Temu, Shein and AliExpress Lose Ground in Germany

Three platforms lost share, not the whole channel: their combined share of German online-goods sales fell to 3.1% in Q3 from 5.3% in Q2, while the wider German online-goods market grew 2.9% year on year to about €18.5 billion, including VAT and without inflation adjustment.

Import costs changed the cheap-parcel economics: the EU's €3 duty applies to low-value online imports up to €150 by customs product category, so five T-shirts attract €3 but a T-shirt plus a watch €6, normally paid by sellers or importers.

Local shops have no proven windfall: bevh links the three-platform slump to import costs and weaker confidence, yet German online-only shops fell 0.8% while all marketplace sales grew 5%, with no direct evidence of where former platform customers spent next.

New ad space: THG's assistant mixes labelled sponsored products with unpaid recommendations when Criteo's keyword and meaning-based matching finds them relevant to the shopper's request.

Retailer setup: THG's managed assistant uses Google Cloud AI and needs a provisioned storefront key and catalogue setup; country eligibility is undisclosed, and shoppers follow product links to buy themselves.

Proof pending: THG claims more than five times average click-through and twice average conversion for assistant ads, without absolute rates, sample size or test design proving extra sales.

The offer: Facebook would show the listing to more buyers, and the seller would pay a 20% advertising fee—$10 on this item—if someone clicked the ad and bought within seven days; this sale-based option appeared for certain listings with shipping enabled.

The problem: The confirmation showed $10, but the ad’s editing screen showed $400 per day and said it would keep running; a daily budget is the amount an ad campaign aims to spend per day on average, not the fee for one sale.

What we know: The saved results screen showed $0.00 spent for the dates selected, so the test documented conflicting settings without establishing the final bill, the cause of the mismatch, or how many other sellers were affected.

Ecommerce rose from 0.9% to 16.4% of retail sales between 2000 and 2025 in BCG's comparison, with the later annual figure confirmed by Census data.

Goods consumption fell from 23.9% to 21.0% of gross domestic product in the BCG comparison, a smaller economic share that does not prove absolute spending fell.

Best Buy generated $41.5 billion in FY2025 revenue, illustrating why firm survival and industry-wide gains are different questions rather than proving ecommerce caused its success.

DPD UK appears at 44.9% of large webshops versus Royal Mail's 36.5%, reversing their ranking across all observed shops.

Royal Mail is listed first in 90.7% of shared checkouts with DPD UK, but only 32.3% with Evri, showing how much the rival matters.

Tembi, an ecommerce intelligence provider, measures carrier presence and ordering here, so these figures cannot establish parcel share or shopper choice.

Only 5,181 of 15,749 TikTok Shops had a recorded match to Amazon brand revenue, so missing links do not prove missing businesses.

Within those matches, Amazon was larger for 68.2% and TikTok for 31.8%, despite Amazon's average revenue being about 3.7 times as high.

Revenue period, geography and profit are unspecified, so compare a brand's channels over the same period before allocating stock or budget.

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Ahrefs found that only 14.4% of 66.6 million free, logged-out ChatGPT responses searched the web in its August–September sample, showing why brand visibility requires attention to both existing model knowledge and live source pages.

A MACH Alliance poll of more than 1,000 UK consumers found 45% said inflated AI product expectations would make them more likely to return an item—a product-information warning, rather than a measured return rate.

Which? found an Amazon deal price unchanged after its timer ended and Shein countdowns repeatedly extended in August tests; Shein says an error was fixed and Amazon cites independent seller pricing, with no enforcement finding reported.

Ahold Delhaize took systems offline after a network security issue; five US banner sites and three Netherlands brand sites were down Monday morning, while stores remained open and no restoration timeline was given.

ShopReturns’ 31-order UK-to-Germany mystery-shopping test found a 16-day median refund wait among 20 documented cases, with some delays after warehouse arrival—an operational bottleneck beyond parcel transit alone.

Norway’s newly public NOK 92 million Xandr ruling says the ad intermediary could not outsource consent checks for its own data processing; it covers Norwegian Grindr users in 2018–20 and remains appealable.

Anthropic disabled live-web access across internal evaluations after disclosing unintended real-site actions, including form submissions and fee-gated data access; the restriction concerns internal tests, with no customer-product access change announced.