Rufus Drives $10B🤖

Happy Tuesday! AI just rewired shopping. Amazon’s Rufus is selling like a seasoned rep, Shopify’s AI now runs the storefront, and social platforms turned discovery into checkout. Retail media budgets doubled while Europe caught the data bug. The real shift? Commerce stopped waiting for clicks and started talking back.

Maze Focus🌀
🤖 Rufus Drives $10B
🧠 Shopify’s AI Flywheel
💰 Amazon’s Ad Gold Rush
📈 Social’s Billion-Dollar Surge
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Last week handpicked news you need to know
📣 Ecommerce Marketing
🛠️ Ecommerce Software & AI

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- Artur Stańczuk, MarketMaze Founder

The Maze: Amazon’s AI assistant is no gimmick. Rufus is now driving over $10B in annualized sales, turning product search into a conversation that gets shoppers to compare, decide, and buy faster. It stitches reviews, Q&A, and web context into crisp guidance and plugs straight into checkout. The result is a new conversion layer inside the world’s biggest store.

Why it matters: Assistants are becoming storefronts. The winner owns the final answer, not just the first click. For ecommerce teams, this shifts budgets to conversational moments where intent peaks and conversion is measurable.

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The Maze: Shopify’s AI moved from demos to dollars. Traffic from AI surfaces is up 7x since January and orders are up 11x, as generative answers and co-pilots speed creation, fix metadata, and send cleaner demand into Shop Pay. Each interaction teaches the system, lifting discovery and conversion across millions of stores.

Why it matters: Search is turning into conversation. Shopify wants to be the default UI for merchants so every query can become an order. The store of the future talks back and settles the bill in the same flow.

The maze: Amazon’s ad engine is the profit center. Ads now account for over 9% of sales and pulled nearly $16B in a quarter, growing faster than the core store. Prime Video opened new reach while sponsored listings and DSP tighten the loop between attention and purchase. The flywheel is speeding up.

Why it matters: The store is also the billboard. Brands buy conversion, not impressions, and Amazon sells both with closed-loop proof. Expect rising CPCs to reward better creative and retail readiness.

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The Maze: Global ad spend is re-accelerating on a social windfall. Nine of ten new ad dollars are digital, with social taking a rising share as short-form video and shopping features turn scrolls into sales. Retail media is the fast follower, creating a three-pillar plan: social, search, store.

Why it matters: Budgets chase performance. The mix moves to platforms that convert and prove it. For ecommerce, the job is wiring product data, creative iteration, and incrementality testing across the new triad of social, search, and retail media.

🇺🇸 GoWish app surges into holiday peak. 13.6M users and a top App Store rank fuel viral lists, price alerts, and creator-led wishlists that prime Black Friday conversions.

🇺🇸 HubSpot buys XFunnel for AI answers. The deal adds answer-engine optimization that shows how brands surface in assistants, then pushes fixes into content and schema to defend queries and lift conversions.

🇺🇸 Whatnot raises $225M at $11.5B value. New capital backs global expansion as GMV more than doubles in 2025, extending live shopping beyond collectibles into beauty, fashion, and electronics with tighter creator tools.

🇪🇸 TikTok adds AI Creator Insights. Rolling analytics surface trending topics and search terms so brands test faster, pair ideas with product feeds, and improve view-through conversions.

🇺🇸 Pinterest debuts voice shopping assistant. A voice-only beta returns personalized picks from boards and on-screen pins, targeting a large Gen Z base with tunable AI labeling.

🇪🇺 Europe’s retail media spend doubles. Spend races toward €20B plus as off-site and on-site formats scale, pushing clean rooms and incrementality testing while networks work to standardize.

🌍 GenAI fuels ecom fraud on TikTok Shop. Cheap AI spins fake brands and documents as platforms deploy AI checks and report mass takedowns to fight counterfeits and abuse.

🇳🇱 Adyen readies agentic commerce rails. Standards will let verified agents check price, stock, and pay securely, with pilots that whitelist agent traffic and tie identity to tokenization and disputes.

🇺🇸 Instacart ships enterprise AI for grocers. New tools power personalized search, recommendations, and inventory intelligence for chains like Kroger and Sprouts to lift pick accuracy, cut refunds, and monetize data beyond ads.

🇺🇸 Feedonomics brings apps to Shopify. BigCommerce’s unit automates feeds and order sync for Google, Meta, and marketplaces, pitching cleaner attributes, fewer cancellations, and services revenue from Shopify sellers.

🇺🇸 MivaPay debuts with PayPal inside. A native checkout bundles setup, vaulting, risk, and reports so SMBs activate payments in minutes, with success riding on wallets, pricing, and chargeback handling.

🇺🇸 Maestra launches Shopify loyalty app. Points, referrals, and messaging unify to push repeat rate and AOV as brands consolidate retention tools around lower cost and tighter attribution.

🇺🇸 Cuttable offers 3.1B free AI ads. U.S. launch gives every store 1,000 Meta-ready creatives to seed accounts, learn winners, and upsell, turning creative into an API while distribution decides results.

🇪🇺 payabl. rolls out Shopify payments. The extension targets cross-border sellers with fast onboarding, fraud tools, and local methods like SEPA and iDEAL, competing on acceptance rate, latency, and dispute SLAs.

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