Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

Retail Brew

Katishi Maake

retailbrew.com

Gen Zers are more resistant to ‘doom spending’ than you’d think

80% say doom spending and soft saving don’t reflect their financial habits: survey.

Gen Zers are more resistant to ‘doom spending’ than you’d think 

Resale is growing increasingly popular online: report 

45% of younger shoppers would prefer to buy secondhand online.

Alex Vuocolo

Shoppers’ pickier habits are spreading to essentials

Consumer spending reveals priorities.

Shoppers’ pickier habits are spreading to essentials, data shows  

E-Commerce

Vidhi Choudhary

Instacart has appointed Etsy CEO Josh Silverman to its board of directors, the grocery delivery platform announced on Friday. Silverman, who has led Etsy since 2017, brings vast experience in e-commerce, marketplace dynamics, and consumer behavior—areas increasingly relevant to Instacart’s evolution from a delivery service to a broader retail tech platform.

“Josh is a proven marketplace innovator with a track record of scaling consumer platforms such as Etsy, Skype, and Evite,” said Instacart CEO Chris Rogers in a press statement. “His deep understanding of consumer technology, passion for empowering independent entrepreneurs, and commitment to sustainable growth make him an invaluable asset.”

In a statement, Silverman said he was honored to join Instacart at such a “pivotal moment” for the company. 

“Instacart has already transformed how millions of people shop for groceries, proving the power of technology to make everyday needs easier,” Silverman said.

Last week, Instacart parent Maplebear reported strong Q2 results. Revenue rose 11% to $914 million and gross transaction value (GTV) grew 11% YoY to $9.08 billion. Orders surged 17% to 82.7 million. Ad revenue climbed 12% YoY, driven by the expanded reach of the company’s digital advertising offerings.

“Our technology gives retailers an edge they simply couldn’t build on their own,” wrote the former CEO and new chair of the board at Instacart, Fidji Simo, in a 

Simo added that Instacart’s marketplace investments in unifying its platform and using AI to streamline onboarding have more than doubled its launch pace—rolling out more than 40 new retailer partner sites in the first half of 2025 alone, compared to 30 in all of 2024 and just over a dozen in 2023.

Last year, Instacart upgraded its tech in physical stores with 

Etsy CEO joins Instacart’s board

Josh Silverman previously served as CEO of Skype and Shopping.com, and was the co-founder of Evite, a platform for sending digital greeting cards.

Etsy CEO joins Instacart’s board as the platform evolves beyond grocery delivery 

Erin Cabrey

, Amazon this week announced its latest bid to become a digital grocery powerhouse and compete with Walmart. Consumers can now purchase perishable grocery items through its same-day delivery service.

The service is now available to shoppers in 1,000 locations across the US, and the e-comm giant said that’ll expand to 2,300 by the end of the year. Perishable items include produce, dairy, meat, baked goods, and frozen offerings, which can also be ordered alongside any other Amazon products in the same cart.

The move could help Amazon, which has found muted success in the fresh grocery space, compete with its biggest 

, Walmart, which is the top digital grocery retailer in the US, per eMarketer. Walmart currently accounts for approximately 40% of US all online grocery sales, according to Brick Meets Click.

The efforts to win in online grocery come amid the segment’s burgeoning success, with penetration reaching a record 81 million, or 61% of households and US online grocery sales growing 26% YoY to $10 billion in July, Brick Meets Click reported this week. Delivery sales jumped 36% YoY to $4.3 billion, while ship-to-home sales increased 10% YoY to $1.6 billion.

Amazon said it uses a temperature-controlled fulfillment system for the perishable orders, which undergo a “six-point quality check” before they arrive at shoppers’ doors in the same insulated bags they’d receive for Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods deliveries. Delivery is free over $25 or $2.99 under $25 in most cities for Prime members, Amazon said, and $12.99 for non-Prime members.

The company tested the offering in locations like Phoenix, Arizona; Orlando, Florida; and Kansas City, Missouri, and has found shoppers use the same-day delivery service twice as often as those who don’t buy fresh food on the platform, and are increasingly turning to Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods as well, Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, said in a statement. The company also said strawberries beat Airpods as a top five seller on Amazon in these regions.

Amazon’s other recent efforts to expand its grocery biz include reorganizing its leadership. In 

, it tapped Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel to serve as VP of worldwide grocery stores while also continuing to lead Whole Foods. And in June, Business Insider 

 Amazon was restructuring its leadership to organize Whole Foods more closely under Amazon’s operations.

Perishable groceries and home goods from Amazon

Amazon ups Walmart competition with same-day grocery delivery

The move comes as online grocery sales grew 26% year over year in July. 

When you think about where direct to consumer (DTC) came from, it started with a simple concept: Anyone could come up with an idea and create their own online store. Then in the mid-2000s, e-commerce platforms like Shopify made it easier for anyone to launch an online store. And social media giants like Facebook (now Meta) gave brands new ways to reach customers directly, and that’s really where this whole world was born.

During the 2000s, DTC was dominated by massive mail order catalogs and late night TV was a wild west of “as seen on TV” products that promised to change lives. The DTC revolution started when disruptors like Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Casper, and Blue Apron showed everyone that slick websites and cheeky ads plastered all over Instagram feeds and subway commutes was a legit business model. These brands mastered the DTC playbook—-cutting out the middleman, slashing prices, and turning customer feedback into product gold.

The 2010s brought the DTC boom with companies like Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper, and Away, proving that DTC could build massive brands by cutting out retailers and going straight to consumers with clever marketing and subscription models.

Today, DTC has evolved from a scrappy alternative into the mainstream (nearly every major brand has some direct sales component) and is an essential part of how all modern brands operate. Even brands like Levi’s have been 

 on their own DTC channels to present a more revamped brand and direction.

The big challenge facing DTC brands today is the rising cost of customer acquisition, two DTC experts told Retail Brew. However, the impact of AI, particularly ChatGPT, on consumer behavior and advertising strategies is potentially going to be one key game-changer for the future of DTC. While DTC isn’t going away, it’s about to get disrupted in interesting ways.

“We’ve seen a lot of shifts, with [the] introduction of Amazon, or with the introduction of now AI,” Jamie Domenici, CMO at Klaviyo—a marketing platform that enables DTC brands to group all their customer data from their website, email, SMS, social media etc in one place—told Retail Brew. “I think [AI] is that next evolution

While the core principles of DTC remain the same—digital-first marketplace, customer acquisition, and building a great brand—Domenici said, with AI democratizing things like ad creation and image generation, having a great product and elevated brand is a no-brainer to stand out from the crowd.

Abir Syed, co-founder of UpCounting, agreed. “The only really fundamental change might be with respect to AI,” Syed told Retail Brew. Particularly if ChatGPT succeeds in integrating product recommendations directly into their platform. Instead of manually researching products on Google and watching reviews, people might just go straight to ChatGPT for buying decisions, Syed added.

“The rise of Open AI or ChatGPT as an advertising platform,” is the kicker, he said.

 working on a major integration that would allow users to shop directly within ChatGPT without ever leaving the chat interface. It’s the same story for everyone in retail from product research to 

Domenici said the companies she works with, from Skims to Summer Fridays, are actively asking themselves: “How am I going to be the first to be ready for what’s coming next?”

The answer, Domenici said, lies in “thinking about operationalizing all of their channels, all their communication touch points, how they’re there, how they’re thinking about them holistically, and driving that engine across everything they do.”

 Seven years ago, when Syed first got into the e-commerce business, “the dream” was to cut out the middleman and go DTC. However, as competition heated up, ad platforms like Meta, Google, and Amazon ended up becoming the new middlemen, Syed explained.

Meta’s most recent earnings show that average price per ad across Instagram and Facebook went up 9% YoY.

“Each brand that got onto the e-comm train, they were willing to sacrifice more and more of that margin to the ad platforms to be able to acquire the customer. And, in theory, you always just regress to that point of breakeven. And that’s where a lot of the brands that I work with these days are at,” Syed said. “They’re struggling to make money happen from purely a ‘direct-to-consumer through Facebook ads’ type of play.”

As digital ad rates have exploded over the past 20 years—going from practically free to supporting entire billion-dollar businesses—brands are shifting back to a more omnichannel approach to avoid being overly dependent on expensive paid advertising.

“Consumer behavior during Covid-19 changed a lot because obviously people weren’t going to stores, purchasing a lot online. I think that now they are because people can go back to stores. I think it’s kind of moving back a little bit in that direction,” Syed said. “So there are some forces that are continuously getting people more and more comfortable with the online purchasing behavior.”

For smaller DTC brands, the advice Syed offered was to stay organic—and it wasn’t food he was referring to. “It’s easiest to start organic on one channel and just do the best job that they can there, and then diversify after they add traction,” he said.

Domenici agreed that it’s “not an easy place” to be a small brand, but she added that “within change, within disruption, there is an opportunity for you to optimize first.”

 With AI making creating ads super easy, the real gold mine for DTC brands becomes actual humans doing their thing—-creators going live, being messy and authentic in real time, Syed added.

“I think that’s still the opportunity to be able to do better if you’re going to focus on the organic side,” Syed said. “When people get more fed up with the inauthenticity of AI—because there will come a point where people just get irritated at how much fake content there is—the respite will be, I think, [shopping] lives, because that is hard for AI [to replicate], and then in-person.”

Meanwhile, Domenici said in-person or online “disruption” will be key to the future.

“This is a place where people who are set up the right way can really jump ahead at the competition and differentiate, but it’s going to be a battle, and it’s a new battleground where you have to think about every channel, every interaction, how you optimize for this new world,” she said. “Your marketing mix will look very different in this new world disruption.”

What’s next for DTC?

AI is the biggest fundamental shift that will change the way DTC brands serve ads and how shoppers shop from DTC.

Shopify’s e-commerce sales reported strong numbers for the second quarter, tariff impact notwithstanding, as the Canadian tech giant remained laser focused on serving its merchants.

GMV, or gross merchandise volume, which tracks the total dollar amount of all sales flowing through Shopify’s platform, grew 31% YoY in Q2. Enterprise brands including Starbucks, Canada Goose, and Burton Snowboards migrated to Shopify this quarter.

Shopify’s international GMV for the most recent quarter was up 42% YoY on a constant-currency basis, driven largely by top-notch performance in Europe, putting it ahead of North America.

“This is the outcome of a clear strategy executed really well. Agility and ease of use are now prerequisites for any modern commerce company,” Shopify President 

 becoming the new normal, the e-commerce platform also added strong agentic AI upgrades for merchants. On Tuesday, Shopify 

 three tools: a Checkout Kit for embedding purchases directly in chats; Shopify Catalog for fast product searches across millions of stores; and Universal Cart for shopping anywhere with one unified cart.

“We’ve built a suite of products that make it easy for AI platforms to bring shopping to their agents from discovery to checkout, and our merchants are front and center,” Finkelstein said.

According to Mark William Lewis, founder at commerce agency Netalico, “[Shopify] merchants are doing really well. Their general strategy is working well of converting people from [rivals like] WordPress, Magento,” Lewis told Retail Brew. “All ships rise when GMV goes up and it’s not even Q3, it’s not Black Friday.” He added that these numbers also bode well for the next quarter.

On Shopify’s Europe performance, Lewis said, the e-commerce platform has finally cracked how to get into this huge untapped market from a people and cultural perspective at a time when the US market is saturating for the company. “Europe has a lot of merchants that are still on older platforms,” he said.

On AI, Lewis said, Shopify is “taking control of the experience that AI agents should have around commerce when shopping on Shopify, as opposed to letting the agents do what they want.”

The Shopify logo seen displayed on a smartphone next to a shopping cart.

Shopify’s core business reports strength in second quarter

Shopify’s AI features have also moved beyond the buzzword phase.

Jeena Sharma

If you haven’t yet heard of British apparel retailer Aligne, we’ve gotta ask: Where have you been?

Launched in East London in 2020, Aligne began as a wholesale womenswear label before evolving into a buzzy DTC brand known for its 

In the first eight months alone, the brand notched $1 million in sales in the US with ShopMy as an affiliate partner. While primarily online, the brand has also been operating a widely popular summer pop-up in NYC’s Soho since April this year, which shuttered earlier this month.

And if you’re thinking, this is just another viral Gen Z brand, think again; the majority of Aligne’s customers fall between the ages of 30 and 50. 

CEO Ginny Seymour, who first came on board in 2022, said a pivot from wholesale to DTC has been instrumental in the brand’s growth. 

“I wanted to change who the customer was,” Seymour told Retail Brew, explaining that the brand initially launched as an affordable option but needed repositioning “to make that shift and to change the design handwriting, and to reestablish who our customer was.”

Seymour, who has a background as a buyer, said she wanted to build a direct relationship with the customer that was not through the “lens” of another buyer or their customer.

“By being DTC, you can also move much quicker; you don’t have to worry about wholesale selling periods,” she added.

Aligne’s US customers in particular have been a big part of the retailer’s virality and success as a DTC label. While the initial goal was to have the US account for 35% of its total sales, as of August 1—which also marks the end of Aligne’s first fiscal year as a DTC brand—the US made up for 70% of its overall revenue. Currently, the company’s sales in the US have surpassed those in the UK.

Seymour added that the brand is also available through retailers like Shopbop and Anthropologie, although the majority of its orders come through its website. While she said New York has been its “strongest” market in the country, San Francisco and Los Angeles are close seconds, followed by Dallas.

But despite its rather rapid rise to fame, Seymour said the company has no plans to open a permanent physical location in New York or the US anytime soon. Instead, Aligne is pivoting to an omnichannel model this fall, with a permanent office opening in New York and plans to build out a US-based team.

“We’re releasing omnichannel as a complement to direct to consumer,” she said. “Right now, we’re seeing brick and mortar as a way to support, not replace, our direct to consumer strategy.”

The retailer has also opened a warehouse in the US already for faster shipping and to avoid complications from tariffs. “It’s much more complex to run a business in the US,” Seymour said. “Shipping lead times across the country, different providers and carriers are just many more nuances to it, where, when we were 90% UK based, the UK is such a small region with a lot more similarities.”

She added that “catching up operationally” has been the biggest obstacle despite significant growth. 

Still, the brand has no plans of slowing down. In fact, over the next 12–18 months, Seymour plans on expanding into other categories to begin Aligne’s ascension into a full-grown lifestyle label.

“One of the things for a brand to last is that people need to understand who the brand is, and that brands can have a moment,” she explained. “But making sure people understand the ethos around Aligne and the lifestyle around Aligne is a really important part of our journey.”

How Aligne found its footing in the US

Within the first eight months alone, the British womenswear label notched $1 million in sales in the US through an affiliate partner.

“This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.”

That is the 11-word sentence at the center of a legal fight brewing in New York over the Preventing Algorithmic Pricing Discrimination Act, a new law requiring retailers to display the sentence as disclosure to shoppers when a price is set using personal data such as purchase history, online shopping carts, and zip codes—a controversial practice known as surveillance or personalized pricing.

The National Retail Federation filed a lawsuit against the State of New York last month after the law went into effect, claiming the warning is “misleading and ominous,” per the 

, and that the state “cannot force businesses that disagree to do so.

NRF General Counsel Stephanie Martz made an even bolder claim in an interview with Retail Brew: “We don’t think that the warning is factual,” she said. “We don’t think it’s accurate, and we think it’s really going to diminish customers’ trust in retail needlessly.”

When asked how the warning was inaccurate specifically, Martz emphasized again that the warning had an inherently negative connotation. “The suggestion is clearly that prices have been set,” she said. “Otherwise, why would the State of New York even have passed a law requiring a disclosure like that and didn’t think the practice was inherently negative.”

But does “inherently negative” equate to inaccurate? Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, which is not involved in the lawsuit, argued that the “negative valence is not in the disclosure itself, but tethered to a very basic norm, which is that most people would be offended to hear they are paying at a different price for the same product than their neighbor or coworker.”

The New York Attorney General’s office did not respond to an interview request in time for publication.

The idea of surveillance pricing goes back to the 1970s, Hepner explained, when economists started exploring the possibility of “individualized price discrimination,” or setting prices based on a consumer’s personal willingness or ability to pay.

He added that this idea challenged a norm going back over a century that consistent retail prices established a fair playing ground for consumers.

NRF’s argument denies that surveillance pricing is being used to discriminate between consumers, or even raise prices for that matter. Indeed, that is the opening salvo of its complaint: “Retailers use algorithmic pricing to help customers save money.”

“We’re not talking about raising prices in an unfair or opportunistic way,” Matz said. “There are actually already laws against some of those practices, like price gouging.”

The suit claims algorithmic pricing is actually bringing down prices in the aggregate, because it helps companies be more responsive to shifts in supply and demand, and thus better reflect market conditions.

To the extent that there is a public perception problem, Martz blames regulators: “I think part of the reason there’s a public perception issue is that regulators have gone out of their way to make this a public perception issue.”

 that, in her view, painted surveillance pricing as an “inherently bad or concerning practice.”

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” then–TC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement on the report.

The topic quickly became political. One week after the outgoing Biden administration released these preliminary findings along with a request for information, the newly Trump-appointed FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson 

Hepner, however, said the onus is on retailers and proponents of surveillance pricing to address any negative perception, whether that perception originates with lawmakers and regulators’ public efforts or with consumers’ basic sense of fairness.

“Godspeed to them in their effort,” he said.

NRF’s Lawsuit against New York’s surveillance pricing law

A legal battle is brewing in New York over a law seeking to regulate a controversial practice known as surveillance pricing. 

NRF’s Lawsuit against New York’s surveillance pricing law sets stage for battle over fairness 

AI is making sweeping changes to everything from product recommendations to checkout and changing the way consumers shop online.

Nowadays, agentic checkout is the latest battleground for AI dominance within e-commerce. Online payment incumbents like Mastercard and Visa released their respective agentic checkout programs in April—

. In May, Google said it plans to launch 

 in the coming months. And PayPal is offering developers its Agent Toolkit to support order creation, invoicing, and shipping.

By definition, agentic checkout is built on the same principles as AI shopping agents. Both are derived from 

, a more sophisticated AI system, which is trained to reason and act on behalf of shoppers. Three experts said the success of agentic checkout will rely on strong partnerships between payment providers, e-commerce platforms, and technology innovators.

Dave Anderson, VP of product marketing for digital analytics company Contentsquare, told Retail Brew that this moment is like “the dawn of a whole new industry, much like when SEO [search engine optimization] and PPC [pay-per-click] first started,” Anderson wrote in an email.

“The payment companies and e-commerce platforms that position themselves as the infrastructure powering AI agents, rather than competing against them, will capture the most value as this market develops,” Anderson said.

Meanwhile, PayPal is paying it forward with new improvements. “We’re upgrading our infrastructure built over decades to handle the heavier event volume of AI-driven transactions,” Michelle Gill, GM of small business and financial services at PayPal, told Retail Brew in an email.

“To make agentic commerce real, we’re equipping developers with open, interoperable tools like PayPal’s Agent Toolkit to support order creation, invoicing, and shipping. This unlocks the ability to build production-ready, agent-powered experiences with confidence,” Gill said.

While this sounds like a lot of work, Mastercard’s Co-President of Global Partnerships Sherri Haymond said that retailers won’t need to “rip out” their entire technology infrastructure for this transition: “As a retailer…I don’t think they’re going to be running to change their e-commerce platform provider or anything like that, so long as those e-commerce platform providers—which I know they are—are working to make these environments accessible to their merchant community.”

“I would encourage merchants to have an open mind, and to be willing to explore this new technology, and to lean in and do the work to make their environment accessible in this new way,” Haymond said.

 said it will build checkout functionality within ChatGPT.

At a high level, Haymond said that agentic checkout really is changing what’s possible in online shopping: “I think it has the potential to bring a whole different level of…with consumer consent, personalization and speed and efficiency.”

“For what it’s worth, we don’t think that anytime soon [that] all transactions are going to be autonomous or anything like that, [or] agents are going to go buy things without humans…without their consent, or anything like that,” Haymond added.

“Agentic commerce requires open infrastructure, verified identity, and seamless, secure payments—and that’s what we’re delivering,” Gill said. She added PayPal’s tools “integrate easily into agent frameworks without locking developers into a closed ecosystem.” The general sense in the industry is that “rather than competing, these stakeholders increasingly collaborate to harness the potential of agentic AI,” she said.

Ultimately, whether AI will get along with e-commerce and payment providers remains to be seen. Anderson said that the ecosystem is evolving to include AI, but “not necessarily” for AI to replace current players in e-commerce and/or payment providers completely.

“Over time, their ability to get along will come down to how AI firms will recoup their costs,” he said. “It’s likely they’ll take commissions just like any marketplace, and retailers will probably end up paying for better positioning in AI recommendations—similar to how they bid on Google today.”

AI dominance in e-commerce has a new focus: agentic checkout technology

As AI reshapes online retail, e-commerce platforms and payment providers are united in their goal to create frictionless, secure, and tailored shopping experiences for consumers.