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.

Several of the biggest names in commerce spent last week trying to get closer to the shopper. Salesforce agreed to pay $5.66B for Braze, the software brands use to send texts and push notifications. Walmart combined Walmart+ and Sam’s Club+ into one $120 membership, and Google started rolling out a cart that holds products from any store. Amazon is closing the storefronts it ran for other grocers so it can keep grocery delivery for itself. And for about a week, ChatGPT traffic dropped out of a lot of analytics reports because ChatGPT stopped tagging its links.

Salesforce has agreed to buy Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value, all cash. Braze shareholders get $47.50 a share, roughly a 58% premium over the close before the October 20 announcement. Braze has about 2,770 customers, including Instacart and Urban Outfitters, so by my math Salesforce is paying about $2 million per customer.

Braze will be folded into Marketing Cloud and Agentforce, and I’m not sure what Marketing Cloud means anymore. The two products compete for the same brands today. I’ve watched plenty of my clients move from one to the other, and anyone who left Marketing Cloud for Braze in the last year is headed back to Salesforce. Neither company has said how it will sell the two together. The deal needs a Braze shareholder vote and regulatory approval, and it should close in Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, which starts in February 2027.

ChatGPT adds a UTM tag to the links it cites so analytics tools can tell a visit came from ChatGPT. For about a week this month, many of those tags disappeared and the visits were counted as direct traffic instead. Josh Blyskal of Profound tied the change to ChatGPT’s new Intelligent UI, which started rolling out October 9. Profound says marketing teams saw their ChatGPT traffic look down 30 to 40%. By October 16, the tags were back on about 99% of links. If your October numbers look odd, check direct traffic for those dates.

Walmart now sells Walmart+ and Sam’s Club+ together for about $120 a year, almost $100 less than buying both separately. Members get free delivery from both chains and 2% back in Sam’s Cash. The bundle also includes Peacock or Paramount+. Brett Rose of United National Consumer Suppliers told Retail Dive it’s a shot at Prime, which costs $139.

I think it’s aimed more at Costco. Costco keeps taking grocery share, and grocery is Walmart’s base, so combining the two memberships should have happened years ago. The bundle went on sale October 20.

Google’s universal cart is rolling out in Search and the Gemini app. You save products from different retailers into one cart tied to your Google account, and Google alerts you when prices drop. Nike, Sephora, Target and Walmart are named partners. Google has tried this before, with Google Express and then Buy on Google, which it shut down in 2023. I don’t see what would make shoppers change how they buy, and a new protocol has never done that on its own. Google also hasn’t said what retailers pay or who owns the customer after the sale.

Amazon is shutting down the storefronts it ran for Winn-Dixie, Metropolitan Market, Weis Markets and Morrisons. Amazon says shoppers found it confusing that every storefront had its own fees and checkout. It now wants those grocers to host Amazon lockers in their stores and run their e-commerce on AWS. Amazon’s own same-day fresh delivery already reaches more than 2,300 US cities and towns, and I can’t tell what Winn-Dixie offers a shopper that Amazon doesn’t, or whether Amazon has worked that out.

Braze customers have a long wait ahead of them. The deal is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, which starts in February 2027, and until then nobody outside Salesforce knows which product will keep getting the investment. The Walmart bundle looks like the easier sell to me, at $19 less than Prime for delivery from two chains plus a warehouse club. I’m much less convinced by Google’s cart. Google has tried shopping checkout twice before, and Nike, Sephora, Target and Walmart haven’t said what they expect to get from this one.

Instacart is reportedly looking for a buyer. Its revenue growth slowed to 11% in both 2024 and 2025, from 19% in 2023. DoorDash grew 28% last year. Uber grew 18%, and Uber also runs a ride-hailing business.

The company is worth about $12B today. In 2021 it was valued privately at $39B, and talks with DoorDash back then put a possible price between $40B and $50B. A normal 30% to 40% takeover premium would value it at roughly $16B or $17B now.

Instacart still makes money. Second-quarter revenue rose 14% to $1B, free cash flow was $480M, and most of this year’s cash is going to buybacks.

DoorDash and Uber are the reported suitors.

Amazon is still expanding in grocery, and Instacart’s push into ads hasn’t closed the growth gap with DoorDash or Uber. I don’t know which of those two problems a buyer would be paying to solve.