The V Spot Nearly Ecomm News April 11 2026 Ep 9 Amazon Gets a Dog Google Gets Your Checkout

Welcome to the Big Spot, your home for the e-com nerdy news. So the Supreme Court killed the tariffs, and like a horror movie, the tariffs came back. Different legal hat, same price tag. Second one, '22 this time, for those keeping score at home. $29 billion a month that the US government is now pulling in on import duties. $29 Billiam. That is one of those subscription services that none of us opted into but keeps popping up on our docket every single month. And like most good subscription services, it's almost impossible to cancel. Let's do the news. We somehow still manage to be here, sponsored by Omnisend, a company brave enough to still be associated with us publicly. Omnisend are the email platform not always trying to be your best friend. They just get shit done. Uh, story one this week, a flip-flop story just in time for the summer. Amazon and USPS. Amazon and the US Postal Service have finally agreed to keep seeing each other. USPS retains about 80% of Amazon's delivery volume. You know, those shitty small parcels no one makes money on, but it did sell over a billion parcels a year. And now Amazon had threatened to cut those ties. USPS said it would literally run out of cash by October. So what we got was a compromise, or as it's known in logistics, The thing you do when you realize that you cannot deliver 160 million addresses by yourself. Amazon is spending $4 billion rolling out rural delivery services. USPS has accumulated $118 billion in losses since 2007. It is still less than the annual turnover generated by AWS at about $128 billion. If this were a marriage, you'd call them codependent. But in logistics, we still call this strategic alignment. Same thing, I guess. Story 2, Google's Universal Commerce Protocol gets an update. UCP update for all. They updated the UCP yesterday. And for those unfamiliar, UCP is the open standard that lets agents talk to retailers, check inventory, build carts, and check all inside Gemini and Google. New features include multi-item carts and loyalty thinking. Loyalty linking even, maybe, I don't know. Which means that an AI agent can now buy 3 things at once from your store and apply your loyalty discount. Woohoo! And you, the retailer, don't even get to say hello. Good luck owning that customer. Google's framing this as frictionless. Frictionless, the worst word out there. Retailers are framing this as we just became a warehouse with a checkout API. Sorry, but they don't even know that yet. If you're a European watching this, UCP, is US only for now. Don't get too comfortable, it is coming. Um, it'll be bringing GDPR questions beside of a French customs declaration with it. Next up, it's Stacks Global, uh, and they have risen from the ashes. Well, sort of. Stacks Global, the luxury retailer that went to Chapter 11 in January owing Chanel $136 million. Yes, Chanel smells terrible. I have secured $500 million in exit finance and plans to emerge again this summer. Uh, over 650 brands are now shipping again. Inventory in March was up 18% and online conversion jumped 11%. They even reversed 3 planned store closures. Hmm, nice. If this were a rom-com, this would be the part where the couple gets back together just in time for prom. But in luxury retailer— in luxury retail, uh, trust is rebuilt once an invoice is paid one at a time. Good luck to them, we say. Uh, and send Jeffrey Van Ramdonk a coffee. That man's done his bankruptcy thing before at Neiman Marcus in 2020. Some people collect stamps, Jeffrey collects restructuring. Story 4: Amazon buys a robot dog. Ruff! Rough. Amazon acquired Rover— River, same thing, I guess. Uh, Swiss robotics company formerly called Swissmile that makes a four-legged wheeled dog carry parcels from the van to your doorstep. What an age to be alive. It's a dog on roller skates. I am not making this up. Their CEO literally called it that. It can climb stairs, carry 60 kilos, uh, and navigate uneven terrain. Not unlike my grandfather. So basically, it does everything your current delivery driver does, except it doesn't ring your doorbell and run away. Amazon shut down its Scout delivery robot program in 2022. Now they've bought a Swiss one, because if there's one thing the Swiss know how to do, it's be neutral while things deliver precisely on time. Getting close to the end, folks. Stay with me. The WTO drops the e-commerce ball. Here's one that flew under the radar. The World Trade Organization's moratorium on customs duties for digital goods that one that has been in place since 1998 when I was 17, just collapsed for the first time in nearly 3 decades. It couldn't reach consensus. What does that mean? Well, it means a country can now start taxing digital commerce at the border. Streaming services, SaaS, digital downloads, all fair game. If you're running a cross-border digital business, you may want to Google tariffs on code now. Actually, to my tariff to Google too. And because we're now using UCP, it's probably going to be able to do that for you too. Finally, the agentic commerce Cold War, the one that we're not talking about, the war we're not talking about. The divide is widening. Google rolls out UCP and says, let the agent shop. eBay says, absolutely not, and bans AI for me, agent buy for me agents from its platform. Amazon is sitting in perplexity while simultaneously building its own buy for me feature. So to recap, Google wants AI agents to buy things, eBay says no, Amazon says no to yours but yes to mine, and the merchant in the middle is standing there like the bartender in a fight going, does anyone want to actually order something? The agent e-commerce future is here. It's arriving via 3 different doors with 3 different bouncers and none of them are talking to each other. It's a good old bouncer story. Big thanks again to our sponsor Omnisend who make this show possible. We offered them a four-legged robot to deliver the invoice, they said they prefer email. Go figure. Fair enough, we say. Head over to Omnisend.com and tell them the lad with the accent sent you. Thanks so much for watching The Beef Spot. That's the 6 minutes you're not getting back again this week. Stay tuned for more next week.