The e-commerce news of the week you can't afford to miss! Trends, events & tools, all in under 5 minutes ๐
๐ข E-commerce & Shopping
โ๏ธ The heatwave forces the government to extend the summer sales until 28 July Faced with a sharp drop in footfall in city-centre physical stores due to extreme heat, Trade Minister Serge Papin has announced an additional week, which applies automatically to online stores as well. (www.sortiraparis.com)
๐ฒ Fnac Darty moves into the circular economy with Repair and Run The retail leader is taking part in a 1.2 million euro Series A alongside Crรฉdit Agricole to add a local micro-mobility repair capability, an eco-design initiative aimed at capturing margin in the after-sales market. (www.licornesociety.com)
๐บ๐ธ Amazon Prime Day 2026 sets a record of 26.4 billion dollars against a backdrop of micro-credit US online sales are up 9.3% year on year, but reveal growing consumer financial strain with a 9.5% jump in buy now, pay later (BNPL) solutions, totalling 2.1 billion dollars during the event. (www.retaildive.com)
๐ก๏ธ Amazon launches "Brand Elevation" to lock product listings in favour of brands The e-commerce giant now bars wholesalers and unauthorised third-party sellers from creating or editing product listings or variants for brands enrolled in Brand Registry, preventing the catalogue inconsistencies that drove away 38% of shoppers. (www.ecomcrew.com)
๐ E-commerce migrations: PrestaShop and Shopify benefit from WooCommerce's decline A lebot.in study of 155,000 French merchant sites reveals an exodus from WooCommerce (-47 net platforms) toward PrestaShop (+32 sites, median GMV of 67,696 euros) and Shopify (+20 sites), driven by the desire to reduce technical debt. (www.lebot.in)
๐ Virtual try-on establishes itself as a conversion tool against a critical 40% return rate A DRESSX study shows that with online return rates of 30% to 40%, brands are deploying AI try-on and adopting Google's Universal Commerce Protocol to run try-on requests inside conversational engines. (www.marketingtechnews.net)
๐จ The DGCCRF increases its fines by 150% and sets up a unit dedicated to the AI Act The authority's annual report shows 202.3 million euros in penalties issued in 2025 and formalises a "Data & AI" unit tasked with closely monitoring the algorithmic compliance of online stores and the enforcement of the law in France. (www.signaturelitigation.com)
๐บ๏ธ CoStar Group enters France with its 3D digital twins for retail The S&P 500 giant is rolling out its analytics suite of geospatial and 3D modelling tools to allow retail expansion teams to precisely assess the performance and vacancy of their commercial locations. (www.costar.com)
๐ Global-e completes the acquisition of cross-border logistics specialist Passport for 350 million dollars The international e-commerce platform is integrating Passport's last-mile optimisation solutions, giving global DTC brands a highly strategic "non-Merchant of Record" standard shipping option. (investors.global-e.com)
๐ฉ๐ช Germany establishes itself as the undisputed e-commerce leader in central Europe The German market captures more than half of its region's online revenue, underlining vast disparities in digital concentration across Europe (66% in Italy against 46% in France) that call for strongly localised merchant structures. (ecdb.com)
๐ค Indonesia freezes platform commission increases to protect its SMEs The government has agreed a moratorium suspending any unilateral rise in administrative fees on Shopee, Tokopedia, TikTok Shop, Lazada and Blibli, pending the completion of the SAPA UMKM support platform rollout. (en.antaranews.com)
๐ฃ Marketing & Ads
๐ฃ๏ธ Fnac industrialises nano-influence and sets new engagement standards Brands now favour creator-led strategies over classic paid media, imposing a strict floor of 5% average engagement rate on influencers for any commercial collaboration. (www.influencia.net)
๐ฅ Candy'Up and KeBlack turn brand communication into native cultural content By orchestrating the release of rapper KeBlack's track "Pas normal" with agency 87seconds, the brand gains a massive social media engagement campaign that outperforms traditional ad formats in terms of return. (www.influencia.net)
๐ TikTok Shop US business volume passes 30 billion dollars in the first half Powered by a 2.3 billion dollar advertising subsidy plan dedicated to live shopping and in-feed formats, the social network is shaking up Amazon in beauty and fashion, requiring fine-grained campaign management at the margin. (novadata.io)
๐ Uber Advertising rolls out "Offsite Ads" and unifies its console under Uber Marketing Manager The mobility group is accelerating in commerce media by allowing brands to retarget consumers on Meta and Google Shopping using its exclusive first-party data, in a global partnership with Mastercard Commerce Media. (ppc.land)
๐ค AI & Tech
๐ค Generative artificial intelligence becomes the official arbiter of French purchasing power Faced with inflation, 36% of French consumers now use AI assistants to compare prices, 31% to track discounts in real time and 25% to detect greenwashing, driving unprecedented brand volatility. (www.itrnews.com)
๐ง Kantar Mรฉdia studies the rise of agentic advertising aimed at AI assistants France CEO Denis Gaucher highlights the emergence of a discipline that consists of designing advertising campaigns no longer for the human eye, but to convince the autonomous AI agents that make purchases on consumers' behalf. (www.influencia.net)
๐ Gap Inc. modernises its direct sales channels with Google Cloud AI and Zeta Global Presented at Cannes Lions, this initiative integrates the Gemini, Veo and Agent Studio models to generate automated visual content, while Athena's agentic technology drives audience segmentation and loyalty programmes. (www.digitalcommerce360.com)
๐ Wave of layoffs at Lazada and Tokopedia under pressure from AI automation Lazada is cutting 5% of its regional workforce while ByteDance is reducing Tokopedia's R&D and engineering teams in Southeast Asia, marking the definitive shift to AI tools for handling technical maintenance and logistics. (www.straitstimes.com)
๐ท๐ด Romanian startup Naratix raises 1 million euros to automate catalogue enrichment Led by Early Game Ventures, this seed round will allow it to expand internationally its semantic AI solution dedicated to the intelligent structuring and automation of product listing catalogues for merchants. (www.vestbee.com)
๐ Resources
Report by the Conseil National du Commerce on retail vacancy: The report co-led by Emmanuel Le Roch sets out 40 concrete proposals to reform local taxation and loosen the commercial lease regime in order to restore the competitiveness of city-centre retailers. (www.costar.com)
Citadel Securities half-year market flow analysis: The study highlights unprecedented retail investor participation (+65% year on year), driven by speculative enthusiasm around tech and AI chip options, despite their caution in everyday consumer spending. (www.citadelsecurities.com)
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