Same Day Delivery (Of A New Tariff) The V Spot eCommerce Nearly News - Agentic AI and Supply Chain

You know the feeling you get when you're at a wedding and someone gets the DJ to play Wonderwall? That's tariff policy in 2026. Nobody asked for it. Nobody wants it. The room goes awkward, and yet here we all are, all standing around pretending it's fine while a man in a suit destroys the vibe. The Supreme Court struck down the IEPA tariffs, and the administration responded in approximately the same time it takes to microwave a frozen burrito. New 15% global import surcharge, the minimum is gone, and about 4,000 Shopify merchants simultaneously Googling what is a bonded warehouse. Let's do the news. It's Friday, the 27th of February, 2026. Welcome to the VSpot. As I just said, the Supreme Court has just torched a year of trade policy just before lunch. A tariff replacement was live by dinner. Perplexity wants you to do the shopping for you, and Forrester has politely asked us to calm down about the death of the retail store. It's gonna be a hell of a week. First up, and the Supreme Court broke trade policy, and then that sequel dropped by dinnertime. On February 20th, the Supreme Court ruled a 6-3 that the IEPA '77 emerg— 1977 emergency law Trump used to Bill's entire tariff architecture does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, said that the word regulate in a decades-old statute cannot carry the weight of a trillion-dollar trade agenda. I wonder why not. Liberation Day tariffs, fentanyl tariffs, and reciprocal tariffs— all of it struck down. Trump's response time? Hours. Before most import brokers had finished their second cup of coffee, a new 10% global import surcharge was signed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. By February 24th, it was live. Since then, it's been revised upward to 15%, and it expires 150 days from now, July 24th, unless Congress, uh, votes to extend it. Section 232 steel aluminum duties remains fully in place though, and a potential refund on $160 billion collected in IEPA— this is so hard to say— tariffs collected since 2025. A magnificent mess that nobody in government appears eager to resolve quickly. For retailers and e-com operators, the practical read is this: the policy destination hasn't changed, only legal motorway has. If you're repricing, renegotiating with supplier contracts, or rerouting supply chains, that 150-day clock on Section 122 is now the most important date in your calendar. You thought it was Black Friday. And if you're Irish or European watching this from across the water, the 18 Trade deals negotiated under this rule are now in legal limbo too. The chaos, as ever, is the policy. And Perplexity, not wanting to add to the case but do, wants to do your shopping for you, and it's free. On February 25th, the same day Samsung was launching iPhones in— or it's iPhone— Samsung launching their new phone in San Fran, which I will get to, Perplexity quietly dropped something that should be getting a lot more attention in retail circles. In-Chat Shopping powered by PayPal and Venmo is now live for all US users. Free, no sub required. Wow, I guess there are some things in life for free, just your security and privacy handed over in return. Uh, here's what this means in practice. Uh, you open Perplexity, you type in best waterproof jacket for somebody who cycles to work to Dublin in February, and yes, that is a deeply specific ask, and Perplexity finds a product, shows you the pros and cons, pulls in the reviews, lets you buy it. PayPal handles the payment. You never leave the chat. The merchant still owns the customer relationship, the returns, the loyalty, but the transaction just happened inside the search engine that is not Google on a platform that wasn't built for e-commerce 18 months ago. The mind boggles. This is not just a niche product launch, Perplexity claims, and they're not the only one doing this. Shopping queries on this platform have jumped fivefold since it first launched Buy with Pro for paid users last year. And it's not alone in this race. As we know, Amazon's Rufus has now got an auto-buy button, which allows you to set a target price and buys the product when it hits that target price. The race to the bottom is real unless you want to be an ethical buyer, I guess, in which case you're going to say, I would love my brand owner or retailer to have some margin, which I never knew about before this was in place. ChatGPT has since launched instant checkout via Shopify and PayPal. Google has Agentic baked into its AI mode in search. And the VSpot last week covered Shopify's Agentic storefronts. Um, I think that was in week 4, the idea that your products need to be discoverable inside AI interfaces, not just on your website. This week, that stopped being a vision statement and became a reality on Wednesday when Shopify launched your GEO requirements and laid out in the partnership briefing this week. The chat is now the store. Whether your inventory is showing up is a different question, and most of the merchants do not know the answer right now. But since they ignored all listing practices for marketplaces for 20 years. I guess we're going to have this conversation again in 10 years' time. Forrester. Oh, remember Forrester? They say the store is not dead though. That's the retail store. It's doing fine at $4.4 trillion. So while everyone else was tariff watching during the week, Forrester quietly dropped a report that should be pinned to the boardroom of every single office for people who are predicting the retail apocalypse. By 2030, e-com will account for 29% only of all US retail sales. That seems a long way off from where it is now. The remaining 71% of $4.4 trillion is going to happen in store, where it should happen. Total retail now is expected and forecast to grow from $5.2 trillion to $6.2 trillion by the end of the decade. This is the longest V-spot in history. Let that sit with you for a second. After 15 years of being told that the store is a buggy whip factory, it's still doing $4.5 trillion annually by 2030. A separate Salsify survey this week, digital shelf experts found that a number of people still shopping online has dropped from 21% to 9% year on year. This nuance, always a goddamn nuance, is not that it's a rejection of digital, it's confirmation that the fulfillment point, the brand experience, and increasingly the thing your AI agent routes you to, actually touch something before you buy it. Imagine that. As we covered with M&S during the last couple of weeks and the UK high streets, the having a bit of a bounce. But one of the things M&S have done more than others is got into social. So if your shop doesn't look good on TikTok and doesn't feel worth entering, you're invisible in both worlds. The store is not dead, it's just having to entertain everyone while it's still a store. TikTok blinks, sellers 1, algo 0. TikTok had a plan a couple of weeks ago, a bold one. They were saying that they were going to force fulfillment on all sellers. Sounded like a great idea, probably on a Notion board but catastrophic the moment sellers saw this drop into their inbox. It was meant to start later this month— or earlier this month, I should say— when they announced that all US local sellers would be moved off independent shipping and moved into TikTok Logistics. Mandatory, no exceptions. The seller community reacted angrily with the energy of a group WhatsApp chat that's just been told Christmas party venue has been changed into a car park. TikTok, like all good tech companies and politicians, rolled it back. To be clear about what they were trying to do though, this is the Amazon Amazon FBA play executed in the style of someone who learned project management on a YouTube video, which is kind of what we're all doing right now. Get sellers dependent on your platform, take over fulfillment, own the data, own the relationship. Worked for Amazon for over a decade of carefully boiling that fraud TikTok tried to do before most of their sellers finished up and giving them their ring lights in return. This retreat is tactical, though not philosophical. The destination is still the same: death by a thousand cuts. A closed logistics loop where TikTok controls the end-to-end experience. If you're building on TikTok in the US or watching this arrive natively in Europe, this story is far from over. One small window for the merchant class. Enjoy it, then prepare for the next attempt. That is your 6 or 8 minutes from the VSpot this week. A little longer than usual, but there's a lot to cover. The Supreme Court killed tariffs. Trump then changed that before a launch— perplexity— launched a shopping agent on Wednesday. They're going to replace your browser. Forrester confirmed that the store is going to outlive us all. And TikTok remembered what sellers— that sellers have feelings. Temporarily, though. Looking forward to the week ahead section. 1:22 clock is ticking. IEPA refund queue is forming. And somewhere, customs broker hasn't slept since February 20th. Keep that in mind after manifest. Send them a coffee, or better yet, let an agent do it. For you. See you all next week. Thanks for watching. Thanks for our kind sponsors, Omnisend. Why do you do—