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TODAY’S MAZE
Happy Friday! TikTok has secured its future by finalizing a domestic ownership agreement. This deal ensures the platform stays active for millions of American brands and users.
Oracle now manages data oversight while ByteDance maintains a minority stake. Will this structure provide the stability needed for long-term ecommerce growth?
In today’s MarketMaze focus:
TikTok US sale finalized
Amazon slashes corporate jobs
Vinted enters US market
AI search retrieval trends
Social skills value grows
+Handpicked recent news you need to know
LET’S ENTER THE MAZE!
- Artur Stańczuk, MarketMaze Founder
MAZE STORY
The Maze: TikTok finalized its US divestment, spinning off into a new joint venture with Oracle and Silver Lake to comply with federal law. This press release ensures platform survival for 170 million US users.
The new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, makes managing data security and content moderation accessible for a portfolio of apps including the video editor CapCut and Lemon8.
ByteDance retains a 19.9% ownership stake in the joint venture, a figure that satisfies the specific requirements of the 2024 divest-or-ban law targeting foreign-owned technology.
Oracle will host all US user data within its secure cloud environment and assist the new venture in validating source code and recommendation algorithms for the specific US market.
Why it matters: This resolution eliminates the existential threat of a ban and allows scaling marketing efforts for brands and creators without fearing sudden platform deactivation.
How do you expect seller fees for AI-driven checkouts on platforms like ChatGPT with Shopify to evolve over the next 12 months?
- 🌍 Global standard (4%+ fees become common across major AI shopping platforms worldwide)
- 🇺🇸 US-led first (fees normalize in the US before spreading to Europe)
- 🇪🇺 EU pushback (European regulation or merchant resistance limits fees)
- 🏢 Enterprise absorb (large, scaled brands accept fees as a new acquisition cost)
- 🧾 Seller bypass (brands push shoppers back to direct web checkout to avoid fees)
P.S. To see poll results please vote!
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MAZE STORY
The Maze: Amazon plans to eliminate another 14,000 corporate roles starting next week. This second wave brings total recent job cuts to nearly 30,000 as the retail giant aggressively removes management layers to work like a startup.
The cuts target specific business units including Amazon Web Services, Prime Video, and the People Experience and Technology division according to sources at Reuters.
CEO Andy Jassy emphasizes that these massive layoffs focus on reducing bureaucracy rather than fixing financial strain as mentioned in his detailed employee memo.
This strategy aims to shrink the corporate headcount which tripled between 2017 and 2022 before the company shifted toward a more cautious hiring approach for office staff.
Why it matters: Streamlining management suggests Amazon prioritizes speed over scale to combat rising competition. This cultural reset forces teams to own decisions directly, potentially improving margins before upcoming quarterly earnings.
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MAZE STORY
The Maze: Lithuanian fashion marketplace Vinted is now pushing into the United States starting with New York City. The platform helps Americans declutter their closets and offload unworn wardrobe items.
The company currently prepares for a major share sale that could push its valuation to 8 billion euros following a successful trial period of transatlantic shipping services conducted last year.
Recent research reveals that 21% of New Yorkers currently harbor over $500 in unworn clothing, highlighting a massive untapped inventory pool for the marketplace to capture.
This permanent expansion into the region follows a strategic push into Canada where the platform secured 250 million euros in funding to fuel its growth and North American footprint.
Why it matters: Vinted’s entry intensifies competition in the US resale market, forcing domestic players like Poshmark to defend their market share against a cash-rich leader. Capturing New York’s dense inventory provides the density to scale efficiently.
DATA TREASURE
The Maze: Not every AI answer is contestable. Only a narrow slice of prompts allow real-time content to influence outcomes, and those prompts skew heavily toward commercial intent.
Commercial queries trigger retrieval more than half the time, making them the most winnable and monetizable part of the AI answer ecosystem.
Informational queries trigger retrieval far less often, but rising compute costs push AI systems toward cheaper browsing over expensive internal reasoning.
The likely future favors smaller models that orchestrate tools, rewarding content that is structured, clear, and easy to retrieve.
Why it matters: Search is not disappearing, it is mutating. Brands must optimize for machines that decide when to look things up.
DATA TREASURE
The Maze: The labor market has rewarded social skills for decades. AI accelerates this trend by automating tasks while amplifying the value of coordination, judgment, and persuasion.
Roles combining quantitative ability with social skills deliver stronger employment and wage outcomes than narrowly technical jobs.
Math-heavy roles with limited interaction lose ground as automation handles structured tasks faster and cheaper than humans.
Senior roles reward influence over execution, as decisions increasingly depend on aligning people, not crunching numbers.
Why it matters: AI automates tasks, not responsibility. The durable edge is turning complexity into action across teams and systems.
BRIEFING
🏬 Everything else in Ecommerce & Big Tech
🇨🇦 Shopify revealed that orders driven by AI agents surged 14x as the company formalizes its Universal Commerce Protocol for autonomous shopping.
🇬🇧 Asda is relocating its George clothing online operations to a DHL depot by 2027, a move putting 1,200 jobs at risk as it seeks to scale its digital apparel business.
🇮🇪 Primark reported a 4.2% total revenue increase for the Christmas quarter, though like-for-like sales in continental Europe fell 5.7% amid weak consumer confidence.
🇺🇸 YouTube is expanding its shoppable Connected TV (CTV) ad formats to all Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns following a successful seven-month pilot.
🇺🇸 PayPal agreed to acquire multi-channel orchestration platform Cymbio to help merchants sell directly within AI environments like Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.
🇪🇺 TikTok now offers European fulfillment for Asian sellers, allowing them to outsource logistics to platform-owned warehouses in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
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