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Welcome to the Moast newsletter. We spend the week collecting news, trends, and other content that we think would be interesting to e-commerce founders and CMOs. Our goal is to provide value without sounding like a promo for our app. Helpful wether you use Moast or not.
A Monet that almost nobody had ever seen sold for $56.2 million at Sotheby's Paris, the highest price ever paid at auction in France. Iris had sat in a private collection, never publicly exhibited, for most of a century. Scarcity still commands a premium, as long as the scarcity is real.
Here's what caught our attention in the world of e-commerce this week 👇
1/ DTC Headlines
Google is putting ads inside AI Mode, and search growth is slowing
-> Ads in AI Mode go international for the first time, with multi-turn ads also launching in the US.
-> Search revenue grew 12% in Q3, down from 17% in Q2 and 19% in Q1.
-> Click-through on sponsored product listings in AI Mode is already running close to organic.
Pop Mart's revenue fell by half as the Labubu craze cooled
-> Q3 revenue dropped 45% to 50% year over year, sending shares to an 18-month low.
-> The Americas fell hardest at 70% to 75%. China, the home market, held up best at 25% to 30%.
-> No follow-up hit has landed. One character carried the company up and is now carrying it down.
Jassy says everyone is sleeping on Amazon's retail business
-> He pointed to hundreds of billions in revenue and double-digit operating margins including ads.
-> Fresh groceries and everyday essentials grew about three times faster than the rest of the store.
-> US shoppers using Alexa for Shopping spend 50% more per order. He expects it to become the default.
Fanatics rebuilt its outfit tool with OpenAI's Codex
-> Shop the Look builds full fan outfits from in-stock items matching the product's team and style.
-> It runs on Fanatics plus the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL stores, with suggestions refreshed daily.
-> The 30,000-product MLB pilot drove 10% higher engagement than the version it replaced.
Instacart is killing the smart carts it paid $350 million for
-> Caper Carts wind down by Q2 2027, with pre-tax charges of $55 million to $80 million.
-> Adoption "has not scaled quickly enough to justify our continued investment," the company said.
-> Those carts were also in-store ad inventory, which complicates the retail media story.
Best Buy published its whole holiday calendar, and Black Friday runs ten days
-> Halloween offers started October 30, with early Black Friday deals from November 6.
-> The main event runs ten days from November 19.
-> Publishing the calendar this early trains shoppers to wait for you instead of someone else.
Amazon told engineers to stop "tokenmaxxing" to look productive
-> An internal memo calls AI usage metrics "deeply flawed" and disconnected from what actually matters.
-> If AI does not improve your work, Amazon says that is "a finding, not a failing."
-> Managers are told to measure customer impact and delivery, not token counts.
2/ Shopify
The Shop app now does one cart across up to 15 brands
-> Universal checkout merges single-store carts into one Shop Pay checkout, built on Shopify's UCP endpoint.
-> Harley Finkelstein: "Each merchant still makes the sale and keeps the customer relationship."
-> Outside developers can request early access to put it inside their own AI shopping agents.
Campaign Autopilot is now live for every Shopify merchant
-> Set a monthly budget and it builds campaigns across Meta, Microsoft, Snapchat, Shop and Messaging.
-> It writes creative from your catalog images and descriptions, and suggests one-click SEO fixes.
-> It wants two to three weeks of learning data before peak traffic, so setting it up now matters.
3/ What We Found Interesting
Only one in ten shoppers starts a product search with AI
-> AlixPartners polled over 9,000 US consumers. Among Gen Z and millennials it's 14%.
-> Nearly 70% earning $150,000 or more say AI shopping matters, against 53% earning under $45,000.
-> Most still aren't ready to let an agent finish the purchase for them.
The shoppers who do arrive by AI convert 90% better
-> Adobe's September data: AI traffic produced 83% more revenue per visit than everything else.
-> A year ago that same traffic converted 9% worse. The gap flipped in twelve months.
-> AI visitors spend 73% more time on site and add to cart at a 53% higher rate.
4/ What We Found Helpful
Get your product pages ready for BFCM, week by week
-> A four-week plan: reviews and tagged video on your top 20 pages, then mobile speed, then a code freeze.
-> Across 6,080 stores on our network, shoppers tap play on 21.1% of video widget impressions.
-> Video-engaged sessions produce 14.3% of completed checkouts, so the clips earn their place.
How brands are actually running TikTok Shop this holiday
-> The BFCM campaign runs November 11 to 30. Best Buy, Ulta and Sephora are all selling there for the first time.
-> Beachwaver's exclusive curling iron ships packaged like a PR kit, to provoke unboxing videos.
-> Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy have moved 550,000 units combined since joining a year ago.
November 2, 2026
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