GameStop – which became a household name during the meme stock craze of 2021 – has offered to buy ecommerce giant eBay for $55.5 billion, a tie-up that the video game retailer's boss believes could produce a "legit competitor" to Amazon.

This is a hypey little self-serving marketing video, but it also shows you the future of ecommerce. You'll see this very, very soon with your favorite indie brands, but I'm pretty certain that this model will be core to the online shopping experience on sites like Amazon in just ~two years.

(NASDAQ: $FLWS) reported 3QFY26 results ahead of WTR estimates as ongoing cost reduction initiatives and improved operating discipline continued to support profitability trends despite softer top-line demand. 🔹 Management achieved its full $50MM annualized cost savings target ahead of schedule, helping adjusted EBITDA outperform expectations 🔹 Floral & Gifts remained pressured by marketing pullbacks and evolving search engine dynamics, while Gourmet Foods & Gift Baskets outperformed supported by wholesale strength and favorable Easter timing 🔹 Management continues to position FY26 as a foundational transition year focused on stabilizing operations, improving marketing efficiency, and returning the business to profitable growth Read Douglas M. Lane, CFA's full report for additional detail on FLWS’ transformation strategy, profitability outlook, cost savings execution, and FY27 considerations. $FLWS #Ecommerce# #Retail# #Consumer# #DigitalMarketing# #NASDAQ# #SmallCaps# #Investing# #ConsumerTrends# #Flowers# #WaterTowerResearch#

Coding agents are accelerating different types of software work to different degrees. When we architect teams, understanding these distinctions helps us to have realistic expectations. Listing functions from most accelerated to least, my order is: frontend development, backend, infrastructure, and research. Frontend development — say, building a web page to serve descriptions of products for an ecommerce site — is dramatically sped up because coding agents are fluent in popular frontend languages like TypeScript and JavaScript and frameworks like React and Angular. Additionally, by examining what they have built by operating a web browser, coding agents are now very good at closing the loop and iterating on their own implementations. Granted, LLMs today are still weak at visual design, but given a design (or if a polished design isn’t important), the implementation is fast! Backend development — say, building APIs to respond to queries requesting product data — is harder. It takes more work by human developers to steer modern models to think through corner cases that might lead to subtle bugs or security flaws. Further, a backend bug can lead to non-intuitive downstream effects like a corrupted database that occasionally returns incorrect results, which can be harder to debug than a typical frontend bug. Finally, although database migrations can be easier with coding agents, they’re still hard and need to be handled carefully to prevent data loss. While backend development is much faster with coding agents, they accelerate it less, and skilled developers still design and implement far better backends than inexperienced ones who use coding agents. Infrastructure. Agents are even less effective in tasks like scaling an ecommerce site to 10K active uses while maintaining 99.99% reliability. LLMs' knowledge is still relatively limited with respect to infrastructure and the complex tradeoffs good engineers must make, so I rarely trust them for critical infra decisions. Building good infrastructure often requires a period of testing and experimentation, and coding agents can help with that, but ultimately that’s a significant bottleneck where fast AI coding does not help much. Lastly, finding infrastructure bugs — say, a subtle network misconfiguration — can be incredibly difficult and requires deep engineering expertise. Thus, I’ve found that coding agents accelerate critical infrastructure even less than backend development. Research. Coding agents accelerate research work even less. Research involves thinking through new ideas, formulating hypotheses, running experiments, interpreting them to potentially modify the hypotheses, and iterating until we reach conclusions. Coding agents can speed up the pace at which we can write research code. (I also use coding agents to help me orchestrate and keep track of experiments, which makes it easier for a single researcher to manage more experiments.) But there is a lot of work in research other than coding, and today’s agents help with research only marginally. Categorizing software work into frontend, backend, infra, and research is an extreme simplification, but having a simple mental model for how much different tasks have sped up has been useful for how I organize software teams. For example, I now ask front-end teams to implement products dramatically faster than a year ago, but my expectations for research teams have not shifted nearly as much. I am fascinated by how to organize software teams to use coding agents to achieve speed, and will keep sharing my findings in future posts. [Original text: ]

$EBAY — eBay is shifting from legacy e-commerce platform to a growth story driven by AI and strategic partnerships, with earnings, alliances, and M&A headlines all developing in parallel Highlights: — Strong Q1 2026 results: revenue of $3.1B, up 19% YoY, with non-GAAP EPS of $1.66 — all beating market expectations — A strategic partnership with Hertz officially launched this month, bringing Hertz-certified used car digital showrooms to the eBay platform, with over 8,000 vehicles in the initial listing — a move into a high-ticket vertical — GameStop made a $125/share bid (around $56B total) for eBay in early May; given GameStop's market cap sits well below eBay's, the proposal drew heavy attention. eBay's board formally rejected it on May 12 Three independent storylines unfolding at once, putting eBay back on the discussion table beyond "legacy e-commerce" Trade $EBAY and 1,000+ US and HK equities with stablecoins on StableStock For informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Assets carry risk. Not directed at restricted jurisdictions.

"I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce." - @bchesky "I think the future is not apps. The future is agents, but I don't think they're going to be text-forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interfaces." "Imagine using iMessage to do everything, when in fact every other app has a unique interface." "With e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You can have a conversation with it, but the point is that it has to be more visual."

Alliance Entertainment $AENT isn't just a distributor: it's a $1.1B revenue engine powering 35,000+ retail storefronts and 200+ e-commerce platforms with vinyl, video games, collectibles, and more. Why This Matters: • With a capital-light model, expanding exclusive IP, and strategic retail partnerships (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy), $AENT is positioned to scale profitability in a $200B+ collectibles and entertainment market. Watch our brief overview: $AENT $FNKO $SONY $DIS $PARA $WBD $NTDOY