GameStop has made an unsolicited $56 billion cash-and-stock offer to buy eBay (paywalled; alternative source), with CEO Ryan Cohen arguing he can turn the marketplace into a far larger Amazon competitor. "EBay should be worth -- and will be worth -- a lot more money," Cohen said in an interview. "I'm thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars." The Wall Street Journal reports: Cohen said GameStop has a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide up to $20 billion in debt financing to help make a deal possible. GameStop delivered an offer letter to eBay on Sunday and released a copy of it following the Journal's report on the details of the bid. Cohen wrote in the letter to eBay Chairman Paul Pressler that GameStop started building its eBay position on Feb. 4. It said its offer consists of 50% cash and 50% GameStop shares.

EBay said Monday morning its board and financial advisers would review GameStop's unsolicited proposal. It said there were no discussions with or outreach from GameStop before receiving the offer. Ebay added that it will review the offer "with a focus on the value to be delivered to eBay shareholders, including the value of the GameStop stock consideration and the ability of GameStop to deliver a binding, actionable proposal."

If eBay isn't receptive, Cohen said he was prepared to run a proxy fight and take the offer directly to its shareholders. The window for shareholders to nominate director candidates at eBay ahead of an annual meeting scheduled for this June has already closed, according to the company's proxy materials. Cohen told the Journal that putting his videogame retailer and eBay under one roof could create opportunities to cut costs and improve earnings. The two companies have some overlap already, including a focus on selling collectibles such as trading cards. "There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business," Cohen said, referencing his time at GameStop and previously Chewy, the online pet-products marketplace he co-founded.

Walmart has secured patents for systems that use machine learning to forecast demand and automate pricing decisions, "pushing the U.S. retail behemoth into a debate over the use of algorithms to adjust product costs," reports the Financial Times. From the report: In January Walmart obtained a U.S. patent for a "system and method for dynamically and automatically updating item prices" to carry out markdowns in its ecommerce unit, a rapidly growing division that generated more than $150 billion in sales last year. Last week it received another patent for using machine learning to predict demand and recommend prices for goods. [...] Walmart said that both patents were "unrelated to dynamic pricing," as the patent issued in January was specific to markdowns and last week's patent was designed for merchant teams to make decisions, not the technology.

The patent granted in January involves an "end-to-end price markdown system" for ecommerce platforms such as Walmart.com based on data including predicted demand and consumers' price sensitivity. Last week's approved patent outlines ways to forecast demand and set prices at levels that will move stock over periods such as a week, a month or a quarter. "Example categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices," according to the filing. The "demand forecasting and price recommendation" tool envisaged in the patent would incorporate sources including purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, such as a passport or driver's license number. "Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire," said Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, who cited "the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things with pricing that are to your benefit and their detriment."

UPDATE: Amazon later published a blog post to address what it calls "inaccuracies" in the Financial Times report that the company's own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December.

An anonymous Slashdot reader had shared this report from the Financial Times: Amazon's ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a "deep dive" into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a "trend of incidents" in recent months, characterized by a "high blast radius" and "Gen-AI assisted changes" among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under "contributing factors" the note included "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established."

"Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT. The note ahead of Tuesday's meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. [...] Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly "This Week in Stores Tech" (TWiST) meeting on a "deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives" the group hopes will limit future outages.

He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Amazon said the review of website availability was "part of normal business" and it aims for continual improvement. "TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store," the company said.

Bloomberg reports on Amazon listings "automatically generated by an experimental AI tool" for stores that don't sell on Amazon.

Bloomberg notes that the listings "didn't always correspond to the correct product", leaving the stores to handle the complaints from angry customers: Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, small shop owners and artisans who had found their products listed on Amazon took to social media to compare notes and warn their peers... In interviews, six small shop owners said they found themselves unwittingly selling their products on Amazon's digital marketplace. Some, especially those who deliberately avoided Amazon, said they should have been asked for their consent. Others said it was ironic that Amazon was scouring the web for products with AI tools despite suing Perplexity AI Inc.for using similar technology to buy products on Amazon... Some retailers say the listings displayed the wrong product image or mistakenly showed wholesale pricing. Users of Shopify Inc.'s e-commerce tools said the system flagged Amazon's automated purchases as potentially fraudulent...

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said sellers are free to opt out. Two Amazon initiatives — Shop Direct, which links out to make purchases on other retailers' sites, and Buy For Me, which duplicates listings and handles purchases without leaving Amazon — "are programs we're testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon's store, while helping businessesâreach new customers and drive incremental sales," she said in an emailed statement. "We have received positive feedback on these programs." Tagay didn't say why the sellers were enrolled without notifying them. She added that the Buy For Me selection features more than 500,000 items, up from about 65,000 at launch in April.
The article includes quotes from the owners of affected businesses.

• A one-person company complained that "If suddenly there were 100 orders, I couldn't necessarily manage. When someone takes your proprietary, copyrighted works, I should be asked about that. This is my business. It's not their business."

• One business owner said "I just don't want my products on there... It's like if Airbnb showed up and tried to put your house on the market without your permission."

• One business owner complained "When things started to go wrong, there was no system set up by Amazon to resolve it. It's just 'We set this up for you, you should be grateful, you fix it.'" One Amazon representative even suggested they try opening a $39-a-month Amazon seller account.

China has unveiled new rules to rein in aggressive pricing tactics by online platforms, prohibiting e-commerce operators from forcing merchants to offer discounts or setting different prices based on user demographics without consent. The 29-article regulation -- jointly issued over the weekend by the National Development and Reform Commission, State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), and Cyberspace Administration of China -- lays out detailed compliance requirements that target several long-standing pain points as competition among internet giants has often eroded the rights of both consumers and merchants.

To restore merchant autonomy on pricing, the rules ban platform operators from leveraging their dominant scale to impose "lowest price" agreements. Platforms are prohibited from using traffic throttling, search ranking demotions, or algorithm penalties to pressure merchants into predatory price-cutting or exclusive pricing arrangements.

Pinduoduo in China, Shopee in Southeast Asia, and Meesho in India operate in markets that could hardly be more different -- an upper-middle-income industrial state, a stitched-together archipelago of under-banked economies, and a country where three-quarters of retail is unorganized and e-commerce penetration sits at about 7% -- yet all three have landed on the same business model.

These platforms run asset-light marketplaces specializing in cheap goods and slow delivery, monetizing through logistics mark-ups, advertising, and installment credit rather than retail margins. Temu and Shein are further variations now expanding in the U.S. and Europe.

The economics are thin for all. Pinduoduo's EBITDA margins on GMV (gross merchandise value) sit in a 0-4% band; Meesho's group-wide EBITDA hovers around break-even. Neither charges commissions on most sales; both earn through logistics mark-ups and advertising. Sponsored listings account for 1-3% of GMV at Indian marketplaces and 4-5% at Alibaba and Pinduoduo.

Credit is the more consequential side business. In India, cash on delivery functions as unofficial credit. Meesho CEO Vidit Aatrey said the customers prefer CoD for its "built-in delay," which effectively makes it "a five-day loan." Geography, income, and regulation were supposed to produce different answers. They produced one: a 3% endgame where e-commerce clips a few points of GMV and relies on attention and credit for profits.

"Amazon suggested its engineers eschew AI code generation tools from third-party companies in favor of its own ," reports Reuters, "a move to bolster its proprietary Kiro service, which it released in July, according to an internal memo viewed by Reuters." In the memo, posted to Amazon's internal news site, the company said, "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools.

"As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them," according to the memo.

The guidance would seem to preclude Amazon employees from using other popular software coding tools like OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code, and those from startup Cursor. That is despite Amazon having invested about $8 billion into Anthropic and reaching a seven-year $38 billion deal with OpenAI to sell it cloud-computing services..."To make these experiences truly exceptional, we need your help," according to the memo, which was signed by Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of AWS utility computing, and Dave Treadwell, senior vice president of eCommerce Foundation. "We're making Kiro our recommended AI-native development tool for Amazon...."

In October, Amazon revised its internal guidance for OpenAI's Codex to "Do Not Use" following a roughly six month assessment, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters. And Claude Code was briefly designated as "Do Not Use," before that was reversed following a reporter inquiry at the time.
The article adds that Amazon "has been fighting a reputation that it is trailing competitors in development of AI tools as rivals like OpenAI and Google speed ahead..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A group of states is seeking to extend a World Trade Organization agreement to refrain from placing customs duties on digital transmissions, a World Trade Organization document showed on Thursday. The proposal submitted by Barbados on behalf of a group of African, Caribbean and Pacific states proposed to extend the current moratorium -- a key pillar of internet development for decades -- beyond March 2026, when it was set to expire.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon on Friday expanded the reach of its low-cost ecommerce service to 14 additional markets and will call it Amazon Bazaar, as part of a push to compete with Chinese rivals including Shein and PDD Holding's Temu. The expansion of the service comes at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping import tariffs are denting consumer sentiment, especially of lower-income groups, who are on a constant hunt for cheaper deals.

Walmart announced a new partnership with OpenAI that will let customers shop using ChatGPT. "For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement. NBC News reports: It was unclear Tuesday what the terms of the Walmart-AI partnership would be. The announcement also did not say when shoppers can expect to see ChatGPT integrated with their Walmart online shopping experiences, only that it's coming "soon." The OpenAI announcement is part of a broader push by Walmart, the biggest private employer in the U.S., to incorporate AI into its daily operations.

"We're excited to partner with Walmart to make everyday purchases a little simpler. It's just one way AI will help people every day under our work together," Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement. The partnership could also serve OpenAI by introducing ChatGPT to a massive set of consumers who may not be as accustomed to using AI chats in their shopping as OpenAI's core user base. "There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual," said Walmart's McMillon.

DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. From a report: If that's not uncanny enough, you'll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it's a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that pops up alongside it.

The satellite TV giant is partnering with the AI company Glance to roll out this experience to DirecTV Gemini devices starting next year. "We are making television a lean-in experience versus lean back," Rajat Wanchoo, the group vice president of commercial partnerships at Glance, tells The Verge. "We want to give users a chance to use the advancements that have happened in generative AI to create a ChatGPT moment for themselves, but on TV." Glance is owned by InMobi, the same company that injected ecommerce bloatware into Motorola's budget phones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: A pair of e-commerce entrepreneurs who bought a number of well-known retail brands -- including RadioShack, Modell's Sporting Goods and Pier 1 Imports -- out of bankruptcy are accused of running a Ponzi scheme. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday accused Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez, founders of the Miami-based Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), of defrauding investors out of approximately $112 million. Through their holding company, Mehr and Lopez acquired distressed brick-and-mortar companies in order to turn them into successful, online-only brands. Dress Barn and Linens 'n Things were also among their acquisitions. [...]

The SEC's suit alleges that between 2020 and 2022, Mehr and Lopez, "made material misrepresentations" to hundreds of investors about the bankrupt retailers they had acquired. For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong." They also told prospective backers that money raised for a company would only be invested in that specific firm. That proved not to be the case, according to the SEC's lawsuit, which was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

"Contrary to these representations, while some of the REV Retailer Brands generated revenue, none generated any profits," the suit states. "Consequently, in order to pay interest, dividends and maturing note payments, Defendants resorted to using a combination of loans from outside lenders, merchant cash advances, money raised from new and existing investors, and transfers from other portfolio companies to cover obligations." The SEC alleges that at least $5.9 million of returns paid to investors were actually Ponzi-like payments funded by other investors, as opposed to companies' profits. Additionally, the federal regulatory agency claims that Mehr and Lopez allocated $16 million worth of investments for their own use, according to the filing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Adweek: Meta wanted advertisers to believe its ecommerce ad product, Shops ads, was outperforming the competition, per a whistleblower complaint filed in a U.K. court. The former employee alleges the social media giant artificially inflated return on ad spend (ROAS) by counting shipping fees as revenue, subsidizing bids in ad auctions, and applying undisclosed discounts. The complaint, viewed by ADWEEK, was filed with the London Central Employment Tribunal on Wednesday (August 20) by Samujjal Purkayastha, a former product manager on Meta's Shops ads team. The document claims Meta artificially inflated performance metrics to push brands toward its fledgling ecommerce ad product.

The company's motivation, the complaint says, was in part to combat Apple's 2021 privacy changes that cut the troves of iOS tracking information that had long powered Meta's ad machine. Meta's former chief financial officer (CFO), David Wehner, said the changes would cost "on the order of $10 billion" in losses during the company's Q4 2021 earnings call. User purchases on Facebook or Instagram Shops pages would provide more first-party data, however. Purkayastha, who joined Meta (then Facebook) in 2020 as a product manager on the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Applied Research team, was reassigned to the Shops Ads team in March 2022 and remained at the company until Feb. 19, 2025, when he was terminated.

He alleged that during internal reviews in early 2024, Meta data scientists found the return on ad spend (ROAS) from Shops ads had been inflated between 17% and 19%. This discrepancy stemmed from Meta counting shipping fees and taxes as part of a sale, even though that money never went to merchants, he alleged. The company's other ad products exclude those figures, in line with competitors like Google, the complaint reads. Without including the fees and taxes, Shops ads performed no better than Meta's traditional ads, Purkayastha claimed. "This was significant," the complaint reads. "In addition to the ROAS performance metric being overstated by nearly a fifth, it meant that, rather than having exceeded our primary target, the Shops Ads team had in fact missed it once the figure was reduced to take account of the artificial inflation." Purkayastha raised these concerns with senior leadership in multiple meetings between 2022 and 2024, and is now seeking interim relief through his employment tribunal filing to have his former position reinstated.

A Meta spokesperson told ADWEEK the company is "actively defending these proceedings," adding that "allegations related to the integrity of our advertising practices are without merit and we have full confidence in our performance review processes."

AI-powered salespeople are outperforming their human counterparts on Chinese e-commerce platforms, working around the clock without fatigue to sell products ranging from printers to wet wipes. Shanghai marketing firm PLTFRM has deployed 30 virtual avatars across Taobao and Pinduoduo using Baidu video models and DeepSeek language models. Brother's AI avatar generated $2,500 in printer sales within two hours and increased livestream revenue 30 percent. The company now checks overnight AI sales data each morning as routine.

Livestreaming drives over one-third of China's e-commerce sales, with half the population shopping via broadcast in 2024. Baidu's June livestream featuring an AI version of influencer Luo Yonghao drew 13 million views and generated $7.7 million in sales. American and European companies have expressed interest, Wired reports, after PLTFRM successfully tested English-language avatars on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: E-commerce giants everywhere felt the sting Wednesday when President Donald Trump announced that the US will be "suspending duty-free de minimis treatment for low-value shipments" worth $800 or less from anywhere in the world. Americans will likely soon feel the crunch, with one recent study estimating that the cost of eliminating the trade loophole overall to US consumers could fall between $10.9 billion and $13 billion while "disproportionately" hurting "lower-income and minority consumers" who buy a higher percentage of cheap imports.

Price hikes will likely come this fall, as the trade loophole will be closed starting on August 29, with Amazon emerging as perhaps the biggest question mark for US consumers wondering how hard their wallets may be hit by the major trade policy change ahead of the holiday shopping season. In February, Trump temporarily ended the de minimis exemption for all imports from China, prompting China-based retailers Temu and Shein to raise their prices.

Amazon's Prime Day sales plunged 41% on the first day compared to last year's kickoff, with experts attributing the drop to shoppers delaying purchases in anticipation of better deals during the extended four-day event. From a report: Momentum Commerce reported that figure for Tuesday (July 8), with Momentum's Founder and CEO John Shea saying that the sales numbers for this year's longer event could still surpass those of last year's shorter one, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (July 9). Shea attributed the drop in first-day sales to consumers putting items in their shopping carts but holding off on completing the purchase in case better deals come along, according to the report. Last year's shorter event encouraged shoppers to head to checkout to ensure they wouldn't miss out on the discounts, Shea said, per the report. Amazon Prime Vice President Jamil Ghani remains optimistic, telling Bloomberg Television the company was "pleased by the engagement" with shoppers during the event and that it is "very early." He said the company extended the duration of Prime Day because shoppers wanted more time to discover the deals.

According to numbers provided by Adobe, Prime Day's kickoff surpassed Thanksgiving 2024's $6.1 billion in eCommerce spend. The software company also found that 50.2% of sales came through a mobile device and that buy now, pay later orders for Amazon's Prime Day were up 13.6% year over year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Temu has said it will stop selling goods imported from China in the US directly to customers from its platform. The online marketplace said sales would now be handled by "locally based sellers," with orders fulfilled from within the country. The move comes as a duty-free rule for low-value packages is closed.

Temu, and rival Chinese retail giant Shein, had previously relied on the so-called "de minimis" exemption to sell and ship low-value items directly to the US without having to pay duties or import taxes. Temu said it had been actively recruiting US firms to join the platform. "All sales in the US are now handled by locally based sellers, with orders fulfilled from within the country. "The move is designed to help local merchants reach more customers and grow their businesses," it added.

Supporters of the de minimis loophole, which applied to parcels worth less than $800, argue it helped streamline the customs process. But both Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, said it damaged American businesses and was used to smuggle illegal goods, including drugs. In February, Trump briefly closed the loophole but the suspension was quickly paused as delivery services and customs agencies struggled to adjust. During the pause, the U.S. Postal Service even stopped accepting parcels from mainland China and Hong Kong.

WordPress.com has released an AI-powered site builder in early access that constructs complete websites with generated text, layouts, and images. The tool operates through a chatbot interface where users input specifications, resulting in a fully formed site that can be further refined through additional prompts.

While WordPress.com claims the builder creates "beautiful, functional websites in minutes," it currently cannot handle ecommerce sites or complex integrations. Users need a WordPress.com account for the free trial, but publishing requires a hosting plan starting at $18 monthly (less with annual subscriptions). The builder only works with new WordPress instances, not existing sites.

This launch comes as parent company Automattic recently cut 16% of its workforce and faces a lawsuit from hosting company WP Engine, which offers competing site-building tools.

The United States Postal Service has suspended all package shipments from China and Hong Kong following President Donald Trump's decision to eliminate the de minimis exemption, which previously allowed small packages under $800 to enter the U.S. without import duties. "The move could potentially create chaos and confusion across the online shopping industry, as well as make purchases more expensive for consumers, especially because many global manufacturers and internet sellers are located in China," reports Wired. "Shoppers are now on the hook not only for the additional 10 percent tariff, but also whatever original tax rate their products were exempted from until Tuesday." From the report: Cindy Allen, who has worked in international trade for over 30 years and is the CEO of the consulting firm Trade Force Multiplier, gave WIRED an example of how much additional cost the tariff will incur: A woman's dress made of synthetic fiber shipped from China through de minimis will now be subject to a regular 16 percent tariff, a 7.5 percent Section 301 duty specifically for goods from China, the new 10 percent tariff required by Trump, additional processing fees and customs brokerage fees, and perhaps increased brokering and handling costs due to the sudden change in rules. "Will the dress that was $5 now cost $5.50 or $15?" says Allen. "That we don't know. It depends on how those retailers react and change their business models."

In the immediate term, clearing customs will become a challenge for most ecommerce companies. Their long-term concern, though, is the potential impact on profitability. The appeal of Temu and Shein and similar Chinese ecommerce companies is how affordable their products are. If that changes, the ecommerce landscape and consumer behavior in the US may change significantly as well. While the USPS has announced the suspension of accepting any parcels from China and Hong Kong, CBP hasn't elaborated on how the agency will enforce Trump's new tariffs other than saying in an announcement that it will reject de minimis exemption requests from China starting today.

Vacancies at open-air shopping centres in the US have dropped to historically low levels [non-paywalled source], defying forecasts of a retail apocalypse caused by the rise of ecommerce. From a report: Landlords of complexes anchored by big-box chains, discount merchants and supermarkets have gained power to raise rents as leases expire. New construction has been stymied by higher interest rates and soaring building costs.

Scarcity in the market had disproved long-standing beliefs about retail real estate, said Brandon Isner, head of retail research at Newmark, a commercial property broker. "They would say, 'Retail is overbuilt. Retail is struggling. Ecommerce is going to take over brick-and-mortar retail.' And really none of that has ended up to be true," Isner said. Retailers plan to expand further in the years ahead, led by discount chains favoured by inflation-weary consumers seeking deals. Off-price clothing and decor chains Burlington Stores, Ross Stores and TJX, parent of the Marshalls and TJ Maxx store chains, have together added 339 US stores in the past year. Walmart intends to add 150 US locations over the next five years.