The V Spot Week 30 Retail and ECommerce Nearly News

Welcome to the VSpot, your home for the e-com early teas, or for people who think Q3 goals are just a hallucination. UPS stayed on fleek this week. They delivered earnings and said that they'll be fumbling around like a blind person for the rest of the year. No guidance or shits given. This week was basically like an Etsy mood board. Karna launched the creativity engine, that's Karna, the entertainment platform, the payment platform powered by AI, you guessed it. And great, just what we all needed was payment fans of poetry. Shopify introduced new automation features just in time for brands who forget where to write subject lines. That's huge. Amazon's rural expansion continues like a rom-com subplot, but their earnings suggest that they could afford an A-lister or two. And finally, TikTok's shopping rollout is quietly falling towards credibility. And Salesforce somehow thinks its e-commerce leader is now headless. Just emotional. So YC CEOs talk about customer intimacy, and your retention rate goes to do I get hinge mashed. Let's pivot. Segment I call this Room 101, where we banish retail's worst offenders. So if you say it in a pitch deck and it makes me gag, it's going in here. Headlines that are being fired into the sun. Number 1: Is Gen Z killing insert industry here? They're not, they're just broke trying to afford iced coffee. Number 2: Retail apocalypse. Boo! If your store has been closing down since 2014, that's just faux marketing. 3. AI is coming for your job. Bitcuxcard, ciao. The only thing AI replaced last week was your blog, intern. 4. D2C darling disrupts legacy giant. Christ on a bike. Translation: they raised $20 million to sell unprofitable razors in pastel boxes. And number 5: this one weird trick that retailers don't want you to know. If your growth hack sounds like a 2006 pop-up, please unplug your modem. And now, buzzwords that were yeeping into the Mariana Trench. Number 1, yeah, this is going to be undoubted: digital. Still sounds like a disease, always has. 2, omnichannel strategy. The term used minutes before the layoff email goes into your inbox. 3, unprecedented times. This one has been going on since 2020. At this point, it's extremely precedent. I'm neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed, I'm just whelmed. Disruptor to the disruptors Congratulations, you've made a worse version of something that doesn't work. And finally, retailtainment. Unless there's a trapeze artist in your paws, please stop. Please stop. The V Spot is powered kindly by Omnisend, email and SMS platform that gives ROI without the rinse repeat. Merchants are earning $68 for every $1 spent. Yeah, that is really impressive. No fluff, no funnels. To nowhere, just results. Visit Omnisend.com/VinnyOBrien for 30% off your first 3 months. Automate like it's 2025. So there you have it. There's the news. Entertainment platform Klarna wants to be your creative director. Amazon's knocking on barn doors, and Shopify's AI is quietly judging your abandoned cart strategy. We survived another week of bad buzzwords, bad headlines, and acronyms with no context. Commerce isn't dead according to BigCommerce, or is it just Commerce now? Not sure. Shout out to Travis and the team on the work that they've done there. It's just gaslighting us with customer delight and a 7-step checkout. Big love to Omnisend again, the only email platform that doesn't send you straight into a Slack panic. Get great results and great sleep at night. Stop crying during the A/B test. Visit Omnisend.com. You've been watching the VSpot. That is 4 minutes you're not getting back this week.