E-commerce giants of the late ’90s and early ’00s like Amazon and eBay changed how the world shopped. Some of those companies have stuck around, but a new generation of commerce platforms is quickly gaining ground. Ultracheap retailers like Temu, Shein, and AliExpress are winning over customers, luring them in with bargain bin prices on products shipped directly from manufacturers in China. Shopping has also become a core part of business for social media companies — your TikTok feed is both a stream of videos and an endless shelf of products for sale. The Verge’s online shopping section covers how and what we buy and the forces driving this sprawling and opaque market.
Reuters tracked a sampling of Shein prices from April to July and — surprise! — items are now more expensive. Prices spiked in April following Shein’s pre-announced price increase and then dipped slightly, Reuters found. Now they’re creeping back up: a $31 order in April would have cost $69 last week.
[reuters.com]
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Or would you? The weird little toys are a nightmare to buy so we took matters into our own hands.
The scoring models, which incorporate loan history from buy now, pay later services, like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay, will exist alongside FICO’s standard credit score.
FICO trained the models on over 500,000 BNPL loans from Affirm, and users with five or more loans “typically saw their scores increase or remain stable,” according to the WSJ. However, the publication notes that credit bureaus still have to decide whether to share this information with borrowers and lenders.
The retail giants are looking into ways they could use or issue stablecoins — a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar or another asset, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. As noted by the WSJ, the move could allow Amazon and Walmart to receive payments faster, while avoiding fees from credit card transactions.
Six months after the coupon hunting extension Honey was accused of cheating shoppers and influencers, it appears the PayPal-owned tool is still losing users. According to 9to5Google, the number of Chrome extension users continues to drop — at one point 20 million people used the extension. Now, that number is down to 15 million.
In the midst of Donald Trump’s tariff chaos, prices are rising at retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Home Depot, according to data provided to The Verge by Bright Data, which tracks prices week over week. As of May 11th, for example, 21.5 percent of the 1.5 million tracked Amazon products had increased in price. Check out an interactive chart here.
As Donald Trump eliminates the exemption for shipments valued at $800 or less, Wired published a closer look at how Shein, the Chinese fast-fashion retailer that relied on that exemption to keep their prices dirt-cheap, tried to lobby their way out of it: spending millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists, hiring Trump administration alumni, and even sending their president, Donald Tang, to schmooze with the China hawks at the MAGA think tanks. (It didn’t work.)
Drop-shipping packages straight from China to shoppers’ homes was kind of the whole point of retailers like Temu. In response to Donald Trump’s tariffs, Temu now tells Wired that it’s switching to a “local fulfillment model” where orders come from US warehouses. With the de minimis exception officially dead (at least for now), it’s no surprise that retailers are scrambling — especially sites like Temu, whose wide product offerings depended on the exception.
Zulay Kitchen, which makes and sells kitchen gadgets, told CNBC that the company is “temporarily raising” the price of some of its products as it works to move production to India, Mexico, and other locations not subject to Trump’s 145 percent tariff on China.
Another seller, Pure Daily Care, plans to “stagger price increases” while trying to stretch existing inventory in case the US and China reach an agreement, CNBC reports.
The marketplace runs on small businesses all over the world — but Donald Trump’s tariffs are causing uncertainty. In a blog post today, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said the company will add features like shopping pages surfacing domestic sellers, which could be useful for shoppers who want to avoid tariffs.
Etsy also updated its seller handbook with a tariff section providing advice. It’s an interesting look into the many moving parts of global trade that are upended by Trump’s trade war.
Donald Trump’s tariffs threaten to blow up Shein’s supply chain, which heavily depends on Chinese manufacturing. Bloomberg reports that the Chinese government didn’t like Shein’s plans to move some of its manufacturing out of China — Shein wants to avoid tariffs as much as it can, and the Chinese government reportedly is looking to minimize manufacturing job losses.
[bloomberg.com]
Donald Trump suspended a 100-year-old law this week that companies shipping online orders directly from China depended on. The de minimis exemption was used as a loophole by Temu, Shein, Amazon, and countless drop shipping operations. Check out my explainer below.
Would you buy a designer handbag from Walmart? Through a partnership with Rebag, shoppers can buy secondhand luxury accessories like Louis Vuitton wallets and Chanel shoulder bags from Walmart’s site.
The move may be in part a response to Hermés Birkin lookalikes — “The Walmart Birkin” — that went viral earlier this month and quickly sold out.
The ultra cheap retailer giving Amazon a run for its money is piloting an ads system for merchants, The Information reports. Similar to Amazon’s system, sellers can pay for increased visibility in search results as well as display ads on Temu’s site.
[The Information]
