Shopify merchants will pay OpenAI a 4% transaction fee on sales through ChatGPT's checkout feature beginning January 26. At 11 percentage points below Amazon's typical 15% referral fee and without forced advertising spend, the platform offers the potential for organic product discovery at scale.
Read more
Amazon.com registered just 165,000 new sellers in 2025, the lowest annual total since Marketplace Pulse began collecting data in 2015 and down 44% from 2024, continuing Amazon's transformation into an infrastructure for established, well-capitalized operators.
Read more
Widespread predictions of disrupted U.S. holiday sales due to escalating tariffs proved unfounded. According to Adobe Analytics, online spending on Cyber Monday hit $14.25 billion, up 7.1% year over year, while Black Friday reached $11.8 billion, up 9.1%.
Read more
Over 780 Chinese sellers changed their Amazon legal entity to Hong Kong in November 2025 alone – a dramatic response to Beijing's first-ever mandate requiring platforms to report quarterly seller revenue data.
Read more
Walmart's advertising business is growing at six times the rate of its overall retail sales. Walmart Connect, the company's U.S. retail media platform where sellers and brands buy sponsored placements, grew 33% in the third quarter while U.S. retail sales grew just 5%.
Read more
Just two years ago, the battle lines in e-commerce seemed clear. Amazon dominated through speed and convenience, Temu and Shein disrupted through price. Today, both sides are sprinting toward what the other perfected, driven by evolving regulations worldwide and the realization that modern retail demands supply chain flexibility, not purity.
Read more
Amazon's introduction of API fees for third-party developers represents another margin squeeze on sellers, this time arriving indirectly through the software tools that have become essential to operate on the platform.
Read more
Amazon's retail business now accounts for just 40.5% of the company's total revenue, marking a new milestone in its evolution from an online bookstore to a commerce infrastructure provider.
Read more
The conventional narrative fixates on gross merchandise volume as the ultimate indicator of marketplace potential. By that logic, Amazon's U.S. marketplace, with an estimated $305 billion in third-party GMV, dwarfs everything, and the conversation ends there.
Read more
Additional tariffs imposed by the Trump administration caused U.S. customs revenue to surge to $215.24 billion in fiscal year 2025, an increase of nearly $120 billion compared to 2024 and almost $100 billion higher than the 2022 peak of $117.49 billion.
Read more