Elastic Path is the API-first, AI-ready commerce platform for brands with complex requirements: large catalogs, multi-tier pricing, and multiple brands and markets. Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers run account hierarchies, quoting, and negotiated pricing natively, not through bolt-on apps and workarounds.

C.H. Robinson is buying RXO for $5.8B in cash and stock, and the deal should close in the first half of next year. RXO expects $137M in adjusted EBITDA this year, so by my math Robinson is paying more than 40 times that.

The deal deck gets the multiple down to about 13 by counting $300M in expected cost savings. Most savings promised in acquisitions never materialize, and when I see a number that size I think about layoffs. Retailers should pay attention to how this plays out, because retail and e-commerce make up 37% of RXO’s revenue and its last-mile unit handles more than 11M deliveries a year.

I can’t work out what OpenAI is doing in shopping. Last Thursday it added virtual try-on to ChatGPT shopping search, a few months after instant checkout didn’t work out. You upload a photo of yourself and ChatGPT shows you wearing the item, and it works on store screenshots and celebrity outfits too.

We were promised superintelligence and got a worse fitting room. A dedicated shopping assistant could build this without a trillion dollars of expectations behind it, and nothing OpenAI has shown in consumer comes close to paying that back.

Apple has been playing spoiler in advertising for years and just did it again. iOS 27 shipped on September 14 with a WebKit update that blocks a list of ad tech firms in Safari, including The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, ID5, and Permutive. Early reports guessed it was a bug. I doubt that, since WebKit is open source and the block list was left out of its public GitHub repo. Retail media is exempt because Walmart and Amazon have logged-in relationships with their shoppers.

This one looks like a Roundel play to me. Target’s digital holiday catalog has close to 500 toys and gifts with creator videos and reviews built in, and the app scans a kid’s handwritten wish list so grandparents can shop from it. I haven’t seen creators used inside a gift guide like this before, and I expect it to get copied. Target also released its top toys list ahead of 150 Toys R Us stores opening over the next year.

Canvas is Shopify telling the theme business it’s finished. Shopify says a merchant can now build a custom store with Sidekick in twenty minutes, though Canvas doesn’t replace the current editor yet. Shopify has technical debt like every other platform, so I’d like to know what the rest of them have been doing with AI coding. How Shopify makes money from Canvas is still an open question.

Heather Hershey at IDC estimates the commerce software market grew 11.5% to $13.4B in 2025. Shopify’s share went from 19.5% to 21.8%, and Salesforce shrank 3.4%. Heather also notes that vendors are pitching themselves as the single data layer for agentic commerce, which would tie merchants to one vendor after years of moving toward composable stacks. IDC doesn’t count payments, which is where most of Shopify’s revenue comes from.

Two of this week’s biggest stories depend on money nobody can see yet. Robinson’s valuation only works if the $300M in savings shows up, and OpenAI keeps launching consumer features without a clear way to earn back what it has raised. Shopify’s Canvas is live for merchants now, but Shopify hasn’t explained how it will make money from it either.

Walmart is testing whether third-party marketplace items can sit in its stores and go out with pickup and delivery orders. Kyle Carlyle, who runs global marketplace fulfillment, told advertising partners about the test at a Walmart Connect event in New York last week. Today those items ship from a seller’s warehouse or a Walmart fulfillment center, and delivery can take several days.

The Financial Times reported an early version in April, running in the back rooms of several Dallas stores.

CFO John David Rainey has put the marketplace at about 500M items, with revenue growing around 20% a year. Store back rooms can hold a small share of that.

Walmart hasn’t said how it will choose which sellers get space or what the fees will be, and that choice will decide whether this helps most sellers or mainly the largest ones.