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.
Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Shopify promise AI tools will improve our experience of buying things online. The fashion brand Finesse even uses AI to design clothes — but that doesn’t mean products are actually good.
I tried $400 worth of AI clothes, plus product image and text generators to see how they live up to the AI hype.
Outdoor Voices, a popular athleisure brand once seen as the next Lululemon, is closing all of its stores on Sunday. The direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand was valued at $110 million in 2018, but has been on the decline following internal friction. It’s the end of an era for the e-comm startup once considered a model for founders — the company will go back to selling strictly online.
[The New York Times]
The Flip shopping app is a TikTok knockoff, filled with wannabe influencers making pennies per video view — myself included.
House Fresh, a blog focused on air quality, is just the kind of source you might want when you’re shopping for an air purifier — but it’s getting harder and harder to find them.
In a post titled, “How Google is killing independent sites like ours,” managing editor Gisele Navarro explains how bigger publishers like BuzzFeed, Better Homes & Gardens, and Rolling Stone outrank the independent site in Google Search:
These Digital Goliaths shouldn’t be able to use product recommendations as their personal piggy bank, simply flying through Google updates off the back of ‘the right signals,’ an old domain, or the echo of a reputable brand that is no longer.
As a team that has dedicated the last few years to testing and reviewing air purifiers, it’s disheartening to see our independent site be outranked by big-name publications that haven’t even bothered to check if a company is bankrupt before telling millions of readers to buy their products.
