Beyond the Basket - 10/04/26

Friday 10th April | #72 | Join Free

Good morning, yes, it’s Friday already. Meta’s click attribution update from March is finally rolling out to ad accounts, and CPAs are suddenly soaring. Meanwhile, Etsy has officially updated its seller protection rules, and new data suggests most ecommerce sites are failing basic accessibility checks, though the fixes might be simpler than you think. Let’s get into it. - Mike

In the Basket today:

+Plus five longer reads to take you into the weekend on marketplace buy box battles, customer feedback loops, live selling, and why AI creative still needs human thinking.

TLDR: Meta's March attribution update, which stripped likes, shares, saves, and comments out of click-through conversion counting, is now slowly rolling out across accounts, and advertisers are logging in to find higher CPA figures in Ads Manager.

Why it Matters: Historically, Meta attributed conversions to all types of clicks, shares, saves, likes, and link clicks, while third-party platforms like Google Analytics only counted link clicks. That gap made Meta's in-platform numbers look stronger than reality. Non-link interactions now fall under a renamed category called engage-through attribution, which carries a one-day conversion window, your conversions haven't disappeared, they've moved buckets.

Your Move: Noticed a Meta ads CPA increase? Before cutting any budget, check whether your actual revenue or orders have moved, if they haven't, the CPA spike is a reporting change, not a performance problem, and the right call is to hold spend and let the new baseline settle.

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TLDR: Alongside the late delivery window change we covered last issue, Etsy officially announced a broader Purchase Protection overhaul coming 7th May, including coverage on every order up to $250 (about £200), a buyer case window cut from 100 days to 30, and nearly double the human reviewer capacity for disputed cases.

Why it Matters: The wider package is more significant than last issue's headline change, $250 coverage on every order removes a genuine grey area for higher-value sellers, and cutting the dispute window from 100 days to 30 is a meaningful win. The tradeoff is tighter eligibility: Etsy is now explicitly linking protection to on-time shipping and a 48-hour response standard.

Your Move: Check your customer service response time in Etsy Shop Manager, the new rules explicitly tie eligibility to a 48-hour reply window, so if you're not consistently hitting that, consider setting up an auto-reply now ahead of the 7th May update.

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TLDR: From 1st May, Amazon will charge FBA removal and disposal fees per unit as each item is processed, rather than as a single bill when the order completes.

Why it Matters: While the fee rates themselves aren't changing, the way they hit your account is, a removal order of 500 units could now generate hundreds of individual charge lines, making reconciliation significantly more complex. This has already landed in the US and is now rolling out across European marketplaces, so UK FBA sellers need to get their bookkeeping processes ready.

Your Move: If you have stock earmarked for removal or disposal, submit those orders before the end of April to lock in a single consolidated bill, then review your accounting process for how you'll handle unit-level charges from May onwards.

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TLDR: Second-hand marketplace Vinted reported 38% revenue growth in 2025 to £956m, with GMV rising 47% to £9.4bn, as demand for resale fashion continues to accelerate.

Why it Matters: The scale of Vinted’s growth shows resale moving firmly into the mainstream. While fashion remains the core driver, particularly womenswear and childrenswear, the platform is expanding into categories like electronics, homeware and sports equipment, signalling that second-hand behaviour is spreading across retail. At the same time, Vinted is investing heavily in logistics and payments infrastructure, with 500,000+ pickup and drop-off points across Europe and its own delivery and wallet products. That level of infrastructure investment suggests Vinted sees the circular economy not as a niche trend, but as a permanent part of how products move through the market.

Your Move: Search your brand on resale platforms like Vinted, eBay or Depop this week. The products that resell fastest, and at the highest prices, are often your strongest signals of real customer demand.

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TLDR: Frasers Group has launched Ask Frasers, a conversational AI shopping assistant on its premium FRASERS platform, with early data showing a 25% rise in sales conversions compared to traditional search.

Why it Matters: For UK retailers still relying on keyword-based search, this is a concrete data point that agentic, conversational discovery can meaningfully move the commercial needle, not just improve UX scores. It's also a signal that the bigger retail groups are moving fast on AI-powered storefront tech, raising the bar on what shoppers will expect from online discovery.

Your Move: If you run a product-heavy store, test your current search experience from a customer's perspective this week, if it can't handle natural language queries like "something smart but comfortable for a wedding in summer," you're already behind where the category leaders are heading.

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TLDR: A new report from WebAIM and Nexer Digital looked at the home pages of the top one million websites and found an average of 56.1 accessibility errors per page, up from 51 last year, with retail, travel and hospitality among the worst-performing sectors, and the same six basic failures topping the list for the seventh year running.

Why it Matters: For UK ecommerce brands this is both a conversion problem and a legal exposure, the six most common failures (low contrast text, missing image alt text, unlabelled form inputs, empty links, empty buttons, missing document language) directly affect whether disabled customers can browse, search and buy on your site. With the European Accessibility Act now in force for businesses serving EU markets, and the Equality Act 2010 covering UK service providers, accessibility expectations are tightening.

Your Move: Run your homepage and key product pages through a free accessibility checker now and review the most common failures. Fixing basics like low-contrast text and missing image alt text alone will move most ecommerce sites ahead of the pack.

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TLDR: New research by the Retail Technology Show finds that over half of UK shoppers distrust AI-generated social content, with demand for authentic, human-led content growing fast, particularly among Gen Z.

Why it Matters: Research from the Retail Technology Show, polling over 1,000 UK shoppers, found that 53% are mistrustful of AI-generated social content, rising to 58% among Gen Z, the same demographic most likely to be buying from you on TikTok Shop. A separate Klaviyo study of nearly 8,000 global shoppers found similar patterns, with half of those polled having noticed low-quality AI content from brands on social media in the last six months.

Your Move: Audit your last month of social posts, if the captions could have been written by anyone, or anything, that's your cue to lean into what AI can't replicate: human-led content. Consider building UGC into your fulfilment flow with a simple insert card asking customers to share and tag in exchange for a discount, and let real authentic buyers do the talking for you.

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Curated deep dives, longer reads and analysis shaping the future of ecommerce and digital marketing.

Brands Are Losing the Buy Box, And Up to 80% of Marketplace Sales With It
CMOtech (5 min read) Read Here >
A look at how brands are quietly losing control of the marketplace Buy Box to grey-market sellers and distributors, and why the issue is often a distribution problem, not just pricing. 

Turning Customer Feedback Into Actionable Growth
Salesforce Blog (6 min read) Read Here >
Salesforce explains how businesses can turn scattered reviews, support tickets, and social comments into clear product and customer-experience improvements using structured feedback loops and AI analysis.

The Secrets to eBay Live Selling Success
ChannelX (5 min read) Read Here >
A practical breakdown of what actually works in live commerce on eBay, from product selection and pacing to building trust with viewers during real-time auctions.

Why AI-Driven Creative Is Failing, And How to Fix It
MarTech (6 min read) Read Here >
Explores why many brands are seeing underwhelming results from AI-generated ads and content, and why the winning approach still combines human insight with AI-assisted production.

Can AI responses be influenced? The SEO industry is trying
The Verge (4 min read) Read Here>
As AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini reshape search, the SEO industry is scrambling to develop new tactics to influence AI-generated answers, creating a new battleground for visibility and trust online.