Online grocery shopping is at special risk as buyers return to squeezing melons in person. Instacart’s response is to evolve from a shopping service to a “grocery technology company”. They just announced their second acquisition in a week, this time of Rosie, an e-commerce platform that mostly serves independent grocers.
The e-commerce pie isn’t shrinking but growth has slowed as the pandemic tapers down and inflation heats up. This puts Amazon and Shopify in tighter competition. The latest skirmish is a warning to Shopify merchants that installing Amazon’s Buy with Prime button violates the Shopify Terms of Service and could lead to fraudulent orders, stolen customer data, incorrect charges, and hair loss. Okay, they don’t mention hair loss but I think it’s implied.
When the going gets tough, Meta runs away as fast as it can. Their response to e-commerce challenges is to scale back Instagram’s shopping pages and refocus on ad sales. The move comes one month after Meta-owned Facebook dropped its own live shopping product.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.