August 4th, 2025: Bigcommerce Rebrands as Just Commerce, UPS Q2 Earnings Highlights Strange Economic Times, OpenStore Valuation Burns, and Amazon Pulled out of Google Shopping for AI, not Advertising
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It’s August 4, 2025 and this is the Watson Weekly - your essential eCommerce Digest!
Today on our show:
Bigcommerce Rebrands as Just Commerce
UPS Q2 Earnings Highlights Strange Economic Times
Last Flight of the Aggregator: OpenStore Valuation Burns
Amazon Pulled out of Google Shopping for AI, not for Advertising
- and finally, The Investor Minute which contains 5 items this week from the world of venture capital, acquisitions, and IPOs.
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To hear new episodes of the show every Monday morning, subscribe now at rmwcommerce.com/watsonweekly and wherever you get your podcasts.
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[PAUSE]
BUT FIRST in our shopping cart full of news….
BigCommerce Rebrands as Just Commerce
Big..err.. "Commerce" Rebrands and Agentic Out the Wazoo
Here are my observations from the rebrand:
1 - Clearly Travis is treating this as his Satya Nadella moment. Important to seize an initiative and describe what the future will look like. This part is good.
2 - Commerce is maybe not the worst name he could have picked, I would have chosen "www" instead, or perhaps the underappreciated yet humble "ampersand semicolon." It's more of an "Alphabet-style" rebrand than a true Private Equity lipstick-style rebrand. Which at least makes it cheaper.
Let's not speak about this again.
3 - Lot of big brands mentioned. This part is a Feedo story.
4 - B2B Gets Top Billing, Yet It's the Dustiest and Least Agentically Likely Industry. What we have here is a failure to integrate. No one is putting agents on top of green screens anytime soon.
This is the biggest cognitive dissonance in the whole bit. Talk to the average distributor, and they are speaking only about margins and declining share because their largest supplier is going direct, not agents. It's not on the radar.
5 - The most suspect quote I read is this:
"Our ability to operate across the stack and ecosystem - sometimes as the platform, other times agnostically as the data, orchestration, or experience layer - is what makes our position in the market so unique and valuable.”
This is what I have historically called the "B2B Suite problem". The collection of things we just happened to have pulled together also just happens to be the perfect thing.
What I read instead is: "Please buy one of the things we happen to have."
6 - Let's look at the sub-brands.
* BigCommerce messaging appears to be competing with Commercetools - B2B, Composable, Headless. Bring your own front-end (even a Contentful logo on the homepage).
* Makeswift: Clever video, but will not help them ultimately. Use cases in the nav, let's consider. Composable Commerce as the first use case is a dead-end. Marketing? Landing pages?
Are we seriously talking about landing pages? I thought those got hit by an agentic truck.
If I didn't know better, they are setting the stage to spin out Makeswift. You don't optimize a CMS business inside a composable commerce business.
* Feedonomics: could be the most valuable thing here. Best brands, best story.
Channel management has always been a horrifically rough business to run but with an AI agentic story, it's unique and different.
Feedo feels like the the future. BigCommerce seems like mostly more of the same. Makeswift feels like a nice to have, but no one is going to grow quickly or make much money here.
FeedoCommerce anyone?
[References:]
Our Second Story
UPS Q2 Earnings Highlights Strange Economic Times
The WTF Economy Rolls On: UPS Q2 2025 Earnings Highlights
The UPS earnings were the wackiest I have seen in some time. Witness these quotes from UPS CEO on the economy:
* "Lowest consumer sentiment on record..."
* "Consumers trading down.." .. so bad?
* "Consumers splurging..." (doom spending?)
* "decreased activity in specific customer segments, particularly within small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprise customers" (bad?)
* "Economy resilient." (not bad?)
* "Consumers for the first time in 3 years spending more on discretionary items - including autos and restaurants" (so.. good?)
As I said, WTF.
On the company:
* Only a slight decline in revenue of 0.8% y/y despite a 7.3% decline in average daily volume. In other words, we already knew Amazon volume wasn't profitable.
* Carol Tome' said a decline in volume was partially caused by "macroeconomic dynamics"... but, but but... Amazon glide down.
But the real kicker:
No forward-looking earnings guidance. In other words, UPS thinks it's a WTF economy too. It's not just me.
[References:]
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ecommercestrategyconsulting_the-wtf-economy-rolls-on-ups-q2-2025-earnings-activity-7356651112277438464-xL2z/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAABzTYBMEkpgbpDWbI9miv0bkNA3W2mE1I
Our Third Story
Last Flight of the Aggregator: OpenStore Valuation Burns
OpenStore, the DTC aggregator darling has finally crash landed. Their valuation was cut in a recent funding round from (get this) 1 Billion. Did I say 1 billion? I meant 50 million. 95% haircut. Woof.
And did I mention that we said we would acquire more than a brand a week? Actually only one brand in all the time was halfway worth a damn, Jack Archer.... so...
Yes friends, it seems like the last bits of hairball has made its way through the proverbial eCommerce cat and has been coughed up: the idea that anyone can and should acquire as many eCommerce businesses as possible is now officially dead. And only a year and a half after Thrasio the Amazon Aggregator declared bankruptcy.
CAPITAL CHEAP
DTC GREAT
MOAR DTC BETTAR
Instead we should be thinking more like:
Most acquisitions fail, across all industries and geographies and time.
Retail is hard, because inventory.
[References:]
[PAUSE]
And Our Last Story
Amazon Pulled out of Google Shopping for AI, not for Advertising
If you have the largest data catalog in the world, why would you give to your top AI competitor? I believe that is the question that Amazon is asking itself at the moment. The performance marketing agency world is only speaking about how DTC should now take advantage, and not much is being talked about as to why.
Some are even saying silly things like: "I bet Amazon just found people search it anyway." Uh, no. That would have been true 5 years ago, too. And the world is different now.
There really can be only two plausible reasons that Amazon pulled out of Google Shopping.
1 - Amazon is in the process of negotiating terms to its data with Google. And expects Google to pay up handsomely. After all, it hasn't even been two weeks since Amazon removed access to all the bots and agents from its website.
Essentially, Amazon is going to eventually play ball with the agents, but is using this to make a point and get them favorable terms at the negotiating table. These terms could be use of data, or literally just a financial payoff. Likely both.
2 - The other explanation is that Amazon plans to compete directly with Google (and others) for the first AI search. In this case, if you have the most complete, attribute and data-rich catalog in the world, why do you just hand it off to your competition and help them in your AI journey?
What we have here at this moment is an opportunity for Amazon. Amazon has been taking first-search share of product searches from Google for many years now, but Google is still the king of search. If search becomes a multi-polar world, I believe Amazon would be one of the biggest beneficiaries of that trend.
But let's face it, they can (and will) compete with them anyway while at the same time extracting a lot of money/terms from Google for the privilege of using its data. As a result, it feels more likely to me that the true reason is the first one. In other words, Amazon's Google ad budget is being used as a negotiating chip in a data licensing war.
Let the partnership discussions begin! Both do need each other in some way.
[References:]
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ecommercestrategyconsulting_amazon-pulled-out-of-google-shopping-for-activity-7355563945203490816-4JnV/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAABzTYBMEkpgbpDWbI9miv0bkNA3W2mE1I
It’s That Time Friends, for our Investor Minute. We have 5 items on the menu today.
First
Dotdigital Group Acquires Social Snowball for $35M
Customer experience and data platform Dotdigital Group has announced that it has acquired influencer and affiliate marketing platform, Social Snowball, for $35 million. The acquisition enables Dotdigital to offer its customers additional acquisition channels.
Second
Product Guidance Platform Remark Raises $16M in Series A Funding
Product guidance platform Remark has announced that it has raised $16 million in Series A funding, which will be invested in product development, growing its expert network, and entering new categories. Remark offers brands product guidance via an expert network, and now it is training models on these conversations between consumers and experts.
Third
Enterprise Loyalty and Promotion Platform Talon.One Raises $135M
Enterprise loyalty and promotion software platform Talon.One has announced that it has raised $135 million in growth funding, which will be invested in product development and go-to-market efforts in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia.
Fourth
Figma Files For an Initial Public Offering
Design and prototyping software tool, Figma, has filed for an initial public offering and plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The company did not disclose the expected price range or the number of shares it plans to offer to public investors. Will this happen or will it be postponed?
Link: https://www.axios.com/2025/07/01/figma-files-ipo
AND FINALLY …
Meta Invests $3.5B in EssilorLuxottica
Meta Platforms has reportedly acquired a 3% stake in eyewear maker EssilorLuxottica for $3.5 billion. EssilorLuxottica is the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley and has partnered with Meta since 2019. We will see more Ray-Ban Meta glasses in the wild.
[PAUSE]
Did you know that RMW Commerce has another podcast? Check out The Watson Weekend for an unfiltered and lively eCommerce chat each week with me, Rick Watson, my co-host Jess Lesesky, and an array of interesting guests and topics. All focused on eCommerce. You can find the Watson Weekend by searching for it on iTunes, Spotify, or Youtube.
That’s all for this week! Till next time Watsonians.....
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Hi, I’m Rick Watson, CEO and Founder of RMW Commerce Consulting and host of the Watson Weekly podcast - your essential eCommerce Digest.
Our production partner for the series is Podcast on the Fly. This podcast is produced by RMW Commerce.
To hear new episodes of the show every Monday morning, subscribe now at rmwcommerce.com/watsonweekly and wherever you get your podcasts.
