📦 The Order : Weekly Roundup - Amazon Q2 & Whatnot

Happy Sunday,

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Amazon released booming Q2 numbers this week:

• Net sales increased 20% year-over-year

• Operating income was $27.5 billion, up 43% year-over-year

• AWS net sales increased 37%—its fastest growth in 18 quarters—to a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate

• Alexa drives Average Order Value up +40%

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full coverage on Linkedin & X.

Insights from This Week on Search Pulse (Wk 30)

• Mon · glue sticks — Elmer’s extends to 32.7% as back-to-school switches on

• Tue · cat litter — Fresh Step jumps #2 → #1, passing Purina’s Tidy Cats

• Wed · vacuum — Bissell breaks a three-way tie

• Thu · cottage cheese — Good Culture passes Daisy Brand on the high-protein trend

• Fri · paddle board — FunWater’s share goes 4.7× in a week

Here’s this week’s top 10 trend summary for 2025 vs 2026:

AI Search is quickly accelerating as new numbers from OpenAI and Google Gemini become public. We are about to see the first holiday season, where AI search starts moving the needle. Autopilot dug into this, more details in “Christmas, in August”

“Of the 900 million people who use ChatGPT every week, around 20% of conversations carry shopping intent — and at least 2% are specific product searches.

• Those shopping conversations span the whole buying journey: 31% product discovery, 22% comparison, 23% evaluating a specific product, 13% at the purchase stage. (Linkedin)

• 6% of Gemini conversations are consumer purchases — and the Gemini app alone has 900 million monthly active users. (Google)”

• Whatnot is in talks to raise a new funding round at a $20 billion valuation [Business Insider]

• Amazon got $600 million in Trump tariff refunds and will pass return along to some customers [CNBC]

• Amazon says groceries and essentials are growing ‘meaningfully faster’ than the rest of its Stores business [Modern Retail]

• Meta; Introducing Seller, an App for Facebook Marketplace Sellers [Meta]

• If AI Mode becomes the default, 95% of Google Shopping visibility disappears [Productrise]

• Time has started serving ads to AI agents [Digiday]

• eBay reaches $56M settlement with e-commerce newsletter writers it terrorized in 2019 [TechCrunch]

• Shein’s Localization Never Arrived [Marketplace Pulse]
  

• Salt Lake City eCom Summit, SLC, Aug 20

• Brandtech Connect @ IFA, Berlin, Sep 5

• Amazon Accelerate, Seattle, Sep 22-24

• Amazon unBoxed, San Francisco, Sep 28-30

• Social Commerce Summit, Los Angeles, Oct 14-16

Make this week count 🙌

Christian

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