THE V SPOT NEWS | FRI, JUNE 19TH, 2026 | One Jeff Should Not Rule Commerce

Welcome to the VSpot, your home for the e-com nearly news. Shopify has a tradition of naming its product editions like a boutique hotel naming its seasonal menu. Winter '26 was the Renaissance Edition, very beret, very oat milk. Before that they had Foundations, which sounds a lot less like a software release and more like a housing estate outside Cork. There was also Oxygen, which meant nothing and meant everything. And then this Tuesday they dropped Summer '26 Edition, which they have called the Everywhere Edition because products are everywhere. Agents are everywhere. They have the checkout everywhere and the actual website's nowhere. 150 updates. The robots are doing the shopping. The chauffeur has left the building. It's time that we did the news. The Knicks finally won. 54 years. New York lost its mind. Fanatics made a fortune. 2 million people lined Broadway for the championship parade. First ticker tape in Knicks history. Jalen Brunson got the key to the city. Alicia Keys sang Empire State of Mind at City Hall. 54 years gone, 53. Uh, the commerce angle though isn't stretched. The Knicks parade set a Fanatics record for the most sales in 24 hours for merchandise of any championship team in any sport ever. NBA Finals averaged 20 million viewers, uh, the most watched postseason since 1998. When the Knicks win, the merchant machine kicks in. Doesn't walk, it sprints. Ireland watched it from the sofa, as always. Story 2: Etsy launched the best ad campaign of the year, and they called it Shop Other Jeffs. Monday, one day before, one week before Prime Day, Etsy launched its campaign spotlighting its 5,000+ sellers named Jeff. Not the big muscly guy that now goes around looking like an MMA fighter. Uh, but they're unmistakable but technically deniable swipe at Jeff Bezos. The tagline: One Jeff should not rule commerce. True. Uh, the ads: a potter named Jeff, a woodworker named Jeff, a lighting designer named Jeff. Real people, real products, real businesses, no billionaire. The CMO called it human, direct, and a little defiant. Uh, it's running on TV, TikTok, YouTube, and out of home in New York, Seattle, and DC. Timing is everything. Etsy Q1 GMV was up 5.5% year on year, active buyers and sequential growth for the first time in 2 years. Uh, the comeback in the campaign landed in the same week. One, Jeff should not rule them all is the line of 2026. Just ask Elon. Uh, story 3, Shopify scripts die in 11 days. This is not a drill, folks. Uh, Tuesday, Shopify Everywhere Edition, 150 updates. The one that matters right now, Shopify scripts stop running entirely on June 30th. 11 days, no extension, no grace period, no nothing, said Toby. No storefront warning, customers just get broken checkout. If you're on Plus with custom discount, shipping, or payment logic still running on scripts, you need to migrate to Shopify Functions yesterday. Not next week, not today, yesterday. Everything else in the Everything Edition can wait. This one cannot. The big strategic shift though, UCP now live by default on every store, making your catalog readable by AI shopping agents. But I've been working in that space all week long and they can read absolutely nothing because all the data they need does not exist. You're gonna have to go and present semantic-level data back to the LLMs if you want to win at all. ChatGPT, my arse. Um, next story. Chewy had a record quarter. The CEO called the consumer more challenging. The stock fell anyway, but dogs still need to be fed, I guess. Uh, Wednesday, Chewy Q1 2026, $3.36 billion in net sales, up 7.7% year on year. Record adjusted EBITDA margin of 7.5%. 21.5 million active customers now, uh, nearly 200,000 net addition stems. Good numbers. AutoShip, their sub program, now 84% of total revenue. That is incredible. Record quarter on almost every single line in the P&L. Then management cut full-year guidance, citing a softening consumer environment, and the stock dropped 6%. Poor pooches. The market heard cut guidance and then stopped listening. The business is still growing profitable and building 60 veterinary clinics by the year end. Chewy is quietly one of the best-run D2C sub-businesses in America. But as ever, stock market agrees, no mention of AI anywhere, um, unless someone names their dog AI. Imagine, gonna happen. Prime Day is in June this year, starts Tuesday, uh, 4 days. Ireland is in, uh, Amazon Prime Day runs June 23rd to 26th, 4 days. Moved from July to avoid competing with the World Cup, but it's competing with the World Cup. Here's the thing though, when you think about it, they're actually putting it into prime position. The halo effect of this is going to be great, and consumer confidence is at an all-time high Plus the Scots will buy anything when they're drunk, much like the Irish. I'm just jealous that we're not there. And the World Cup. And it's also got the two— they're celebrating 250 years of independence. So early deals are now already live. So new in today's big deals, fresh discounts dropping every 5 minutes. A peak counter programming is already deployed. Walmart deals is live. Target Circle Week is running. And Macy's— well, Macy's have a sale for Irish and European merchants. It's running in 26 countries including Ireland, UK, and right across the EU. Get in and get your deals now. Nothing like cheap toothpaste to keep you going for the rest of the year. Shitty deodorant from some herbal company out of Galway or some Amazon other promotion that you don't really know what you're getting. One of those trolleys that we highlighted last year or one of those bundle deals. I think Dean McAuley got one. Story 6, we're almost there, folks. Nike earnings are out on June 30th. Here's what to watch. Nike reporting fiscal Q4 '26 on June 30th. Same day Shopify scripts died. Coincidence. It's either a coincidence or the fact that the universe has a sense of humor. The story this year has been a strategic reversal. Wholesale up, D2C down, China still the weak point. Elliott Hill's win now. Panda showing early progress in North America and running Q4 guidance with cautious revenue down 2 to 4%, but the direction of travel is clearer than it's been in years. Brand has spent 5 years telling retailers that it didn't need them. Now it's rebuilding every one of those relationships Humans murder. The DTC-only era is over. The question that June 30th now answers is, is recovery still tracking or is Elliott still running up that hill? Story 7: US consumer spending held up in May. Gas prices are doing the damage, but that's been reversing ever so slightly this week, much like the PCOs. Updated data from the Census Bureau this week, US consumers kept spending in May despite significantly spending more on fuel. Uh, real purchasing power is being squeezed not by collapsed spending but by gas price. Everything else seems to be pretty much okay. Eating discretionary budgets before anyone gets to check out. For e-commerce operators, this has been a nuance. Headline retail numbers look okay, but wallet share for non-essentials is down. It's been a tough month, there's no doubt about it. Value message coming out of Prime Day is going to matter because now everyone's got into deal mode. It also means that if you're not a discounter It's going to be a tough few weeks ahead. The halo effect, I think, if you look into Prime Day deals for non-participating brands in 2025, those 46% uplifts across the board on Amazon.com. This is not by accident either. So Amazon are setting the tone for the economics for the next month. Plus everyone's happy with the carnival of football that is taking place in North America right now. It's quite incredible to see all of the uplift. So there you go, folks. We're In tumultuous times, nothing has changed. We are going to see what Q3 and Q4 brings, but Q4 is going to get the tail end, the brunt of everything that happened in Q1 and Q2 this year. This VSpot has been brought to you this week by SumoGlue and Omnisend, two partners that understand that reaching serious e-commerce operators means being useful, not just being in the room. Imagine. From next week, we have open sponsorship for the VSpot if your audience wants to reach this kind of peak, then get in touch. So there it is, folks, that's your Six Minutes You're Not Getting Back This Week. Section A: Too many people watching Nick's parade. Fanatics broke every merch record in sport. Etsy told the world there's 5,000 Jeffs worth shopping from. A Shopify script died in 11 years. Chewy had a record quarter but still got punished. Prime Day starts Tuesday. And in Ireland, nothing at the World Cup, we can shop to our heart's content. Nike reports to mount on June 30th. Come find us on YouTube, TikTok, subscribe, share, and don't forget we are starting the Ecom Happy Hour next Friday. That is the 26th at 9 PM local time, 4 PM Eastern, uh, or 11 AM if you are 5 hours west of that. Again, so tune in, drop by, and hopefully you'll subscribe to Happy Hour. See you then.