Welcome to another issue of Commerce Outsights, Nebulab’s bi-weekly newsletter of the most interesting happenings, content, and insights from the world of consumer retail and digital commerce.
The things that matter
Source: Google
Google Marketing Live 2026 made agentic commerce the headline, not a footnote
Google's annual ads keynote leaned almost entirely on Gemini this year: ads inside AI Mode, AI Max for Shopping campaigns, generative tools that spin up creative and product videos at scale, new Meridian measurement features, and Ask Advisor—a single agent spanning Google Ads, Analytics, and Merchant Center.
The centerpiece for commerce was Universal Cart: a persistent cart that follows shoppers across Search, Gemini, and YouTube and checks out through Google Pay, with Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart, Wayfair, and Shopify merchants like Fenty already on board.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) checkout is coming to Shopping ads on YouTube and Direct Offers, with Affirm and Klarna buy-now-pay-later built into Google Pay; UCP rolls out to Canada and Australia next, then the UK, and expands beyond retail into hotel booking and food delivery.
Our take: This is Google firing on all cylinders. While OpenAI has pulled back from owning checkout, Google is doubling down—first with UCP, now with Universal Cart—and bolting it onto an already best-in-class ads business and surfaces like YouTube that no one else can match. The agentic commerce winner won't be whoever has the smartest model; it'll be whoever closes the loop by sitting between ALL the shoppers and ALL the products. Right now, that's Google.
Source: Vogue
Shein's acquisition of Everlane is really a bet on supply chain control
Shein has agreed to acquire Everlane, the transparency-focused DTC brand, for a reported $100 million, with Everlane continuing as an independent subsidiary.
Everlane built its name on "radical transparency"—publishing its factories, true costs, and carbon footprint.
Shein's on-demand model manufactures small batches against real-time demand, limiting the overproduction and deadstock that define traditional fashion—even as the company faces persistent criticism over labor conditions in its factories and its use of cheap, sometimes hazardous materials.
Our take: We don't usually wade into supply chain, but this one cuts against the reflexive "Shein is everything wrong with fashion" narrative (without letting Shein off the hook). The on-demand, small-batch model is less wasteful than the overproduce-and-discount cycle most brands still run on, and it might be just what Everlane needed. While Everlane had a story, but not that much to back it up; Shein sold efficiency, but had a conscience to clear. Win-win.
Source: Profound
ChatGPT started linking brand names, and the zero-click era cracked open
On May 7, ChatGPT began hyperlinking brand names directly to their homepages, and OpenAI referral traffic to tracked sites roughly doubled overnight and held there.
Homepages jumped from about 4% to 24% of OpenAI referral clicks, going from a rounding error to one in four in a single week.
The gains split sharply: B2B SaaS referrals rose more than 200% and financial services about 60%, but e-commerce and retail stayed essentially flat—because ChatGPT links companies, not products.
Our take: The "zero-click" panic was always overstated: AI assistants can and now do send real traffic. But the catch for commerce is in that last bullet: the referral windfall went to companies people search for by name, not to products. A shopper asking ChatGPT for "the best running shoes" still doesn't get a clean link to your PDP. So for those of us in e-commerce, the lesson isn't to celebrate the end of zero-click (yet); it's that brand-name recognition now pays off in AI.
What we’ve been up to
A lot to catch you up on before we head off for a bit.
Back in May, Matteo and I were in New York for The Lead. We hosted a private lunch during the conference and caught catching up clients, partners, and friends, discussing all sorts of things digital commerce, data, and AI (but mostly AI). We also had the most gigantic pastrami sandwich we had ever seen, but that’s a story for another newsletter.
Then, last week, we hosted Commerce Convivium: Dancing with the System in Milan. We retired the usual panel format for the night and ran a proper roundtable instead: a dinner where we put the uncomfortable questions about replatforming to the room and let everyone argue it out over a roundtable and a three-course dinner.
The Convivium was also the first time anyone outside the team got their hands on The Reluctant Guide to Enterprise Shopify Migrations. What started as a modest migration guide quietly grew into an 80,000-word (or 300-page) book written by Alberto and me. As you would expect from something produced by Nebulab, it spends more time talking about humans than machines, because the humans are what makes these projects either succeed or fall apart.
So yes, the Reluctant Guide has humans. But it also has illustrations, tragicomic war stories, and a helpful newt. It is, emphatically, NOT your average Shopify migration guide. Check it out!
Now for the housekeeping: we are (and by “we,” I really mean me, Alessandro) taking some much-needed PTO, so Commerce Outsights is going quiet for a few weeks and will be back in your inbox on July 6.
When we're back, we'll be deep in prep for our first-ever Commerce Symposium in the US—New York on September 8, LA on September 10. If you're stateside, hold the dates; much more to come so very soon!
That’s it for today’s issue. As always, thank you so much for sticking with us, and see you very, very soon! 👋