Your 3-minute Summer eCom Recap

Hey there 👋

It’s been a wild summer for eCom, and we figured it’s time to give you a bite-sized rundown of what happened, including:

Shopify Partnering with Roblox (virtual ecom?) 🎮️ 

Walmart & StockX Collab - Sneakerheads Rejoice 👟

Paypal To Power Shopify Payments 💳️ 

Klarna’s CEO To Replace 50% of Employees with AI?! 😮 

Youtube Affiliate Program for Shopify Merchants 🛍️

TikTok X Pinterest X Amazon for in-app Shopping 🤳 

..and a few more news you can’t miss out on, plus a free guide to boost your Shopify store’s AOV & LTV waiting for you at the end! 👀

Let’s get into it 🔥 

1. Shopify X Roblox eCom Collab 🕹️ 

Nobody saw this coming, but Shopify is partnering up with Roblox to bring e-commerce to immersive spaces, a virtual spin on immersive commerce.

Shopify claims that this integration will let creators & brands engage with over 80M daily active Roblox users (who may become potential customers).

This also gives both Roblox & it’s Gen-Z users a new road to business — we can only wait & see what will come of this 🤔 

Does this mean our products can be plastered over every game on Roblox? 😂

Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Ecommerce & Unicorns! Subscribe now:

2. Walmart Gambles on Collectible Sneakers 👟 

If you know anything about the collectible sneaker market, you know it’s lucrative. A pair of shoes can be sold for thousands of dollars depending on rarity, and Walmart’s gambling on this.

They’ve collaborated with StockX, one of the biggest sneaker marketplaces 🔥

As of right now, many sneakers are available on Walmart, all fulfilled by StockX, some rare pairs are being sold at insane prices — this collab is a way for Walmart to compete with bigger marketplaces like Amazon & grab more spending from them.

Anyone looking to buy a pair of Travis Scott Jordans for $3000? 💀 

3. Paypal To Become Shopify’s Main Payment Processor🤳🏼

Paypal will become another online credit/debit processor for Shopify Payments through the Paypal Complete Payments Solution — this is promising easier managing of orders, payouts, reporting & chargeback flows.

We all know that the checkout process is make or break in eCom, and Paypal being integrated makes things tenfold easier for customers.

How many eCom collabs are there now? 3 in one month? 🔥 

4. Klarna Replacing 50% of Employees with AI? 🤖 

The CEO of a BNPL service we’re all familiar with is doing something pretty questionable — replacing half of the workforce with AI.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski says that AI makes it possible to achieve more with fewer people, he also claims that Klarna boosted it’s average annual revenue per employee from $400K (1 year ago) to $700K now, just from cutting the workforce & replacing it with AI 🤯 

You can argue morals all you want, but the numbers are there, and it seems this won’t be the first or last time we hear about AI replacements in the financial space 🤔 

5. YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program for Shopify Merchants 💰️ 

YouTube now expanded their partnership with Shopify, allowing Shopify Plus (and Advanced) merchants in the U.S. to join the YT Shopping affiliate program directly through the Google & YouTube app on Shopify.

A cool stat to gasp at — over 30 billion hours of shopping-related content was viewed on YouTube in 2023 alone 😮 

With this collab, merchants can now easily manage their affiliate program, track analytics, and view product performance through the Google Merchant Center.

This also benefits creators, too, since now they can tag dozens of brands in their shopping content, and here’s a visual showing how this’ll work from mobile:

Shopify just can’t stop getting love from every corner — how many more collabs will we see in just this year alone?!

P.S. — If you want to see the biggest changes that came to Shopify, check out our post on the best from Shopify Editions 2024 😉 

6. Amazon X TikTok X Pinterest for In-app Shopping 📲 

Yup, customers can now shop Amazon products inside of TikTok & Pinterest without ever leaving any of those apps.

However, there are limitations — in-app shopping with Amazon is only available for select products advertised on TikTok/Pinterest AND sold by Amazon or sellers on Amazon.

First we had Shopify & Roblox, and now Amazon’s also trying the “immersive commerce” model — though this partnership is a less bold approach than Shopify’s 😂

Bonus News & Your Freebie 🔥 

Amazon Prime Day reached $14B in U.S.

Shein sues Temu over copyright infringement & trade secret theft.

Ikea launches a “pre-owned” marketplace.

We also mentioned China’s eCom Wars & TikTok Shop entering The UK in our previous recap.

Finally, not news, but something you should really care about — our 3-minute BFCM Guide (cause it’s right around the corner).

And as a thanks to you for reading to the end, here’s a free guide from The DTC Insider on boosting Shopify AOV & LTV:

🎧 ECORN Radio This Week:

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Thanks for reading and supporting E&U (Ecommerce & Unicorns)

Daniil from ECORN