In partnership with
TODAY’S MAZE
Happy Sunday! Amazon Business has crossed the $35 billion mark in annualized gross merchandise sales, signaling a major strategic shift in its priorities. To capitalize on this growth, the platform is now measuring Brand Store success based purely on sales attribution, moving away from softer engagement data.
This change demands that B2B sellers optimize their Brand Store content exclusively for conversion, rewarding revenue outcomes over simple clicks. The question now is how quickly competing B2B platforms can counter Amazon’s increasing scale and logistical might.
In today’s MarketMaze focus:
Amazon Business shifts sales focus
FedEx grounding causes cost shock
Google faces EU AI probe
+Handpicked recent news you need to know
LET’S ENTER THE MAZE!
- Artur Stańczuk, MarketMaze Founder
MAZE STORY
The Maze: Amazon Business achieved over $35 billion in annualized gross sales and immediately focused on optimizing revenue attribution by shifting Brand Store quality ratings away from engagement metrics, prioritizing sales-based scoring. This growth fuels major 2026 updates, adding powerful third-party software to Amazon Business Prime to streamline operations for members.
Amazon replaced Brand Store quality ratings with High, Medium, or Low classifications based entirely on sales attributed to the store within a 14-day window, maintaining alignment with existing metrics.
Internal data showed high-quality stores generate 97% more sales than low-quality stores, confirming the efficacy of optimizing Brand Stores for transaction-focused conversion.
Amazon expanded Business Prime benefits, integrating essential software like CrowdStrike Falcon Go and Gusto, enabling eligible US SMBs to save nearly $1,000 per year on operating costs, according to reports detailing the new benefits.
Why it matters: This strategic shift demands that sellers immediately prioritize Brand Store content—like video and product groupings—that directly drives conversion, moving optimization efforts firmly toward revenue outcomes. Marketplace leaders can now leverage the enormous $35 billion GMS scale and the logistical muscle, with over 70% of US Business Prime orders arriving same or next day, to build a powerful B2B supply chain advantage.
FROM OUR PARTNERS
7 Actionable Ways to Achieve a Comfortable Retirement
Your dream retirement isn’t going to fund itself—that’s what your portfolio is for.
When generating income for a comfortable retirement, there are countless options to weigh. Muni bonds, dividends, REITs, Master Limited Partnerships—each comes with risk and oppor-tunity.
The Definitive Guide to Retirement Income from Fisher investments shows you ways you can position your portfolio to help you maintain or improve your lifestyle in retirement.
It also highlights common mistakes, such as tax mistakes, that can make a substantial differ-ence as you plan your well-deserved future.
DATA TREASURE
The Maze: AI assistants are turning into a new distribution channel for commerce, not a feature. Walmart saw ChatGPT driven referrals jump roughly 10x in 2025, showing shoppers now start with questions, not keywords. Discovery, comparison, and trust collapse into one AI answer, and that answer increasingly points to a single retailer.
In 2025, AI driven referrals to Walmart accelerated sharply, outpacing peers, signaling assistants now influence demand before search, ads, or marketplace browsing even begin.
AI recommendations reward depth and reliability, meaning broad assortments, clean product data, real time availability, and strong fulfillment now drive visibility more than SEO tactics.
Amazon grows defensively inside its own ecosystem, while Walmart benefits from being an easy, trustworthy endpoint for AI to confidently recommend at scale.
Why it matters: Ecommerce acquisition is shifting upstream. If AI decides first, ads compete later. Retailers that become the default answer will own demand before the funnel even starts.
FROM OUR PARTNERS
ElevenLabs Agents are real-time conversational AI agents that talk, type, and take action. They resolve shopper questions, guide purchases, and scale across e-commerce using your data.
Reduce cart abandonment and lift conversion.
Agents answer product questions and guide checkout in real time.Drive upsell and higher lifetime value.
Context-aware concierges recommend relevant products and bundles.Scale support without adding headcount.
Voice and chat agents resolve issues and hand off to humans when needed.Enterprise-ready for marketplaces and retailers.
Built with strong security, monitoring, and compliance controls.
MAZE STORY
The Maze: Global supply chain integrity faced a major hurdle this peak season as the FAA grounded FedEx’s MD-11 fleet, leading to a projected $175 million in unplanned operational costs, while fulfillment operators like Stord counter capacity concerns by investing $40 million to double down on regional distribution networks in Kentucky.
The FAA-mandated inspection grounding of 25 MD-11s is generating about $175 million of incremental costs during peak season as the carrier relies heavily on outsourced air cargo capacity.
Facing sustained weak trends, FedEx revised its Freight outlook, forecasting a $300 million decline in adjusted operating income for the second half, compared to the initial $100 million estimate noted in the Freight earnings release.
Stord will invest over $40 million to expand fulfillment operations in Hebron, Kentucky, expecting to create more than 500 jobs and doubling its regional footprint to over one million square feet.
Why it matters: The immediate spike in air cargo expenses and capacity shortages means brands must bake higher logistics costs into Q1 planning while auditing carrier reliability for expedited service levels. Forward-looking investment in regional fulfillment nodes, highlighted by Stord’s aggressive Kentucky expansion, enables operators to decrease reliance on strained long-haul air capacity and deliver faster to customers.
DATA TREASURE
The Maze: Temu is not misunderstood, it is evolving faster than the debate around it. Losses dropped from about 27% in 2023 to ~5% by late 2025 as Temu redesigned logistics, inventory placement, and merchant responsibility. Cheap cross border shipping was a phase, not the destination.
Early Temu relied on air shipped small parcels, but by 2024 it began shifting proven SKUs into local forward warehouses supplied by sea or rail to cut unit costs fast.
Semi managed and local to local models moved inventory risk to merchants and reportedly became profitable within months after launch in March 2024.
By deploying 1,000 staff globally to recruit local sellers, Temu is building a hybrid marketplace that looks less like a loophole and more like a system.
Why it matters: Policy can slow models, not strategies. Temu’s real threat is operational learning speed. Marketplaces that iterate logistics fastest win margins and time.
MAZE STORY
The Maze: The French court rejected the state's request to suspend Shein's website over illicit listings, a decision that confirms judicial reluctance to enforce broad marketplace shutdowns. Simultaneously, the European Commission formally opened an antitrust investigation into Google's AI Overviews, scrutinizing how they consume publisher content and potentially divert traffic from commerce sites.
The court called the requested three-month suspension “disproportionate” after Shein swiftly removed isolated illicit products, though the judge still demanded an injunction for robust age verification on adult content.
EU finance ministers agreed to impose a €3 duty on low-value imports entering the bloc starting July 2026, which will increase landed costs and potentially compress margins for offshore marketplaces like Shein.
The EU probe focuses on whether Google unlawfully uses publisher content to power AI Overviews, creating a zero-click experience that makes search visibility increasingly reliant on paid placements for retailers.
Why it matters: Marketplace leaders must focus less on avoiding total site shutdowns and more on proactive content moderation and implementing technical fixes like age verification to manage growing regulatory compliance risk across Europe. Ecommerce teams should urgently diversify traffic strategies away from organic search referrals, as the AI Overviews probe suggests the price of visibility will continue to increase.
BRIEFING
🏬 Everything else in Ecommerce
🇺🇸 Instacart was hit with a $60 million FTC fine for misleading customers by concealing service fees and auto-enrolling users in memberships without proper consent between 2013 and 2019.
🇨🇳 Alibaba is accelerating its instant commerce operations in China, utilizing its logistics arm Cainiao to rapidly open and expand new warehouses specifically for Tmall Supermarket delivery.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh's textile sector is facing a structural crisis due to prolonged energy shortages and rising costs, which have already shuttered over 30% of the country's production capacity.
🇺🇸 ByteDance will retain control over TikTok's critical US advertising and e-commerce money-making businesses, despite a new ownership consortium focusing primarily on data security.
🇪🇺 Google Ad Manager (GAM) is undergoing structural changes in the EU, including the elimination of Unified Pricing Rules and new integration with Prebid, forcing publishers to overhaul their ad monetization strategies.
🇺🇸 President Trump signed an executive order instructing the DOJ to preempt states enacting “onerous” AI regulations, signaling a strong push for standardized federal control over AI tooling.
SHARE THE MAZE
Your network thinks you’re as smart as the content you share. Share smarter stuff and help us grow. Win–win. Here’s what you get when friends join the Maze:
Here is your unique referral link to share with friends:
and link to the hub to check your progress.
THAT’S IT FOR TODAY!
You’re the reason our team spends hundreds of hours every week researching and writing this email. Please let us know what you thought of today’s email to help us create better emails for you.
What do you think of this issue?
If you enjoyed it please share it with a friend, or share it on LinkedIn and tag me (Artur Stańczuk), I’d love to engage and amplify!
If this was forwarded by a friend you can subscribe below for $0 👇
See you next time in the maze!
MarketMaze team
