8 June 2018 Ecomm news roundup

You play checkers, couldn’t beat me playin’ chess

• Joules CEO says he thinks more fashion companies will get into interior design
• Amazon Echo and Alexa now available in France
• Zalando is expanding into Ireland
• Facebook, never to miss an opportunity to copy something that seems to work greatly (*cough* Snapchat stories *cough*) just released a Musical.ly competitor
• In a landmark case, judge rules Amazon not to be liable for damage caused by one of its products

You still stutter after certain questions

• Amazon is deleting all the reviews that seems to have been garnered thank to gift cards and all — apparently this is already impacting sales
• on JD.com, an AI-powered algorithm writes product descriptions based on customer reviews

Now I like dollars, I like diamonds, I like stunting, I like shining

• Amazon will create 2,500 jobs in the UK in 2018. Now we just need to add up the jobs lost because of the Asda-Sainsbury’s merger, the Tesco folding, and the high street stores crumbling :)
• After the uptick of last week, fashion sales fell by 7.8% YoY in the week ending in 3 June
• Everything is a marketplace if you want it hard enough: now you can sponsor a Facebook Marketplace listing to show it off to people around you
• In New York, you can order products from Walmart by text, and it will arrive the same day. This “perk” costs $50 per month

Living my best life

• If you work for Macy’s in the US, they invest in coaching your personal brand to grow your following list to show off more and more Macy’s products. This paints a very scary picture about the future of retail work where you may have to hawk products on your personal accounts to keep your job #latestagecapitalism
• Big Little Toys, an SME toymaker sued a highstreet copycat for copyright infringement, and won — this could be a very interesting precedent down the line, especially for fast fashion.

‘Bout likin’ pictures, not returnin’ texts

• Soon you’ll be able to upload a video of 60 minutes to Instagram — it’ll be interesting to see how this will change influencer marketing.

I don’t wanna hear ‘bout invasion of privacy

• Google’s new ethic of rules forbids the company from using AI for weapons.
• The best AI-related title is, however, “MIT fed an AI data from Reddit, and now it only thinks about murder” which I have been laughing at for around 30 minutes.
• New York is cracking down on AirBnB
• More people in the US use Reddit than Facebook
• Mexico imposes $3B worth of tariffs on US cheese, pork, and other products