Conversion, checkout, the AI shopping behavior reshaping retail funnels.
Roundups frame agentic commerce as a standards war between OpenAI and Google. Read both specifications and OpenAI’s retreat from Instant Checkout, and the two rails are converging on one journey, asking merchants for the same feed at a cadence the spec never demanded.
In Shopping and Performance Max you cannot pick keywords, audiences, or placements in any way that sticks. What decides which auctions you enter is a text file: the title, the attributes, and the labels you put on each product. Here is how the matching actually works, and the one Google rule about AI-written titles that almost nobody has implemented.
US retail media hits roughly $71 billion in 2026, but Amazon and Walmart take nine of every ten new dollars. The channel is huge, growing fast, and more concentrated than any other in digital.
Amazon called its 2026 fee change slight, and for one unit it is. The real cost of selling on Amazon and Walmart sits underneath it: a stack of fulfillment, storage, and ad charges that turns a 6-15% referral into something operators put near 30-40% of gross merchandise value (GMV), and each platform hurts in a different place.
US TikTok Shop is forecast at $23.4 billion in 2026, bigger than Target’s or Costco’s e-commerce. But the top 1% of sellers drive about 60% of that, and half the headline stats are forecasts and second-hand claims. Read it with both eyes open.
