January eCom Recap - All You Need To Know

Hey 👋

January’s been a wild ride for eCom — and we’re going to give you a recap of the biggest news, including:

Trump’s Tariffs on Canada, Mexico & China 📦️ 

TikTok’s Ban Situation Got Worse 🚫

Amazon’s New Ad Retail Service 🗣️ 

Meta’s Stop to Fact-Checking 🤓 

Trump’s Meme Coin Fail? 🟡

Walmart’s New Digital Avatars 🤵 

eCom Platforms Will Be Liable for Unsafe Goods ⚠️

EU’s New AI Act Can Ban “Risky” AI Systems 🤖 

Expected IPOs in 2025 🤔 

…plus some more hot news & a special deep dive on scaling brands from Nik Sharma 😁

Let’s get into it 🔥

1. Trump’s Tariffs Since Election 😢 

Since Trump’s re-election, he’s been on a roll with imposing tariffs or threatening to impose them. As of now, imported goods from Canada & Mexico have a 25% additional tariff, and goods from China are at a 10% tariff.

The worst part is, the De minimis loophole used by everyone (think big names like AliExpress, Temu, Shein) who imports goods from China, isn’t a thing anymore.

All goods from China now face the same duty fees, regardless of whether they are under $800 or not — and this hurts eCommerce really, really bad.

Here’s a visual showing the estimated impact of the China tariff alone:

If you want to learn more about Trump’s tariffs and how you can work with & around them, check out our post on Trump “Killing” eCommerce, we covered everything in detail.

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

2. What’s Up With TikTok Now? 😬 

Keeping it short & sweet — TikTok’s been under fire for a while ever since Biden “forced” their parent company to sell their shares. Since then, many billionaires voiced their wishes to buy the app, but so far, nobody really came through with that.

Trump has recently placed a 75-day ban extension, and now the app’s been banned from the Google Play & App Stores, so nobody within the U.S can actually download and use it the legal way.

And while Trump did state he doesn’t mind Elon buying TikTok if he wanted to, Elon recently said he has no plans to do so, and doesn’t even know what he’d do if he had ownership of the app — that’s one billionaire down, how many will rethink their bids following this?

Of course, TikTok’s one of the best marketing channels there is right now, especially for eCom. Overall this isn’t good news, but we covered every way you can actually benefit from this ban in our recent post — the TikTok & Trump Situation.

3. Amazon’s New Ad Retail Service 📦️ 

Amazon just dropped a new program called Amazon Ad Retail Service that lets multi-brand retailers use its ad tech right on their own sites.

If that sounds a little confusing — it means you can manage and sell ads through Amazon’s platform, without ever leaving your own site.

Retailers can determine ad formats to fit the size of their own templates, show what ads are shown where and the frequency of them showing, as well as customize where the ads lead the shopper — not to mention ads can also show availability and price.

While this is a demo as of now (and you can request one here, or check out their resources), it’s confirmed that retailers pay fees based on usage levels, but they haven’t disclosed pricing just yet.

Isn’t it exciting to see Amazon making ads so much easier to manage for retail? 😁

P.S. — Want to use Reddit to grow your brand? Check out our Merchant’s Guide to Reddit in case you missed it 👀

4. Meta’s Put an End To Fact-Checking 🤓 

Instagram, Facebook and Threads are now no longer using 3rd-party fact-checkers, and instead opted in for a more “X” approach with user community notes.

Along with this, Zuckerberg has also weakened the content moderation on Meta platforms — many say this is a move to increase user engagement, since studies have shown that misinformation spreads up to 20x faster than factual content.

And that directly means 20 times more engagement, which also means, by proxy, twenty times the ad revenue — even if the content may be harmful thanks (or, rather, no thanks?) to this lax moderation.

Meta’s moving to a more profit-centered engagement model at the expense of truth? Wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card, that’s for sure.. 🤔 

5. Trump’s Meme Coin 🟡 

With Trump in office, he’s fully embraced crypto — even to the extent of launching his own Meme Coin $TRUMP. It was created on the 17th of January, and rose from $10 to a peak of $74.59, and as of 2/12/25, it’s hovering around $15.29.

Of course, a coin plummeting from $75 down to $16 or less doesn’t mean everyone profited — over $2 billion was wiped out across 813K crypto wallets. At least Trump’s affiliates made $100M in trading fees..

The launch of $TRUMP also led to the mass creation of copycat tokens, most of which in one way or another use names of Trump’s family with the goal of misleading investors. Even with this overall negative publicity around the coin, the Trump administration is going to continue promoting digital assets.

They’ve recently launched a “token reserve”, made to support mainstream crypto like BTC & ETH, with the goal of lowering volatility and making these tokens more appealing to invest in not just for the ultra-wealthy, but to Americans in general — an interesting move to make right after your own coin crashes, Donald 🤦‍♂️ 

Also, congrats to whoever shorted $TRUMP, you must be eating good 😂 

6. Walmart Now Has Digital Avatars 🙍 

Walmart expanded into the metaverse by partnering with Zepeto, a pretty popular with Gen-Z digital avatar platform.

This collab lets users purchase real-world clothing from Walmart’s “No Boundaries” line straight from the Zepeto app.

When shoppers buy these physical clothing items, they’ll also get a free virtual version for their avatars.

This is pretty similar to the Shopify X Roblox collab we saw last year — and I’m more than sure this won’t be the last one we see, since merging online and offline shopping with a good enough incentive definitely brings in more revenue.

It does seem a little silly though, doesn’t it? Maybe I’m too old to understand these Gen-Z shoppers 😂

P.S. — Do you know what the biggest eCom & DTC events in Q1 are? Check out our Q1 ‘25 eCom Calendar to see which are worth attending 🔥

7. Marketplaces Will Be Liable for Unsafe Goods ⚠️  

The EU is planning to make marketplaces like Temu, Shein and Amazon responsible for the safety and legality of the products they sell.

Right now, individual buyers are considered the importers of goods entering the EU, but under this change, these platforms will have to provide customs data before any goods actually enter the EU.

That means collecting duties, VAT, and check if they meet EU standards. This entire plan also includes creating a central EU Customs Authority to screen every shipment for risks before they enter the EU — this whole idea came from the big increase in imports from eCom companies, with 4.6 billion low-value goods arriving just last year (2x the amount from 2023).

91% of these goods are both from China, and not checked by customs authorities, so, overall, the aim of the EUCA is to make it easier to collaborate with eCom platforms and avoid bad product — seems like a win-win? 🤔 

8. EU’s Act To Ban “Risky” AI Systems 🤖 

As of Sunday, the EU can ban any AI system they feel can pose “unacceptable risk or harm”. Funny enough, this has nothing to do with DeepSeek or the “security threat” that it is in the West.

Instead, it’s a more general act to protect people from misinformation. As for the details, systems like AI email filters won’t face any regulatory oversight, whereas AI healthcare recommendations will be heavily monitored and regulated, and things like AI that build social scoring systems will be banned outright.

Any AI-related system that can manipulate someone’s decisions, exploit any vulnerability (think age, disability, status), profile people based on appearance, collect real-time biometric data in public places will be deemed as an “unacceptable risk” — you can have a look at the full list of prohibited AI here.

Also, companies found to be using any of the above AI systems in the EU will have to pay up a pretty fine of €35M, or 7% of their annual revenue — so it’s worth thinking twice before onboarding an AI system that does something shady 😅 

9. Expected IPOs This Year 💹 

Recently, TechCrunch wrote a list of tech-related IPOs that are in the works this year. The biggest ones they named are:

1️⃣ eToro — a well-known trading platform filed this January for a $5B valuation

2️⃣ Klarna — BNPL fintech we’ve all heard of, filed back in Nov 2024, planning to go public in the 1st half of this year at $14.6B

3️⃣ Shein — the Chinese eCom giant filed in the UK last year at $45B

4️⃣ Chime — a digital bank, filed just 2 months ago, valued at $25B (in 2021)

5️⃣ Karman Holdings — a space & defense startup, went public last month, seeking to raise up to $100M at an insane $3B valuation

All of these are pretty big companies that were private for so long — we’ll just have to wait and see if raising all this money will help them grow or not 🤔 

Bonus News & Special Video 🎁 

Here are some more news you might find interesting:

TikTok assured advertisers that no laws are being broken by running ads on the platform

Microsoft started firing low-performance workers without paying severance or health insurance

Amazon is creating Easy Ship, a solution in the Netherlands and Poland to help sell products faster and cheaper

US-based neobank Mercury is in talks to raise $250M after reaching $500M

Shopify announces their “buy local features” in their Shop app

..and here’s a value-packed deep-dive on how to scale a brand from Nik Sharma:

🎧 ECORN Radio This Week:

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Daniil from ECORN