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.

Wayfair grew revenue 9.7% in the third quarter while the home furnishings category sat roughly flat. Niraj Shah told analysts “our success has been independent of the macro.” I usually roll my eyes at that line. This time the numbers mostly back him.

U.S. revenue rose 11.4%. Orders climbed 12.2%, and new customer orders grew more than 14%, which management called a post-pandemic record. Average order value slipped about 2%, mostly mix.

Adjusted EBITDA was $236M, a 6.9% margin and the best third quarter since 2020. Free cash flow hit $136M, up more than 40% on a year ago, and net income swung to $62M. S&P and Moody’s both upgraded the credit rating. Wayfair has $1.1B in cash and spent $60M on buybacks to offset stock comp, which it plans to keep doing.

Advertising came in at 9.9% of revenue, Wayfair’s first single-digit quarter since 2021. CFO Kate Gulliver said they are “spending less to acquire each of these customers.” Some of that is timing, and Q4 guidance puts the ratio back at 10.5% to 11.5%. Direct traffic revenue grew more than 15% and branded search visits rose more than 17%, which suggests at least part of the drop is real. Money has moved into TV, including an NFL campaign this fall, and into creators, whose sales already exceed the full-year 2025 total. Wayfair also pulled spend that mostly reached shoppers already on their way to the site. Lots of retailers say they’ve done this. Wayfair is one of the few where you can see it in the ad line.

Visits referred from AI tools more than doubled quarter over quarter to about 1% of traffic. Wayfair co-developed Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and runs a branded shopping agent within ChatGPT. Its full catalog is also live in Meta’s Muse. Management says most AI-referred shoppers still complete their purchase on Wayfair’s own site or app. I’d hold that loosely, since it’s self-reported and describes a sliver of traffic. My worry with agentic shopping is the agent ending up with the customer relationship while the retailer ships the box. At 1% of visits you can’t tell which way that goes.

The stores are working better than I expected. Atlanta and Columbus are tracking close to the state-level lift Chicago produced, and five more stores open in 2027. Management says landlords want them.

International revenue fell 2.3% and the segment loss widened to $25M, partly from a one-time settlement with the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority.

Q4 guidance calls for high-single-digit growth and a 6% to 7% EBITDA margin. That’s slower than Q3, and analysts pressed on it. Management said the category is near the bottom of the cycle and Wayfair’s results come from its own levers.

A category recovery in 2027 would make this business look very good. I’m less sure about the efficiency side. A chunk of this year’s savings came from cutting spend on customers who were coming back anyway, and I don’t know where Wayfair finds that kind of saving a second time.

The WSJ ran a profile of Seth Dallaire this week, and it’s worth reading if you follow retail media. He’s Walmart’s chief growth officer and now runs ads, Walmart+, the marketplace and Vizio. Together those businesses produce about a third of Walmart’s operating income.

Walmart booked nearly $6.4B in global ad revenue last fiscal year, against Amazon’s $68.6B. Grocery runs at 2% to 3% operating margin, and ad margins can sit between 70% and 90%, so a company built on low prices has good reason to put this much weight on selling ads.

Walmart’s merchants worried that ad sales would take money out of their trade budgets. Dallaire started describing the app’s home-page banner as a digital cart rail and showed them how ad profit gets reinvested into prices and store remodels.

He’s doing all of this under Walmart’s rule against offering or accepting even a free coffee in a business deal. That kept the company’s Cannes spend to about $3M while Amazon built an acre-sized space next door.

I’d like to know how much of that $6.4B is new money and how much is suppliers moving trade spend they were already giving Walmart.