#100 - December E-Tail Report: Unpacking Quarterly E‑Tail Headlines

Headlines moved fast this quarter, but the throughline is unmistakable: AI now sits at the center of e‑commerce strategy. We dig into Amazon’s shift toward agentic AI that actually does the work—fixing listings, launching campaigns, and resolving account issues—then follow the ripple on the shopper side as Rufus becomes a core shopping layer. When customers type “best drain cleaner for old pipes,” the assistant doesn’t just find keywords; it selects solutions. That’s why GEO—optimization built for how AI understands goals, entities, and outcomes—now beats traditional SEO.

We also unpack TikTok Shop’s growing pains and progress. Counterfeiters tried to ride generative tools to fake reviews and visuals; TikTok answered with a combined AI and human crackdown that removed tens of millions of listings and hundreds of thousands of sellers. The message is clear: trust is the moat. Meanwhile, Walmart tested a premium pivot, chasing higher-end assortments. The opportunity is real, but shopper expectations and merchandising still lag. Premium brands should enter with care, protect price architecture, and watch for improvements in content modules, ads, and service SLAs before scaling.

Numbers tell the rest of the story. Cyber Monday hit a record $14.25B, Black Friday reached $11.8B, and total Cyber Week spend landed at $44.2B. Mobile accounted for 57% of Black Friday purchases, and AI-assisted shoppers were 38% more likely to convert—proof that the path to purchase runs through a small screen and a smart agent. Looking forward, AWS is pushing custom silicon to cut AI costs, and TikTok is preparing a U.S. data migration by March 2026 alongside stricter AI labeling. Our takeaways are simple: build mobile-first content, structure product pages so assistants can parse real outcomes, invest in authentic creator proof, and price for promotion-heavy peaks.

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Transcript

Q4 Setup And Scope

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the ETAL Report. Headlines You Missed From Around the World. I am your host, Velocity Pete, and today we have a very exciting episode for you. It's our Q4 E-Tail report, meaning we've got six headlines for you today, not just three. We've got three from the 2025 season, looking back at the most important headlines from around the world on the e-commerce side of things, of course, focusing on e-commerce. Uh, looking back at what happened in the e-commerce world, some of the biggest drivers, some of the biggest impacts, as well as it glance at the Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or now known as Cyber Week, statistics and how Amazon performed, how sellers performed, uh, and answering the question of are we in a recession? So those are the first three. The second three, the back half, are gonna be headlines announced for 2026. So, what I mean by that is if you didn't get, if you didn't get that, things that have been announced to be working on projects that Amazon or TikTok is is advancing in, um, and really where their shift is going in 2026. So you're gonna want to stay tuned for the back half of these as well. So three in headlines from 2025, three headlines from from 2026. Um, I'm not Marty McFly. Um actually, I guess he went to the past, so that would be not uh a good phrase there. Leave it in, leave it all in. I want everyone to see my mistakes, leave it in.

Amazon’s Agentic AI For Sellers

SPEAKER_00 1:37

The first headline, arguably the most important, you could have guessed this, you could have put money on this, and you would have been right uh on what the first topic would be, of course, is AI. And Amazon's shift in 2025 to a more strategic type of AI, to a more uh agency or a type of AI that assists you better instead of just reading data or spitting things out to you. They made a real significant pivot toward this type of, again, this autonomous AI that's designed to execute complex multi-step tasks. It's more of like a seller assistant that's a little bit more advanced. So we've got things in the realm of seller tools. Uh, so they're continuously rolling out new, again, agentic AI seller assistants uh to be a sort of a teammate for sellers to help them uh optimize listings, fix account issues, um, and creation of campaigns. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that they can do. Is it better than, and again, I'm biased, but is it better than an agency? Probably not. Um, is it something that if you're a mom and pop shop that doesn't want to pay an agency, um, that doesn't want anyone to help, you want to do it, you know, yourself? Yeah, it's better than a one-person operation for sure. So it's only going to get better as it gets more data, as it gets smarter, as it gets more advanced. So something else to keep an eye out for. Um, the other side of this, of course, is on the customer side with Rufus. So Rufus was announced, I believe, beginning of last year, potentially end of 2023. I'm sure it was announced

Rufus And The Rise Of GEO

SPEAKER_00 3:10

way before that. But what I mean is it it really came onto the scene in the past couple of years. And it's, like I said, with the seller tools, it's only getting smarter, it's only getting more advanced. Uh, the AI shopping assistant, uh, Rufus, again, is now deeply integrated into the core e-commerce experience. So it's becoming more and more a part of the shoppers, whether it's answering questions for them, whether it's pulling up listings that it thinks are the best for whatever prompt that they put into Rufus. For example, if they say, I need the best drain cleaner, uh, they might pull up a few different brands that they find. Um, and Rufus is more than likely going to be influencing those decisions uh for the customers saying, hey, this product got really good ratings and it was really good at solving the exact problem that you typed into your prompt. So the more complex it gets, the more important it becomes to play to Rufus, to make sure that your listing is uh GEO optimized, not just SEO optimized anymore. This is of course something that we've been talking about all year. If you know, if you've been following the podcast, thank you. Uh if you've been liking and watching all the videos, again, thank you. But you know that GEO is becoming more and more and more and more important, uh, of course, not just for the Rufus side, but also again, for in general. If you're going into Gemini, if you're going into ChatGPT, if you're going into any of the other uh open AI large language models, and you're saying, what's the best product for X, Y, and Z, you're more than likely going to be finding a set of products that have been optimized for that AI. So, as sellers out there, talking to you now, you want to be optimized for this stuff. This is something that's going to be very important moving forward, that your products are you're able to play again to these AIs and make sure that your products are showing up when people type in those prompts. So another AI headline, moving on to our second headline here.

TikTok Shop’s Anti‑Fraud Crackdown

SPEAKER_00 5:11

We're taking a look at TikTok shop, which has become very mature, has matured greatly over the last year from going from a simple dancing app where people dance and they sing to now selling a good amount of money and products. Not the shift I don't think anyone expected, but it makes sense the way it is. Uh, there's a few headlines that we'll get to on TikTok here as well. I've weave them in quite nicely. So the first one, we're talking about major AI crackdowns. So TikTok has started to work on this a little bit more. There's been some problems in the last year here, last couple of months, especially on fraudulent sellers and counterfeit listings. They don't have something like brand registry as Amazon does or something similar. They have um a much lesser version. It's not as inept. It's not as um, I guess it is inept. It's not as uh adaptable, it's not as good uh to use a simple word. It's not as good as brand registry. So this has been a big problem here. Um it's become so much of a problem that TikTok has actually launched a sort of a mix of AI and human reviewers uh to block tens of millions of fake products and shut down hundreds of thousands of seller accounts that are black hat, that are fraudulent, that are counterfeit. So where the AI comes in here is that this is something that they're looking at where you want to make sure that your content is legit, even if you're using AI, you want to make sure that you're avoiding the um cheap, high, widespread um generative AI tools. People are using those, the bad actors are using those to create realistic looking product images and videos uh for these counterfeit items. So, and also to use and to generate fake reviews. So we just did an episode um with a review removing software. Um, and it was uh very insightful to me to think about you know how hard Amazon has cracked down on these fake reviews. It's good to see the next up-and-coming e-commerce market also doing this as well. So there's a lot going on there. Um, this is a legitimate pain point for sellers. This is something that I have heard amongst the TikTok community they're taking very seriously. This is really affecting uh the trust that these sellers have in TikTok of why are these bad actors allowed to sell my product and how are they not getting punished? Here you go. Here is the punishment. So that's nice to see again TikTok. I think we talked about this a little bit as well this year. TikTok likes to take the steps in the right direction for sellers where other other major e-commerce channels might not. So this is a really good step in them competing with Amazon. They're of course nowhere near Amazon. Amazon is still king, uh, but this is a good step in the right direction, I believe. I believe in a lot of other people in the community believe as well.

Walmart’s Premium Pivot

SPEAKER_00 8:12

And lastly, to touch on the third e-commerce giant in the space, Walmart had a pretty premium pivot this year, and I say that as not really a joke, but they had a premium pivot as in they were moving away from their usual model of the cheapest item possible. Um, the sort of lower, lower end's not the right word uh to say there. Um, leave it in. They're they're they're switching away from the cheaper items, and they were actually starting to expand in the premium category. I don't think this is going amazing. I don't think this is going great. You know, we have a lot of brands here at Velocity that we say, you're a premium brand, you're a high quality luxury brand. Of course you're not going to sell on Walmart. Um we've explored the opportunity to expand to some of those brands, expand them to Walmart specifically, and it's not there yet. I think it's a step in the right direction, but I think the thing with Walmart is they're maybe pulling a roam where they're expanding too far. Sorry, I mentioned the Roman Empire. Um that's a meme for all of you uh older people out there. The kids like to talk about the Roman Empire. Um, they're expanding too much, and I think that will hurt them in the long run. Um, I was sort of right about Walmart in the past. I was sort of wrong about Walmart. We're all sort of right and sort of wrong. I of course would like them to secede. I would like I would succeed. I would like them to be a really a second major channel for those maybe wanting to not shop on Amazon just to actually legitimately consider Walmart. Um, but right now I think Target has that role of the luxury, nicer quality products. Um and I think Walmart is maybe trying to step in there and they might be overstepping their boundaries just a teeny little bit. So those are our three headlines from 2025.

Cyber Week By The Numbers

SPEAKER_00 10:06

But before we move into 2026, I do want to cover the Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as it's been dubbed, uh Cyber Week sales. Um, I want to take a look at the logistics, the KPIs from that. There were some pretty interesting KPIs from Cyber Week, from Cyber Monday and Black Friday. Not what I thought from considering uh Prime Day's performance this year, how it was a little bit shaky on whether or not it was up from Prime Day 2024. Uh, but there is a lot of records being broken this cyber week here. So Cyber Monday, the total online spend was reported at 14.25 billion with a B. I'm gonna be talking in billions here with a B. So if you think I said million, you're wrong. We're talking billions. That's billion with nine zeros. It's a lot of zeros. Uh so the Cyber Monday total online spend was 14.25 billion, which is the official largest single online shopping day in US history. That was up 7.1% year over year. Black Friday also had a really successful spend day. It wasn't as much as Cyber Monday, which I think is interesting because I bought all of my stuff on Black Friday. Um makes you wonder if I was that was incorrect. But anyway, Cyber Monday had 14.25. Black Friday had 11.8. So also a new US record uh for the day. That was up 9.1% year over year. That's just the spent. That's just the spend. Um, so the total cyber week spend as well from Black Friday, Saturday, Sunday, into Cyber Monday, and then also the couple of days leading up to Black Friday, the total spend again was $44.2 billion. So very that's a lot. That's a lot. Uh the sales itself was not posted, very interestingly enough, uh, but the spend was. So that tells you all you need to know there. The AI-driven sales, this they did put this out. The AI-driven sales, so not the total sales here, but the AI-driven sales. So um things sales attributed to generative AIs, um, if other shopping agents, if there's a Gemini attachment, if there's a Chat GPT question, uh, if it's most likely more so on the Rufus side, was around $3 billion. That's again in the US. So pretty good numbers. Um for the AI side of things. Again, I like Rufus just because it's a Corgi. That's the the the logo or what it's based off of was uh an old Corgi. Um so I want Rufus to succeed. That's the only AI I kind of like. Sorry, Gemini and ChatGPT. Um, but the AI driven sales were right around 3 billion. Could be 3.1, it could be 2.8. They didn't, they put out, Rod, they said roughly 3 billion. They didn't give us an exact number. So um they did give us some other metrics that I thought were very interesting. The first one being that 57% of Black Friday purchases, Black Friday specifically, purchases were made via mobile devices. So this is something that we all know that the majority of shoppers are on the mobile side of things. Um, I actually am not in this 50%. I'm in the minority at this time. I bought all my things on my uh desktop or my laptop computer. Uh it was not on mobile, but 57% of purchases were made via a mobile device. So just further, if you didn't already know it, which you should have by now, but if you didn't already know it, you need to have mobile optimized listings, uh, more so than a desktop listing. Both should be, of course, optimized, but you really want that mobile. The majority of sellers are on mobile, so you want that there. Something else that was interesting, another one that I liked that they put out, um, the average discount was uh uh roughly 28%. The average discount was 28%, which was pretty flat uh compared to 2024, indicating that deep promotions were necessary to capture sales in an increasingly competitive uh environment. Of people saying, hey, I can

Mobile, Discounts, And AI Conversion

SPEAKER_00 14:20

spend this much on this product, even though it has less reviews. So I'm gonna do that. So again, it's very interesting to see that alone. Um, that is something that we want to very stress is that you know, price might be your biggest value point in in 2026. It might not be your review score anymore. Just a thought. Could not be true. It's not exactly my prediction, but could be what we look at and what we see. So, and the last Black Friday KPI was the conversion rate of AI assisted shoppers. So, again, I mentioned up at the top there that it was around 3 billion in terms of people using an AI assistant like Rufus. Uh, that was the roughly the estimate of sales. It was also estimated that uh the shoppers that were using an AI power tool, again, like Rufus, were reported to be up 38% more likely to purchase uh or convert on a product than non-AI users. So I think Amazon is gonna see this and say that's a big number, and they're gonna really lean heavily into that in 2026. They're gonna really lean heavily into how can Rufus direct you to the best possible product for your growing success as a seller in 2026. So, and speaking of that, it's a great transition into our 2026 headlines. Thank you for sticking with me here if you made it. Uh, I'm excited to go over these. The of these, of course, are just speculation. Again, I'm uh doing a reverse Marty McFly. I went to the future and came back with an almanac. Um, I guess he did that in the third one, the third movie. But anyway, the first headline, of course, is still pertaining to AI. That's not slowing down anytime soon. We're talking about AWS here and how AWS is accelerating into the AI infrastructure and the custom silicon race. So this was a huge headline about AI,

AWS Bets On AI Silicon

SPEAKER_00 16:15

about um their again, move for making AWS more AI-based, uh, for allowing the growth of data centers to support these AI workloads for training new AIs, um, as well as the custom Amazon silicon, which is like the Tyranium, Triranium, I never know how to pronounce that. Triranium, say train trainium, train chips, training three chips, um, to offer more cost-efficient alternatives uh to competitors' hardware, accelerating the AI-driven growth phase for AWS. So expect to see a lot more of it. I'm sure you already did, but that's a big piece of this in 2026, is their new investment into their cloud services and how they're going to be bolstering them with AI. The next one is about TikTok. I want to go back to TikTok and talk a little bit more about them. You know that TikTok was banned this year, this year. I think it was 2025, maybe it was the end of 2024. It was banned for all of 12 hours. Um, where were you when TikTok was down for 12 hours? I was with my buddies at a mini golf course and they were freaking out. Um, not to brag,

TikTok’s 2026 U.S. Migration

SPEAKER_00 17:24

but I have been off TikTok for a while now. I just uh got sucked in, got doom scrolling a lot. But anyway, TikTok was banned, and a lot of this legislation is still going on. A lot of this dealings behind the scenes that we don't hear about or don't know about is still going on. Um, but they are reaching a finalization. They have reached a conclusion where the deadline for US users to transition to a new US exclusive version of the TikTok app is set for March 2026. So the current one, the current TikTok app, is expected to stop functioning in the US shortly after this date. Again, you're gonna have, I imagine, the same accounts. You're going to have all of your videos, everything you've posted, all of your information. It's just going to be on a US-based service, whereas right now, of course, it's based in China. Um, and it's the company's not based in China, but all of the data and all of the servers are based in China. So um, this involves a complex mass migration of user profiles and data. Like I said, you're going to keep all of your stuff, but it's going to be transferred to US-based servers as opposed to the Chinese-based servers. So this will be interesting to see. I don't know how this is going to affect sellers. I would imagine it would not, but I could be wrong. I have been wrong about that. I could be wrong. We will see. This last one, again, also pertains to AI, and it's the content creation and moderation race. So they're kind of going like this content

AI Creation Vs. Moderation

SPEAKER_00 19:00

creation goes up, moderation goes up a little bit, slows this one down, then it goes back up. So TikTok is simultaneously embracing and fighting this surge of AI creation tools where they're heavily pushing them. You know, they want you to use these tools, but like I mentioned earlier, they're trying to moderate it in a sense of they don't want fake products on there. They want to make sure that they're using real products to create this, these real content, this, this, this real uh videos and and other things related to the products, that you're not having black hat people just do whatever they want. Um, and the platform is also facing an escalating challenge with the rise of, again, these deep fakes and all these other things to help fight the counterfeit products. So they're also starting to work on some mandate labeling. I've seen this in a couple different areas. I've heard this from a couple different TikTok people where they're going to be strictly enforced. The requirement for the creators to label all realistic AI generated images, audio or video as such. So saying, hey, this is AI, you know, if you look at um, again, not personally on TikTok, but I've seen the back end of it where the back end of creating a video where it says, let viewers know this is AI. So if you don't click that and your video is AI, I've heard you can get in trouble where of course the video gets taken down, or um sometimes they just label it for you, but sometimes I've seen where they take the video down, or that they sometimes will suspend your account. So it's big. Again, I I like this move. I would like to know what I'm looking at is AI. I've seen some of the videos that are out there and some of the images that

Closing And Newsletter CTA

SPEAKER_00 20:40

are out there from some of the latest softwares, and it's very scary because I don't know if it's AI or not. That might be an Instagram selfie at a coffee shop. That might be a video of a guy driving a truck, a real guy driving a truck, a real coffee shop. I don't know. Um, unfortunately, I do not know. So, like always, AI is the biggest headline here. AI is the most prominent headline from around the world, whether it be in 2025 or 2026. I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot more about AI and its effects on the e-commerce world in TikTok, in Amazon, I can even maybe in Walmart and eBay. It's going to be an interesting year for sellers in 2026, that is for sure. So I appreciate you all watching this wonderful recap of the 2025 season, and we're excited for 2026. Make sure to stay up to date with everything, e-commerce, by hitting that subscribe button and liking this video to get more of the e-tail reports. Um, you can also subscribe to our newsletter, which I have linked down below, as well as on our website, also linked down below. So make sure to check out both of those. If you'd like keeping up to date with all of the latest headlines, we send the newsletter out bi-weekly, so you get up to date a little bit more frequently than the E-Tail report, which is only once a month. So thank you all for watching. I am your host, Velocity Peach. Merry Christmas and a happy new year.