TikTok Shop is coming for Amazon… Here’s what’s going on…

TikTok Shop is testing a paid membership called Shop Plus that mirrors Amazon Prime and Walmart+, with free shipping, discounts, and coupons for a monthly fee at $6, $10, or $15. It's a move from impulse buys toward sticky repeat purchasing, and for sellers the game shifts from winning the viral first order to owning the customer who comes back.

📖 Read More: TikTok Shop takes on Amazon Prime with paid membership experiment

eBay's acquisition of Depop officially went through, with eBay paying Etsy $1.4 billion, and eBay vowed to operate the UK company as a complementary business and retain the Depop brand, platform, and customer experience. Consolidation in resale/secondhand continues.

📖 Read More: eBay to Operate Depop as It Seeks Synergies

Amazon crossed $200 billion in a single quarter for the first time, with net sales up 20% to $200.6 billion, North America up 16%, and international up 15%. Advertising grew another 26% to $19.8 billion, a signal for sellers that demand on Amazon is accelerating into the back half of the year, but the pay-to-play pressure on organic visibility isn't easing.

📖 Read More: Amazon hikes 2026 capex to $220 billion due to higher memory costs

⭐️$1 Billion To Forgotten: How Dollar Shave Club Lost Everything: Logically Answered's latest video breaks down how Dollar Shave Club went from a billion-dollar brand to forgotten. A $4,500 ad turned it into a DTC juggernaut, growing a razor subscription into a $1 billion brand and forcing Gillette to cut prices. But the model was broken from the start: the razors were cheap, customer acquisition was expensive, and subscribers stockpiled blades and cancelled.

Once Gillette copied the subscription model and lowered its own prices, DSC's one real advantage vanished, and after Unilever acquired it, the brand expanded into retail, swapped in worse blades, and lost the irreverent voice customers loved. The takeaway for sellers: there are only two ways to compete, differentiation or price, and DSC tried to do both at once, leaving no path to profitability.

⭐️Hidden Revenue: How to Make Money Off Every Amazon Return: On My Amazon Guy's MAG Growth podcast, JD Sass of Axiom Return Solutions makes the case that Amazon returns are a hidden revenue source, not a sunk cost, and most sellers leave money on the table by writing them off.

Key takeaways: never choose disposal (it now costs the same as a removal but hands Amazon resale rights, so liquidation wins), keep your source cost updated in Seller Central so reimbursements aren't lowballed, and know that roughly 50% of "unsellable" returns are actually new and reintegrable. He also covers fighting fraud with tamperproof seals and fixing high return rates that are really listing problems, like identical images across pillow sizes driving "not as described" returns.

⭐️ The Silent Killer of Ecommerce Brands and How to Avoid It: On the Ecom Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley calls inventory the "silent killer" of eCommerce brands and argues the risk is asymmetrical: under-ordering costs you some sales and ranking but you recover in months, while over-ordering is all downside and can take years to dig out of because it locks up your cash.

Key takeaways: forecast at the SKU level, never the parent (the Thrasio bankruptcy came from reordering off parent-category numbers and drowning in slow-moving stock), never hold more than 12 months of inventory, target a 4–6 turnover ratio, plan to sell out just after peak week on seasonal products, and use Shopify pre-order pages to validate demand and flip to a negative cash conversion cycle. The overarching rule: protect cash flow before in-stock rate.