Practical Ecommerce

Shopify is welcoming Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent. Amazon is trying to keep it out. Meta introduced Muse this month as a personal AI agent that can browse websites, fill out forms, and complete purchases with a user’s consent. Muse’s virtual machine, or Muse VM, gives the agent its own browser environment for carrying out these tasks. What’s more, Muse, like many agents, can remember interactions and use them in tasks.

This week’s rundown of new products and services for merchants includes updates on ChatGPT ads, digital payments, visual search ads, authenticated deliveries, agentic commerce, CRM models, logistics, affiliate marketing, product feedback, and AI-powered promotions and loyalty programs. Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com. OpenAI debuts sponsored AI agents inside ChatGPT Ads.

I met recently with a spa manager in California to introduce her to a French beauty brand. I told her about the company (a client) and shared that she might be the first U.S. spa to carry those products. I expected a wow, since the brand is popular in Europe and Asia. Instead she declined, stating her customers ask for brands they know or that others have recommended. Carrying an unfamiliar brand is a risk, she told me.

Google’s problem with AI-generated content is less the process than the lack of effort. The search giant’s spam policies don’t penalize AI content per se, but its guidelines for human quality raters (PDF) emphasize the importance of “effort” 120 times. A lack of effort could explain studies that consistently show penalized AI content, presumably from the search algorithm’s spam component.

An ecommerce merchant might sell the exact product a generative AI shopper wants and still not appear in the platform’s recommendations. The disconnect starts with how consumers use AI chat and shopping. For example, a shopper could specify in a single prompt the price range, size, material, compatibility, intended use, delivery date, and more. The merchant’s job is to make those specs easy to find and verify. The task is traditional search optimization, but elevated.

Hal Smith says lowering clients’ customer acquisition cost on Meta and Google is a focus of his agency, H Street Digital. He cites 5 performance levers, starting with the offer. Hal founded the D2C-focused agency in 2020 after stints managing political fundraising campaigns. “I learned the importance of the right message,” he told me. In our recent conversation, Hal shared his approaches to ad messaging, testing, targeting, and, yes, reducing CAC. Our entire audio is embedded below.

Retail media may provide ecommerce retailers with high-margin revenue from an audience they have paid to attract. Merchandise sales from online and even brick-and-mortar retailers often produce gross margins near 50%, contribution margins of 25%, and net profit approaching 12%. Retail media margins can look much higher because merchants have incurred much of the cost of attracting shoppers. Plus, the ad buyers are often a store’s suppliers. Here is a comparison.

This week’s rundown of new products and services for merchants includes updates on international shipping, cross-border payments, AI-powered logistics, conversational ad campaigns, social commerce, dropshipping, and reputation management. Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com. FedEx introduces Global Trade Navigator. FedEx Corp. has introduced a suite of digital tools for international shipping called Global Trade Navigator.

I run content for ecommerce brands. Thanks to cheap, infinite copy from generative AI, the question I’m paid to answer has changed. It used to be “Can we publish this?” Now it is “Will anyone see it?” So my favorite content marketing tools don’t write a word. They tell me whether my writing was seen and where. Search and discovery traffic now comes from Google and generative AI platforms. Ranking in one system doesn’t mean showing up in the other.

Visibility across Google Search, generative AI, and other organic channels is increasingly challenging. Some pundits question the feasibility of branded ecommerce sites and suggest selling only on marketplaces. Those suggestion are short-sighted. Here’s why. Consumers trust brands and will seek them out, especially when recommended by friends, social media, and reviews. Shoppers who search for brands are high-intent and ready to buy. Monitoring such searches is key to any marketing strategy.