The latest ecommerce news in marketing, measurement and Shopify. (November 2, 2026)
Amazon Ads nears $20B in Q3 and hands more of the buying to AI
Amazon’s ad business made almost $20 billion in Q3, up 12% year on year, and guided to high teens growth in Q4. The main driver is Amazon Ads Agent, launched at unBoxed last month.
In Full-Funnel Campaigns, you set products, creative and budget, and Amazon’s AI decides how sponsored, display, video and streaming TV run. Amazon’s own beta claims are 67% higher return on long term ad spend and 29% lower cost per new-to-brand customer than manual setups. Those figures come from Amazon, so treat them as unverified for now.
What makes this story worth watching is the control trade off. Advertisers approve creative but can’t pick individual channels or audiences, Amazon’s own exec admits audience transparency is still being worked out. This sits against the FTC and 22 state attorneys general suing Amazon in August over alleged secret auction surcharges, which Amazon disputes and which is unproven in court.
If you sell on Amazon, test it on a capped budget. Run independent incrementality tests rather than relying on Amazon’s reporting.
Apple blocks identity resolution in Safari
On Oct 19, Apple explained why Safari has been blocking companies that match email addresses across sites, and LiveRamp is on the blocklist. The mechanic is that a site hashes a logged in user’s email, a third party returns an ID, and advertisers recognise the same person across sites without cookies. Apple argues the middleman can link a person’s activity across sites in a way no single site could.
WPP’s CEO said on the Q3 call the impact on WPP is minimal because its InfoSum platform matches data inside client and publisher systems, outside the browser. Publicis paid $2.2 billion for LiveRamp in May. One former WPP exec says WPP isn’t unscathed, since it still needs signals to deliver on Safari. The wider industry is rallying behind IAB Tech Lab’s server-side Trusted Server Framework, though doubts remain.
If your audience, retargeting or measurement stack relies on email-hash IDs, check how it performs on Safari. Cleaner first-party data and server-side measurement matter more this quarter.
Shopify’s Fall ‘26 Edition changes how your numbers look before Black Friday
Shopify released its Fall ‘26 Edition, “Exponential”, with 150+ updates. Here’s what matters for ecommerce:
- Bot-filtered sessions: Analytics now strips out bots, merges visits into single journeys and follows cookie consent. Fewer sessions with the same orders means conversion rates will rise without any real change in sales.
- AI agent checkout: Shoppers can buy inside Google AI Mode, Gemini and other named agents, with orders landing in your admin. Eligibility depends on Shopify Catalog, and a new knowledge base lets you approve the policies and FAQs agents quote.
- More ad channels: Campaign Autopilot now runs on Microsoft Advertising and Snapchat, with X Ads coming. Pay-per-sale Shop Campaigns has expanded to 35+ new markets, including the UK and EU.
- Tracking risk: Apps can no longer use script tags. Older tracking or review apps that haven’t migrated could stop sending data without any visible error.
If you sell on Shopify, annotate the date the session change hit your store, judge peak on revenue rather than conversion rate, and confirm every tracking app still reports. Save checkout and app changes for January.
For more information on any of these stories, or for support with your marketing campaigns whilst trying to run your Shopify store, download our Shopify app and connect all your data into one place. One source of truth, so you can see exactly what’s making you money and what to do next.
