Marketplace Talk: September ecommerce news 2026

📊 Profit margin overtakes sales volume as top success metric for marketplace sellers

Marketplace sellers have shifted their definition of success: profit margin has overtaken net sales as the primary measure of performance, according to ChannelEngine's Marketplace Seller Trends Report 2026.

The report surveyed more than 550 ecommerce decision-makers across five markets (the UK, Germany, France, the US and the Netherlands). At the same time, expansion is still happening: 49% of sellers added two or three new marketplaces over the past year, and the share of companies operating on seven or more platforms grew from 34% to 39%. However, growing their marketplace footprint has dropped from fourth to eighth on sellers' priority lists, a sign that the growth-at-all-costs era is giving way to a more disciplined approach.

AI implementation has emerged as sellers' single biggest priority, cited by 26% of respondents, narrowly ahead of boosting profitability at 25%. The vast majority of sellers (82%) are either already adopting AI in marketplace operations or actively considering it. Adoption so far is described as "supportive rather than transformational," with the main barriers being risk, control and reliability. The UK is the most advanced market in AI adoption; Germany the least. On TikTok Shop, 55% of companies surveyed are now active on the platform domestically or internationally, a figure that signals the channel has crossed from experimental to established.

Three in five organisations still rely largely on manual processes or partial automation, which limits how much they can actually gain from marketplace expansion or AI investment. The profitability shift is real, but the operational infrastructure to support it is lagging. For sellers, the gap between ambition and margin is increasingly an automation problem.

"The data confirms what we see every day with our customers: sellers are no longer just asking how to sell on more channels, they're asking how to make those channels actually profitable. Connecting data and automating operations will be critical to turning expansion and investment in AI into profitable growth."

Jorrit Steinz
Founder & CEO

🛍️ October deal wars: Amazon, Walmart and Target pile into the same week

Amazon has confirmed that Prime Big Deal Days 2026, its second Prime Day-level event of the year, will run October 6 to 7, exclusive to Prime members. The 48-hour sale spans more than 35 product categories, with discounts on Amazon-owned devices, home and kitchen appliances, beauty, holiday gifts and everyday essentials. Early deals are already live, and new offers drop three times daily during the event. This is Amazon's fifth consecutive year running a major fall sale event in October, and it has become an unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season.

Walmart has moved to outflank Amazon with a longer event: its Deals & More sale kicks off at midnight on October 5, one day before Amazon, and runs for a full seven days through October 11, with discounts advertised at up to 50% on home, 40% on tech, 30% on toys and Halloween items, and 20% on wellness products. Crucially, no paid membership is required.

Target's Circle Deal Days runs October 6 to 7, overlapping directly with Amazon, and offers up to 40% off thousands of products for members of its free-to-join Target Circle loyalty program. Target Circle 360 paid members get a day of early access on October 5.

The overlap is deliberate on all sides. Walmart explicitly timed its event to align with Amazon's calendar, and Target has been running a competing sale in October since 2022. For brands and sellers active across these three platforms, early October has become one of the most commercially concentrated windows of the year - an effective preview of the Q4 dynamic where Walmart, Amazon and Target compete for the same basket at the same time.

"Early October has become the real start of Q4 for ecommerce. The fact that all three major US platforms are now running overlapping sale events during the same week is a signal that the consumer attention window has permanently shifted earlier. For sellers, being visible and price-competitive across all three channels during this window is no longer optional, it's table stakes."

Jordi Vermeer
Director Revenue (North America)

🛒 Google removes product carousels from EEA search, organic Shopping visibility collapses

Google has removed product carousels from shopping-related search results across the European Economic Area to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Analytics platform Productrise tracked the rollout across thousands of daily queries and reported declines of 90 to 100% in carousel appearances in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden within just a few days, while results in the UK, US and Australia remain unchanged. Google itself called the change the biggest decline in search result quality in its 29-year history. Shopping has also disappeared from Google's tab navigation in the EEA.

In practice, consumers who want to compare products via Google Shopping now face several additional clicks to get there. Instead of product carousels and grids, they see a list of shops and price comparison aggregators. Being listed in Google Merchant Center has become significantly less impactful, and organic product SEO tied to Google Shopping is now largely irrelevant in the EEA. Larger retailers with established brand recognition may benefit from more direct traffic, while smaller retailers face a harder path to visibility.

The move has two compounding effects for European online retailers: AI Overviews are already eating into informational search visibility, as recent German data showed, and now organic Shopping visibility has effectively been removed at a stroke. The businesses most exposed are those that relied on Google Shopping as their primary discovery channel without building independent brand equity or alternative traffic sources.

"This is a structural reset for ecommerce marketing in Europe. The Google Shopping channel as many brands have relied on it no longer exists in the same form. The retailers who recover fastest will be those who already have diversified discovery strategies - marketplace presence, social commerce and AI-ready product data. Those who built entirely on Google Shopping carousels will need to rebuild from the ground up."

Niels Floors
Director Strategic Development

The impact in Germany

A joint study by Sistrix and digital agency Leap found that the organic visibility of large online stores in Germany fell by 16.7% year-over-year in June 2026. The researchers examined nearly 2,500 major online stores together accounting for 90% of Germany's online market. They link the decline directly to the spread of AI Overviews in Google search: the share of search terms that trigger an AI Overview more than tripled in a year, rising from 4.3% to 14.2%. The estimated impact on organically generated revenue is €7.5 billion, bringing the total to around €28 billion.

The pattern is uneven. AI Overviews appear most frequently in informational searches (69.7% of the time) and almost never (0.2%) in searches with direct purchase intent. This means AI is taking over the discovery and comparison stages of the funnel, not the final transaction. Retailers who are absent from those early stages are also, as the researchers put it, absent from the final purchase decision. Organic traffic as a share of total website traffic fell from 42.5% to 33.3% year-over-year.

Additional reading: AI checkout is reshaping ecommerce, but marketplaces remain essential.

There is a silver lining: traditional Google visibility remains strongly correlated with AI citation. The 20% most visible online stores account for around 72% of all AI citations. For now, maintaining strong organic rankings is still the best route to AI discoverability, but retailers need to add a new layer of strategy around structuring informational content so it can be cited by AI systems.

📈 U.S. ecommerce grows more than 10% in Q2 2026: first double-digit quarter since 2021

U.S. ecommerce sales reached $329.5 billion in Q2 2026, representing 12.4% year-over-year growth: the first double-digit quarter since 2021, according to Digital Commerce 360 analysis of U.S. Department of Commerce data. Ecommerce accounted for 23.5% of total retail sales in the quarter and grew more than twice as fast as overall retail. Q1 and Q2 2026 were also the first quarters outside of Q4 to surpass $300 billion in online sales.

Amazon moving its summer Prime Day event to June contributed to the Q2 spike, pulling forward spending that historically fell in July. That shift is reflected in the July data, where ecommerce growth slowed to 4.7% year-over-year after the June surge. Still, the underlying trajectory is notable: ecommerce as a share of total retail has never declined year-over-year, and the gap between online and offline growth continues to widen.

For brands and marketplace operators, sustained double-digit growth in a mature market is a signal that the channel ceiling is higher than many assumed. Competition for consumer attention and basket share will intensify, particularly in Q4, where ecommerce already accounts for more than 25% of total retail sales.

"Double-digit ecommerce growth in a quarter that doesn't include the holidays tells you the structural shift is still in motion. Consumers aren't returning to old habits. For marketplace sellers, the priority question isn't whether the channel is growing - it's whether their operations can capture share as the market expands."

Jordi Vermeer
Director Revenue (North America)

🚀 TikTok Shop bridges the EU and UK: cross-border trade goes live in October

TikTok Shop is opening cross-border selling between the EU and UK, allowing sellers from eight EU member states — Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain — to sell to British shoppers, and vice versa. An EU seller pilot starts on 21 September, with the broader rollout on 19 October. UK sellers will gain access to all twelve countries in TikTok Shop's pan-European "Sell Across Europe" network. The UK has been one of TikTok Shop's strongest markets, with more than 300,000 small businesses active on the platform.

The mechanics are straightforward but require seller readiness: EU sellers shipping to the UK must handle logistics themselves, choosing their own courier and managing customer service for delivery issues. Eligibility requires an active TikTok Shop account in good standing with recent sales history. For UK sellers selling into Europe, eligibility is assessed in real time based on account performance.

This is a meaningful expansion for any brand or seller already active on TikTok Shop in one of the eligible markets. The UK remains one of the most developed social commerce markets in Europe, and opening it to EU sellers, and vice versa, creates a genuinely new cross-border revenue opportunity on a platform growing fast in both regions.

"Cross-border on social commerce platforms has historically been complicated to execute well. TikTok Shop is simplifying the discovery and transaction side, but sellers still need to own the logistics. For brands that already have EU fulfilment sorted, this is a fast path to the UK market without needing to build a new channel from scratch."

Steve Cadman
Enterprise Business Development 

📉 Amazon's EU reach edges down but still dominates at nearly 194 million users

Amazon reported an average of 193.9 million monthly active recipients of its shopping services across the EU in the first half of 2026, down slightly from 195.2 million in the second half of 2025. The figures were submitted to the European Commission under the Digital Services Act. Germany remains Amazon's largest EU market by reach, with 52.8 million monthly active recipients, followed by France (38.8 million), Italy (38.1 million) and Spain (27.9 million). The Netherlands, Amazon's newest dedicated market, was the only one of the five major markets to grow - up 4.0% - while France saw the steepest decline at 4.0%.

The broader picture is one of a platform that has largely saturated its core European markets, even as it continues to invest heavily. In the Netherlands, Amazon is deploying €1.4 billion over three years to narrow the gap with market leader Bol, but Bol's lead actually widened last year. Meanwhile, Amazon's reach grew fastest in smaller markets: Denmark (+18.4%), Sweden (+13.9%) and Ireland (+12.1%) all saw double-digit increases.

For sellers managing EU marketplace strategies, the headline numbers matter less than the country-level dynamics. Markets like France and Germany are mature and competitive; newer markets like the Netherlands and the Nordics still offer expansion headroom. The DSA reporting regime is also useful: Amazon's transparency data is now a reliable annual benchmark for platform reach across the EU.

"Amazon's EU numbers tell a story of a platform in consolidation mode in its core markets while still finding growth on the edges. For sellers, that means the margin for error in Germany and France is smaller than ever, you need to be properly optimised on the channel to compete. In newer markets, there's still room to build a position before it gets crowded."

Mitchell Dröge
Alliance Manager

📱 Best Buy opens a TikTok Shop storefront ahead of the holiday season

Best Buy will launch a storefront on TikTok Shop in late October, bringing nearly 10,000 products from brands including Bose, Dyson, Oura and Microsoft to the platform. Customers will be able to go from product discovery to purchase without leaving the TikTok app, with orders fulfilled by Best Buy and returns accepted in-store or by mail. The launch is timed to coincide with the holiday shopping season and makes Best Buy one of the first major big-box retailers to establish a full TikTok Shop presence. Sephora launched its own TikTok storefront just days earlier.

The commercial model is layered. Alongside direct sales, the launch activates Best Buy's creator program - enabling creators to drive purchases through shoppable videos and affiliate links — and extends the reach of brands advertising through Best Buy Ads. Campaigns tie back to Best Buy's own first-party data, meaning advertisers can close the loop between creator-driven discovery and measurable sales outcomes. That combination of creator content, retail media and platform-native commerce is increasingly the standard playbook for major retailers.

For brands selling through or alongside Best Buy, this opens a new performance channel at a critical time of year. Social commerce on TikTok is no longer speculative, it is a working channel with real inventory, real fulfillment and a direct path from video to purchase. The question now is which brands will show up with content built for this environment versus which will simply list products and wait.

"When a retailer the size of Best Buy commits 10,000 SKUs to TikTok Shop and ties it into their retail media network, that's a signal the channel has matured. Brands that treat this as another listing channel will underperform. Those who invest in creator-native content and connect it to their broader media spend will have a real edge this holiday."

Damian Speck
Channel Partnerships Manager (North America)