Practical Ecommerce

Every week we publish a rundown of new services for ecommerce merchants. This installment includes updates on product images, affiliate sales, agentic commerce, bot protection, less-than-load shipping, AI orchestration, product visibility, conversational search, and more. Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com. Pinterest adds Amazon storefront linking for creators.

At its annual Marketing Live event last month, Google announced roughly 70 new advertising features. The common theme was conversational, AI-driven experiences. Here are my three takeaways for advertisers. Google introduced three ad formats eligible to show in AI Mode. Direct offers. Conversational Discovery that provides answers.

Google has confirmed what is obvious to many: unique content grounded in the writer’s views and experiences will outrank press releases, rote descriptions, repetition, and similar. “Non-commodity” is the search giant’s term in its newly released AI visibility guidelines for one-of-a-kind content. At its Marketing Live conference last month, Google’s Senior Vice President Nick Fox similarly advised against publishing “generic” content.

After 11 years, Amazon Prime Day has trained shoppers to look for summer sales in much the same way Black Friday ignites the Christmas shopping season. The impact is industry-wide. To be sure, Prime Day is much smaller than Black Friday and Cyber Monday in scale, scope, and breadth. But it has changed the annual retail calendar. In 2025, for example, U.S. industry-wide ecommerce sales hit $24.1 billion during Amazon’s event, a 30.3% year-over-year increase, according to Adobe.

In 2019 Dane Witbeck had a problem familiar to parents: What were his kids doing on their smartphones? That problem became his motivation to launch Pinwheel, an Austin, Texas-based seller of Android phones with parental controls for apps, usage limits, monitoring, and more. Fast forward to 2026, and Pinwheel is thriving and profitable. In our recent conversation, Dane shared his company’s production process, marketing tactics, economic model, and more. Our entire audio is embedded below.

Ecommerce websites consist of themes and templates made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Executives typically define the requirements, designers create the layouts, and developers code or implement the components. AI is upending that process. Upwards of 97% of developers now use AI to plan software implementations and generate code. Increasingly, generative AI is also impacting website design. AI is upending the traditional process of designing and coding ecommerce sites.

This installment of our weekly, curated rundown includes new products and services for livestream commerce, direct checkout, business agents, cryptocurrencies, visual search, logistics, media platforms, listing strategies, and AI-powered product intelligence. Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com. Ordoro and ConnectBooks integrate for ecommerce reporting.

Quick commerce in India is a local-delivery model in which consumers buy goods online and receive them within 30 minutes. The model is growing rapidly and will likely reach $50 billion in annual revenue by 2030, 10% of the country’s e-retail spend, according to an April 2026 report jointly published by Deloitte and Google. Three platforms, Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, and Zepto, dominate the market, which benefits from India’s high population density and increasing disposable income.

Reddit’s importance to business is growing. Posts on Reddit frequently rank for branded search results and influence generative AI answers through training data and real-time queries. In 2024, Reddit agreed to share that content with OpenAI and Google. Those agreements apparently remain in place, as I’ve not seen evidence to the contrary. Regardless, info on Reddit is already part of what large language models retain about your product or brand.

From America’s 250th birthday to back-to-school preparation, July 2026 offers plenty for content marketers seeking to connect the products they sell to how shoppers travel, celebrate, and prepare. Content marketers produce articles, videos, and podcasts to attract, engage, and retain customers. Content underlies search engine optimization and social media marketing. But it comes with a challenge: an almost never-ending need for topics.