Welcome back to your no-fluff roundup of the most actionable shifts in e-commerce, retail media and growth strategy. This week we’re zeroing in on conversational commerce, holiday pressure-tests and media monetisation, all of which ring directly relevant for growth-oriented brands and agencies (yes: that means you.)
🤖 AI in Shopping: Trusted Advisor, Not Trusted Buyer (Yet)
Nearly three-quarters of global consumers are already using AI in their shopping journeys — but only 13% have let it actually hit “Buy.”
That’s the headline from Riskified’s latest survey of 5,000 shoppers, which exposes a fascinating gap between curiosity and confidence.
🧠 What consumers use AI for: AI tools like ChatGPT are becoming their go-to assistants for product discovery, review summaries, and price comparisons.
In other words, AI has officially replaced the “friend who knows deals” — but not the cashier.
🔒 Why they’re holding back:
- Payment security tops the list of fears (33%)
- Followed by privacy, mistakes, and loss of control
- 41% of Americans say they simply don’t trust AI assistants at all (YouGov)
- And half of consumers don’t trust AI-powered search results (Gartner)
Until AI can explain its choices and prove it behaves ethically and transparently, consumers will keep it in advisor mode. The lack of accountability also affects adoption: if an AI makes a bad purchase, who’s responsible, the shopper or the merchant?
🎁 Online Holiday Spending Slows — but AI Joins the Gift Hunt
U.S. shoppers are still planning to spend big this season — just a little more carefully.
Adobe Analytics projects $253.4 billion in online holiday sales (Nov 1 – Dec 31), up 5.3% YoY. That’s solid growth, but slower than 2024’s 8.7% and well below the decade-long 13% average.
💸 What’s driving (and dragging) spending:
- Inflation, new tariffs, and shaky consumer confidence are keeping wallets tighter.
- Yet people still want to celebrate — stocking up on décor, gifts, and discounted essentials.
- Adobe notes shoppers are developing a “stock-up habit,” buying early if they sense price swings ahead.
- Cyber Week alone will account for $43.7 billion (17.2% of all online sales).
BFCM Spending from 2015 to 2025
Image Source: CNBC
📱 Mobile reigns: Over 56% of online purchases will happen on phones: up from 40% in 2020. For every brand, that’s a simple mandate: optimize mobile checkout before optimizing ad spend.
🤖 AI becomes the new shopping elf: Adobe expects AI-powered browsing and chat usage to surge 520% YoY, as consumers use assistants to research gifts, compare prices, and plan purchases.
🛒 Walmart x ChatGPT: Shopping Goes Conversational
Walmart announced in mid-October a new partnership with OpenAI that will let users shop Walmart products directly inside ChatGPT. Groceries (non-perishables), household essentials, and third-party items can all be added to cart and checked out without leaving the chat.
Once shoppers link their Walmart accounts, a simple “Buy” button inside ChatGPT completes the order. Sam’s Club members will also be able to plan meals, restock favorites, and discover new items within the same chat thread.
🧠 A glimpse of agentic commerce:
This collaboration plugs Walmart into OpenAI’s broader push to turn ChatGPT into a full shopping platform blending product discovery, recommendations, and payments for sellers on Shopify, Etsy, and now Walmart.
Walmart sees this as a move from reactive to predictive retail, learning customers’ needs through conversation rather than waiting for search queries. CEO Doug McMillon summed it up:
“The search-bar era is ending. A native AI experience is coming, multimedia, personalized, and contextual.”
Meanwhile, Walmart continues to develop Sparky, its in-house generative AI assistant that already helps customers compare products and will soon handle re-orders, bookings, and multimodal inputs (text, image, even audio). Learn more about Walmart’s AI led future.
💰 PayPal Turns Every Small Business Into an Ad Network
PayPal just gave small businesses a surprising new revenue stream, selling ads.
Announced in early October, PayPal Ads Manager lets SMBs host and run ads directly on their e-commerce websites and manage campaigns across PayPal’s own ecosystem and the open web. Think of it as a “mini retail-media network” for the long tail of merchants.
🧩 How it works:
- Businesses add a simple PayPal SDK to their sites.
- They can choose what categories of ads appear — e.g., a café can block competing restaurants.
- AI then automatically serves context-relevant ads on checkout and confirmation pages, creating new monetizable real estate that was previously untouched.
📈 The bigger picture: PayPal wants to help its SMB base tap into the $60 billion commerce-media market (and an expected $1 billion slice for financial media networks by 2026).
Mark Grether, PayPal’s Ads SVP, puts it bluntly:
“We’re enabling small businesses to participate in the same high-margin advertising model that’s powering growth at some of the largest companies in the world.”
Learn more about PayPal’s ad plans
🧩 Why Retail Growth Now Hinges on Specialty Marketplaces
After years of chasing scale, retailers are realizing bigger isn’t always better. The new growth frontier isn’t “more products” – it’s better curation.
According to Boston Consulting Group, marketplaces now drive 67% of global e-commerce sales, up from 40% a decade ago. Even more telling: 70% of consumers prefer specialized marketplaces over “everything stores” when prices are similar. People are tired of scrolling through infinite SKUs; they want trusted experts to filter the noise.
🛍️ The Rise of Curated Commerce: Specialty marketplaces focused platforms built around one category or audience are redefining what “assortment” means. They allow retailers to:
- Expand their online catalog with third-party sellers without taking on inventory risk.
- Earn 8–15% commissions per sale (up to 30% in fashion).
- Leverage first-party purchase data to improve personalization, merchandising, and product strategy.
📈 Who’s Doing It Right:
- Kingfisher’s B&Q (UK): 41% of total e-com sales now come from its home improvement marketplace.
- Decathlon: Aims to hit $1.1B marketplace sales by 2026.
- Ulta Beauty: Recently launched UB Marketplace, an invite-only ecosystem for emerging beauty brands using its authority to curate new subcategories while preserving brand trust.
- 1800-Flowers: Curating local sellers to expand its gifting ecosystem.
🧵 That’s a Wrap: What this week tells us
Commerce is shifting from “sell harder” to “sell smarter + sell where the consumer is already acting”.
Automation, media-data convergence and new moments of purchase (chat, AI, mobile) are creating opportunities, but only brands that pay attention to trust, experience and data-integration will win.
If you enjoyed this, send it to a colleague or a brand friend who needs to stay ahead. Got a hot story you want included next week? Reply and I’ll try to slot it in.
Need help turning any of these insights into your next audit, CRO plan or email flow? Book a free strategy call.
