Section
Marketplaces, DTC, and the economics of selling online.
10 articles
Four weeks after its Hong Kong debut, Shein reported first-half revenue up 1% and operating profit down by half. Europe fell 14% in the second quarter, and the rules that made ultra-cheap cross-border parcels possible are now the ones pricing them.
Next lifted full-year profit guidance by £12m to £1,255m after a half in which international online grew 23.9% and UK stores shrank. In the same report, it cut its UK outlook and spent two pages warning about the British consumer.
Three years into the post-pandemic correction, returns remain the single biggest hidden cost in direct-to-consumer P&Ls. We look at what's actually working to bring them down.
As secondhand luxury volumes grow, the technology and cost of verifying that a handbag is real (and not a very good fake) is becoming the bottleneck.
Between FBA increases, referral fee shifts, and the new low-inventory penalty, the all-in cost of selling on Amazon has quietly crept past the breakpoint for several mid-tier brands.
The end of the $800 de minimis window reshuffled the cross-border map. We track who absorbed the cost, who restructured, and who lost the lane entirely.
We pulled together churn data across replenishment, curation, and content-bundle subscription models. The spread between best and worst quartile is wider than most operators think.
Walmart and Amazon now compete more directly than at any point in either company's history. We map where their 2025 strategies actually conflict and where they don't.
Top-line numbers said the 2024 holiday season was fine. Margins said something else. We track where the gap shows up in the post-mortem decks operators are circulating internally.
Two Chinese e-commerce platforms reshaped US discretionary spending faster than mid-market retailers could respond. We look at what worked, what didn't, and what the second half of 2024 looks like.