as more rulings around the EU AI Act, the FCA’s BNPL rules (live 15 July), DMA enforcement, and the FTC’s pending agentic-commerce inquiry land.
‘New laws will fail shop workers unless employers make it easier to report abuse’
The Retail Trust chief executive argues that the UK’s new retail-crime laws (tougher sentences for abuse of shop workers, faster police response targets, a dedicated retail-crime offence) will not work in practice if internal employer-side reporting mechanisms remain weak. Many retail workers do not believe reporting changes outcomes and do not trust their own employer’s incident-logging tools. The Retail Trust’s piece calls for employer-led reporting reform alongside the new law: simpler digital tools, faster acknowledgement, and clearer feedback loops to workers about what action was taken.
- Agentic commerce shifted from theory to live infrastructure. American Express launched ACE Developer Kit, Visa announced parallel intent, Anthropic added Instacart and Uber Eats to Claude, Amazon’s Rufus is now placing repeat-shopper reorders.
- Retail media captured 21.7 per cent of US digital search ad spend. Up from 18.2 per cent a year ago. Walmart Connect grew 38 per cent. Amazon Ads grew 24 per cent. Open-web search budget is migrating into retailer apps faster than most 2026 planning models assume.
- Operational AI is the 2026 invest-now bet, agentic AI is the 2027 revenue story. Personalisation, dynamic pricing, demand forecasting and customer-service triage already pay back. Agent-led purchasing is largely 2027 for non-Amazon retailers.
- TikTok Shop crossed into serious-channel status for younger categories. Heavy IP-protection and brand-safety investment in South-East Asia, EU and UK markets next. Under-25 conversion rates lead the social-commerce field.
- B2B agentic AI moved from demo to production. Product catalogues, ordering, customer service and pricing all show real deployments this month. Industrial and wholesale platforms are catching up to B2C on agent-readiness.
- Regulators caught up. Card-issuer-led consumer protection for agent-placed purchases sits alongside chargeback and Section 75. EU enforcement of brand-registry rules tightened. Compliance work for 2026 is now concrete, not speculative.
Frequently asked questions
What is the EPIC monthly?
EPIC stands for E-commerce Performance and Innovation Club. It is Anicca Digital’s monthly roundup of the e-commerce and AI stories that matter for senior commerce leaders, published on the last working day of every month and covering the previous 30 days. Each edition is written for B2B and B2C ecom managers, retail directors and senior commercial leads, not for generalist marketers.
What is agentic commerce, and what should I do about it?
Agentic commerce is when an AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Amazon Rufus, Gemini, Perplexity and similar) places the purchase rather than the human consumer. April 2026 was the month it crossed from theory to live infrastructure: American Express launched the ACE Developer Kit, Visa announced parallel intent, Anthropic added Instacart and Uber Eats to Claude, and Amazon confirmed Rufus is now placing reorders for a meaningful share of repeat shoppers. If you sell direct, the priority work in Q2 is getting your product feed machine-readable for agents and pressure-testing your brand attributes against structured agent-led comparison.
How fast is retail media really growing?
Per Q2 2026 eMarketer KPIs (Section 4), retail media now captures 21.7 per cent of US digital search-advertising spend, up from 18.2 per cent a year ago. Walmart Connect alone grew 38 per cent. Amazon Ads grew 24 per cent. Open-web search budget is migrating into retailer-owned channels faster than most 2026 planning models account for. Any plan that grows Google budget faster than retail media in 2026 is fighting against the macro trend.
What is the difference between operational AI and agentic AI in commerce?
Operational AI runs in the background: personalisation, merchandising, dynamic pricing, demand forecasting, customer-service triage. It is already paying back for most retailers and is the largest near-term ROI. Agentic AI handles the actual purchase decision: recommending what to buy, placing the order, handling the checkout. eMarketer’s framing in Section 1 is useful: operational AI is a 2026 invest-now decision, agentic AI is largely a 2027 revenue story for non-Amazon retailers.
Is TikTok Shop ready for serious investment?
Per the TikTok x IPOPHL story in Section 3, TikTok Shop is investing heavily in IP protection and brand safety in South-East Asia, with EU and UK markets clearly next. The Sprout Social data in Section 1 shows TikTok Shop leads on under-25 conversion rates. If your category skews young or visual (fashion, beauty, accessories, home), treat TikTok Shop as a serious channel for 2026 rather than 2027. Get on the brand registry early: enforcement gets stricter every month.
When is the next EPIC edition?
End of May 2026. The last working day of every month is the standard cadence. If a particular story breaks mid-month and you would like our take ahead of the next edition, get in touch using the contact details below.
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