Shopify Stores Become Networks 🛒

Happy Tuesday! Shopify just took a step toward turning independent stores into a shared commerce network, where discovery happens across merchants instead of inside a single storefront.

If stores start selling each other’s products by default, who really owns the customer relationship anymore?

In today’s MarketMaze:

+Handpicked recent news you need to know

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- Artur Stańczuk, MarketMaze Founder

The Maze: Shopify is quietly dissolving the idea of a standalone store. Its new cross-merchant Product Network lets stores surface other sellers’ products when selection runs out. What looks like merchandising is actually infrastructure for networked commerce.

• Launched in December 2025, the Product Network allows Shopify merchants to recommend third-party items inside search, collections, and post-browse flows, while handling multi-seller checkout cleanly.
• Shopify positions the system as discovery, not ads, but commissions, payouts, and ad-credit incentives make it function like performance media embedded directly in storefront UX.
• The model keeps demand inside Shopify when a store lacks inventory, preventing leakage to Amazon, Google Shopping, or vertical marketplaces.

Why it matters: Shopify is inching toward marketplace economics without calling itself a marketplace. Conversion improves, but brand boundaries weaken. If discovery happens at the network level, success depends less on owning traffic and more on staying algorithmically relevant.

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The Maze: Shopping apps are growing again, but the real shift is where money goes after the install. iOS remarketing jumped hard in 2025 as brands realized installs alone do not pay the bills. The winners are not buying users once, they are buying them back again and again.

Why it matters: Ecommerce growth is no longer about reach, it is about memory. Retention decides lifetime value, margins, and media efficiency. Marketplaces and brands that master reactivation will outgrow louder competitors with bigger acquisition budgets.

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The Maze: European regulators are warning that AI competition is being decided upstream. Platforms controlling cloud infrastructure, first-party data, and consumer entry points can hard-wire AI into defaults before rivals compete. Once embedded, visibility becomes permissioned.

• EU authorities flagged that gatekeepers like Google, Meta, and Amazon control both AI infrastructure and distribution, letting them deploy AI directly inside search, feeds, and marketplaces at scale.
• Exclusive access to first-party interaction data creates feedback loops that continuously improve AI outputs while publishers, brands, and sellers cannot access comparable signals.
• As AI summaries and conversational answers replace links, traffic concentrates inside platform interfaces, reducing referral visibility for commerce players that rely on discovery.

Why it matters: Ecommerce now competes inside AI interfaces, not browsers. If platforms decide what AI shows first, selling becomes pay to play. Retail media, preferred placement, and platform fees become the new entry ticket to demand.

The Maze: Marketers spend where they feel safe, not where impact is highest. Paid channels attract more budget because results appear faster and cleaner. Organic loses share because it works slowly and attribution feels messy.

Why it matters: Ecommerce brands that only fund what feels measurable cap their upside. Growth comes from combining fast paid demand with slow organic compounding. The skill is fixing measurement, not avoiding uncertainty.

The Maze: Apple’s control over iOS payments just took a real hit. A US appeals court backed findings that Apple deliberately undermined the 2021 anti-steering injunction, weakening its ability to enforce high commissions on external payments. The App Store toll booth still exists, but its pricing power is slipping.

• In December 2025, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the ruling effectively kills Apple’s 27 percent commission on external payments after courts found Apple used warning screens and link friction to block steering.
• Judges ruled Apple acted in bad faith by designing policies that preserved App Store economics, while sending back the question of what “reasonable cost recovery” could mean in practice.
• Apple may still charge limited fees tied to app review or platform services, but subscription apps, games, and creator platforms now have leverage Apple did not expect to lose.

Why it matters: Mobile checkout is a margin gatekeeper. If developers can route users to Stripe or PayPal without punishment, unit economics improve overnight. For ecommerce, subscriptions, and digital goods, platform rent extraction is no longer guaranteed.

🇬🇧 Mike Ashley's Frasers Group is reportedly considering a bid for the struggling fashion marketplace SilkFred as it continues its aggressive M&A strategy.

🇺🇸 SuperCircle raised $24 million in Series A funding to scale its AI-powered textile waste management platform, helping retailers manage end-of-life inventory and comply with new EPR regulations.

🇺🇸 Five Below saw its stock increase by 85% over the past year, thanks to CEO Winnie Park’s strategy focused on retail fundamentals and sharp merchandising, successfully navigating challenges from Temu and Shein.

🇬🇧 British retailer Next is reportedly among the suitors considering an acquisition of the family-owned footwear business Russell & Bromley.

🇺🇸 YouTube has partnered with PayPal to allow U.S. creators to receive payments in PayPal’s stablecoin (PYUSD), marking a significant move toward integrating crypto infrastructure into the creator economy.

🌍 Enterprise AI adoption is soaring in 'knowledge jobs,' while a CEO survey indicates AI is expected to increase entry-level hiring in 2026, offsetting previous automation fears.

🇺🇸 Rent the Runway achieved 15.4% Q3 revenue growth and completed a transformative recapitalization that significantly reduced its debt.

🇬🇧 Amazon’s Project Kuiper will launch connectivity services in the UK in 2026, targeting customers and communities beyond the reach of existing broadband.

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