26 Predictions for Commerce (Drop the e) in 2026

A manifesto on margin, machines, and the end of pretending.

1: Stablecoins (Yes, Crypto/NFTaylor is Still in There)

The most exciting "crypto" innovation for DTC brands is actually incredibly boring.

And that’s why I love it.

If you ignore the hype and look at the P&L, stablecoins are just Contribution Margin technology.

Here is the math for a US brand selling internationally …

The Old Way (Credit Cards + FX):

• Interchange Fee: ~2.9%
• Cross-Border Fee: ~1.0%
• FX Conversion Loss: ~2.0%
• Total "Tax" on Revenue: ~6%

The New Way (USDC on Base/Solana):

• Network Fee: <$0.01
• Merchant Processing: ~1% (via Stripe/Shopify)
• Total "Tax" on Revenue: ~1%

That is a 500bps swing in Net Income.

For a brand doing $10M a year in international sales, that is $500k straight to the bottom line.

Stripe acquired Bridge. Shopify integrated fast settlements.

The infrastructure is finally closed.

2. Social Commerce Has Its Killer App

TikTok Shop is the breakthrough execution of social that we have been promised for a decade.

The key was the empowerment of the creators, not the focus on the transaction. That is what everyone missed in the attempts in previous periods.

Content + Distribution is the real asset that every brand craves.

TikTok Shop reported that U.S. sales increased by 120% year-over-year in 2025, according to TikTok’s own figures.

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, TikTok Shop crossed $500M in U.S. sales over the four-day period, a significant milestone.

Global GMV for TikTok Shop hit around $19B from July through September 2025, making it similar in scale to eBay in that period.

This giant MLM Ponzi scheme will dominate marketing strategies in 2026.

But …

3. TikTok Uses That Leverage to Become Your Landlord

Now that they have the volume (see #2), they are locking the gates.

Just like Amazon FBA, TikTok is pivoting from "growth" to "control."

As of January 1, the new "shipping label" mandates force sellers to buy logistics through TikTok’s system.

If you fulfill via your own WMS, you get penalized.

You are no longer a "DTC Brand" on TikTok. You are a tenant in ByteDance’s mall. They own the customer, the data, and now, the box that shows up at the door.

This will further impede brands’ abilities to drive profit in the channel as they will depend on the “halo” effect to realize value.

4. Commerce Loses the (e)

(E)lectronic commerce is exemplified by an era of transactions through a website.

In 2026, we will continue the trend of disintermediated online commerce and watch websites become less and less important.

We are already seeing some of the biggest brands (Gruns for example) build the entirety of their digital presence into a series of landing pages.

Others are TikTok native and don't even have a site.

As has been the case for all time:

"Transactions will continue to move closer to the point of discovery."

There is no more obvious surface area for this than …

5. LLM's Grow Exponentially As a Brand Revenue Channel

Notice I didn't say "source".

There has been lots of data about the amount of traffic being driven to websites from LLM's. That may continue, but it's not the key.

The transaction is going to occur in the context of the LLM (whether through chat or a not-yet-released interface).

That is what all the feed integration stuff and protocol development has been about.

This is the new storefront.

And it's why …

6. Amazon Continues Its Domination in 2026

When everything is just a feed, how do you differentiate which product to display or system to transact with?

The answer lies in fulfillment, and ChatGPT knows it.

Amazon is reportedly investing $10 Billion into OpenAI. Why? Because the "Buying Brain" (ChatGPT) needs a physical network to execute the transaction.

In 2025, Amazon expanded "Same-Day Delivery" to 2,300 cities globally (up from ~1,000 in 2024).

60% of Prime orders in major metros now arrive same-day or next-day. We have moved from "2-Day Shipping" to "2-Hour Satisfaction."

The best shopping experience for a user is still a transaction powered by Amazon Logistics.

This gives ChatGPT and every LLM a powerful motivation for preferring these products over alternative feeds with slower delivery and worse pricing.

7. Shopify and Uber Merge

Ok, I am really out on a limb here, and what is more realistic is that they build on the big partnership announcement they made 10 days ago.

Interestingly, right before the Amazon ChatGPT news …

Because without the ability to match the fulfillment power of Amazon, there is a massive disincentive to preferring Shopify feeds to Amazon feeds.

This would also give Shopify a massive new expansion opportunity for POS into the restaurant and grocery sectors.

And grocery really is the secret holy grail of commerce. Grocery is almost 15% of total retail sales (~$1.05 - $1.1 trillion), and online grocery sales in 2025 (~$220B) represent ~10–12% of total ecommerce sales.

8. The Rise of "The Universal Feed" (The Vertical Video DSP)

For the last decade, we have accepted that we must log into Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google to buy media.

We are taking the exact same creative asset (9:16 Video) and manually uploading it to four different "Walled Gardens," hoping to piece together attribution through a variety of different models or third-party tools.

This has to end.

In 2026, a new player will launch the "Universal Feed" buying platform.

You upload your video once. The algorithm places it on the app where the impression is cheapest, and the intent is highest in real-time.

If a user is cheaper on AppLovin, it buys there.

If they convert better on Shorts, it moves the budget there.

It will all be powered by incremental optimization and a common measurement language.

The reason this is possible now is that the asset class has unified.

In 2026, everything is 9:16 Vertical Video. (Reels = Shorts = TikTok = AppLovin).

Since the asset is the same, the buying platform will be too.

9. The Truman Show Brand

Someone will launch a 24/7 livestream brand.

It's the US Office and antics during the day, the overseas manufacturing floor at night.

Big parties, lots of guests, special drops at random times.

Tune in … and bring your wallet.

It's all live shopping all the time for one brand.

10. The Rise of SEANs

Software. Enabled. AgeNcies.

See my previous post:

11. The Most Important of Which Will Be Database by Design

Ecommerce has a massive data fragmentation problem.

It is primarily due to the fact that the underlying data rails of the most important piece of information (products and all their surrounding attributes) are a complete, fragmented mess.

Shopify completely abandoned its merchants on this issue.

The connection between marketing data, finance data, and product data is so messy and broken in our space that there is a huge emerging market for a SEAN to fix it.

Until Shopify decides to buy Fulfill (or GoodDay) and finally gives a crap about the core problem merchants are facing. How inventory, accounting, and product purchasing are not the core development roadmap for Shopify boggles my mind.

Helping brands get data clarity here is a massive opportunity that enables almost all other parts of the business (especially marketing) to work better.

12. Paying for Creative Is Dead, Become the new Media Buying is Dead.

"Paying for creative is dead" is a direct quote from Hudson Leogrande (CEO of Comfrt) and new DTC Hero (step aside Sean Frank) on the Jack Neel podcast.

And while his point is extreme, it is directionally right.

For three years, you could charge 10% of spend to be a media buyer for a Meta account spending $1M. That's $100k a month.

Today, the market rate for that service alone is closer to $5k.

Then that model moved to creative. Brands were paying 10% for spend on creative.

This at least made more sense as it deferred the production risk onto the partners.

But that model is going through the same market cycle that media buying did.

First, it’s outsourced more cheaply …

$4 ugc video just hit 500k views.

metrics are absurd:
> $0.008 CPM
> $0.000008 CPV
> 299,900% ROI

shot by a 19yo student in moldova.
she doesn't know what "brand alignment" means.

she just executed a 1-line whatsapp brief:
"react like your friend is quitting their job to sell… pic.twitter.com/xPZxAP5ANz

— daniel (@danielhangan_) December 15, 2025

Then AI …

We just raised $16M.

Introducing Arcads 2.0, the AI ad maker that outperforms humans.

RT and comment “Editor”, I’ll send you 1,000 AI trained editors for hire 👇 pic.twitter.com/D5dMdUR113

— Romain Torres (@rom1trs) December 17, 2025

Then it's free through affiliate networks on TikTok.

Margin is everyone's opportunity, and the price of a video is going down FAST.

But there will be a major speed bump on this road …

13. BNPL is the Next Ecommerce Lending Bubble

For five years, merchants have treated Affirm/Klarna as a "Growth Hack" worth a 6% transaction fee.

But it wasn't growth. It was a Debt Transfer.

When lending dried up to finance ad accounts, we shifted and started asking our customers to take loans to buy t-shirts.

This BFCM, BNPL spend hit $18.2 Billion (up ~11% YoY). But the quality of that spend is terrifying.

27% of users now report using BNPL for groceries.

When your customer is financing their milk and eggs, you aren't selling "affordable luxury," you are predatory.

Look at Shopify’s Q3 2024 earnings. While everyone cheered the revenue beat, they missed the warning light …

"Provision for Transaction and Loan Losses" more than doubled to $102 Million (up from $42M the prior year).

We already saw a set of lenders like Clearco implode because the "Revenue-Based Financing" model broke.

Now, the consumer version is breaking.

14. The "Anti-Fragile" Supply Chain (Mexico > China)

Tariffs are the new normal; they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Volatility is priced in.

1. "Nearshoring" moves from a buzzword to a survival tactic.

   China was an exercise in margin expansion; if that value proposition is gone, there will be a rise in preference for a more flexible supply chain.

2. "Made in Mexico" becomes the most valuable tag in DTC.

   Not for marketing cachet, but for Cash Conversion Cycle.

   Cutting lead times from 60 days (China) to 14 days (Mexico) allows you to turn inventory 3x faster. Speed is the new margin.

15. Events Become Revenue Channels, Not Marketing Expenses

For the last decade, "brand ctivations" were money pits designed for Instagram impressions.

In 2026, margin pressure will create innovation on this idea.

Hyrox proved you can build a $140M+ business where the event is the product. They didn't sell shorts to fund a race; they sold the race to sell the shorts.

Restoration Hardware (RH) isn't building stores; they are building hospitality revenue streams (restaurants, hotels, jets).

They capture the customer's time and entertainment, not just their furniture budget.

Smart brands will launch ticketed micro-experiences.

Think Cozy Earth sponsoring local book clubs where "BookTok" moms pay $50 for a VIP evening with an author (and leave with sheets).

If you can't get your customer to pay for a ticket to experience your brand, you don't have a community, you have an audience. The best brands of 2026 will consider having a "ticketing" line item on their P&L.

16. Dynamic Pricing Becomes Table Stakes (The Death of MSRP)

We have accepted dynamic pricing in Uber and Airlines for years. In 2026, it hits your t-shirt drawer.

Brands are terrible at Demand Planning. We consistently end up with too much stock of the "bad" color and not enough of the "good" one.

Instead of trying to perfect the forecast, brands will fluidly adjust the price.

Prices will no longer be static numbers in a database. They will float based on Real-Time Inventory Velocity.

• High Demand + Low Stock: Price increases (Capture Margin)
• Low Demand + High Stock: Price decreases (Recover Cash)

Why should a size XXL in a slow-moving "Ugly Green" cost the same as a Medium in "Best-Selling Black"?

It shouldn't.

DTC innovators like Comfrt are already deploying it directly on the PDP.

The "fixed price" is a relic of printed catalogs.

The digital shelf is fluid. If you aren't pricing for velocity, you are letting cash rot on your shelves.

17. Dynamic Pricing Extends Further to Convenience — "Slow Logistics" Becomes a Discount Tier

We spent years racing to "2-Day Shipping."

Temu taught us that customers will wait 10 days if the price is right.

Brands will introduce "No-Rush Shipping" options at checkout in exchange for store credit or a slight discount.

It allows you to batch orders, use cheaper shipping lanes, and improve Contribution Margin on price-sensitive customers.

Speed is a luxury feature; savvy brands will charge for it.

18. AppLovin Hits 10% Wallet Share (Service is the Moat)

For a decade, the "Duopoly" (Meta/Google) ignored small brands because they could. They are too big to care. Their customer service is an endless complaint on X.

In this area, AppLovin is currently eating their lunch with better ears.

The AppLovin team (shoutout Gareth and Cathy) is in our Slack channels every single day. They answer questions, fix bugs, and provide actionable insights on individual accounts.

Because they are willing to engage intimately with the DTC community and embrace "Incrementality" (proving their worth) rather than hiding behind "Attribution" (claiming credit), they are making progress on the trust war.

That growing trust culminates in 2026, AppLovin moves from a "Test" channel to a "Core" channel, commanding 10% of total ad wallet share for scaled brands.

19. AI Unchained

For 50 years, "brand integrity" meant enforcing strict visual rules (fonts, colors, layouts).

New research (Ghose/Todri 2025) proves that when humans impose these "standards" on AI models, performance flatlines. When AI is left alone to generate ads from scratch, performance increases.

If you haven't listened to this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo Podcast, Does GenAI outperform humans with ad creative production?, you need to stop now and go wrestle with it.

The "Brand Police" are costing you money.

The highest-performing brands of 2026 will have "Fluid Identities." They will allow the AI to generate whatever visual composition converts the user, even if it violates the PDF style guide you paid an agency $50k to write.

The algorithm knows what your customer wants to see better than your Creative Director does. This is no different than having a 17,000 affiliate creator group in Discord.

20. The Death of the "Creative Strategist" (The End of Pseudoscience)

In 2025, "Creative Strategist" was the hottest job on LinkedIn. In 2026, it disappears.

We realized that "Creative Strategy" is mostly pseudoscience. It’s an attempt to apply bad math to subjective art.

As AI gets unchained (see #22), the decision of "what to make" won't come from a human analyzing a spreadsheet of "thumbstop ratios." It will come from the available inventory and AI variance.

The "Creative Strategist" becomes a "Creative Supply Chain Manager."

They won't write briefs. They won't give subjective feedback on fonts or colors.

They will manage Massive Creator Networks and AI Data Pipelines. They will track metrics like cost per creative and velocity of production.

The job is no longer "Thinking about the angle."

The job is "Connecting the pipes."

You are either building the machine that generates 500 assets a week, or you are the bottleneck trying to "strategize" one.

21. X Ads Finally Break Through (The "Grok" Dividend)

For years, X Ads have been an afterthought.

Some compelling new hires and product roadmap suggest a massive pivot in Q1 2026.

They are finally plugging Grok (xAI) directly into the ad server. This isn't just "AI Copywriting"; it's "Intent Modeling." Grok understands context (what a user is arguing about in a thread) better than a keyword match ever could.

If you are Android engineer with more than 10 years of experience:

1. We will pay you an extraordinary amount of money

2. You will have more fun here than any role in your life

What are you waiting for? https://t.co/DAT84H7jG0

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) December 20, 2025

With Nikita Bier (Founder of Gas/TBH) leading improvements to product velocity, user growth should follow. These mechanics are bullish for a new ad channel potentially emerging.

22. mySTOREy Becomes a Reality

Before CTC, I tried to build a social marketplace called myStorey.

The idea was to build a social layer on top of all of the product feeds on the internet, so you could curate your own STORE(y) and shop your friends’ as well.

The store was built by connecting your IG and autotagging all of the products in your photos.

We were too early.

But the idea was right.

2026 is the year you get your own Store. AI is constantly populating a curated "for you" shopping experience based on everything it knows about you.

If you want, you will be able to publish the store and let others shop as well.

Because ChatGPT will curate the feed, there will be a universal cart experience that makes checkout magical.

It will all exist within ChatGPT or another Sora-style app.

23. The Shift From Prompting to Proactive (Agency Transfers to the Machine)

“Ask me anything” is a transitional interface.

In 2026, the best systems stop waiting for instructions.

Because the truth is: most operators don’t know what to ask.

Offering a chatbot (Moby, Sidekick, Copilot, etc.) on demand is not enough.

That assumes:

• The human sees the problem
• Knows the right question
• Has the time to intervene

That breaks at scale.

Table stakes in 2026:

• Systems tell you what to do
• Then do it for you
• And only notify you if something goes wrong

What moves into the background:

• New ads launched automatically
• Emails and SMS deployed based on inventory pressure
• PDPs reconfigured dynamically
• Prices adjusted
• Budgets reallocated
• Eventually, POs issued without human approval

Human approval becomes the exception, not the rule.

The operator’s job shifts …

This is not AI assistance. It’s autonomy with auditability.

24. “Knowing” Loses Value. Acting Becomes Everything

Knowledge is now a commodity. Action is not.

We all know everything. The question is what to DO.

In 2026:

• Insight without execution is noise
• Dashboards without delegation are theater
• Prompting without agency is friction

The winning systems:

• Observe continuously
• Decide probabilistically
• Act automatically
• Explain retrospectively

Brands won’t “use” software anymore.

They’ll supervise it.

25. The Prophit Engineer

A single individual who oversees a brand's profit engine.

In partnership with AI, they can forecast, plan, allocate, create, deploy, and optimize a brand's entire advertising program.

They will do it with greater fidelity, speed, and impact than any team possibly could.

They will defy the limitations of human physiology with 24/7 monitoring, instantaneous discovery of opportunities, and statistical rigor in decision-making.

The 20-person Zoom call to review weekly media performance will be a laughable artifact.

26. CTC is Going To Announce The Most Unexpected Partnership of the Year

Coming in April 2026, we are going to announce a partnership you never thought possible.

It will allow us to continue to bring to life our vision of helping small and mid-size brands deliver predictable, profitable growth with enterprise-level tools.

It will be an exclusive way in which we combine some of the most powerful tools in our industry into an exclusive service for our partners.

Stay Tuned.

If you found this vision of the future exciting, interesting, or infuriating, please give me a comment, like, RT or even better, share it in your company Slack channel.

Love you all.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Cheers to a more profitable 2026!

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