Tuesday 24th March | #67 | Join Free
Amazon is quietly reshuffling the summer calendar, Danone just paid €1bn for a protein shake brand built on a mailing list, and it turns out shoppers still don't want to buy things inside a chatbot. Lots to get through. 👇 - Mike
In the basket today:
📅 Prime Day is moving to June
📚 The Works kills its ecommerce site
🍼 Danone acquires Huel for ~€1bn
🤖 Alexa+ is live in the UK - and Amazon claims it's 3x purchasing rates
🛒 AI checkout: discovery is moving, conversion isn't
+plus Your best customers are already in your database, now is the time to tap into their potential.
ECOMMERCE | MARKETPLACE
📅 Prime Day is moving to June (via Bloomberg)
TL;DR: Amazon is reportedly shifting Prime Day from July to late June, per Bloomberg. Amazon hasn't confirmed it publicly, but it’s worth preparing for an earlier event.
Why it Matters: Competing retailers have historically run their own promotions around Prime Day to catch the surge in shopping intent. Suppliers, agencies, and logistics partners all feel the pull at the same time. If Prime Day moves to June, that pressure lands earlier in the year, at a point when most businesses are still in spring planning mode, not summer peak.
Your Move: If you sell on Amazon sketch out your Prime Day timeline now based on a late June date. If you sell elsewhere, plan your marketing and promotions around an earlier surge in consumer spending. If Amazon walks it back, you've lost nothing. If they don't, you're ahead of most sellers.
POLL
🗳️ The Pulse
Are you planning to run promotions around Prime Day this year?
ECOMMERCE | MARKET MOVE
📚 The Works kills its ecommerce site (via Retail Gazette)
TL;DR: The Works shut its online shop with immediate effect, turning its website into a browse-only brand window directed at its 500+ stores.
Why it Matters: The brand highlighted that two consecutive third-party fulfilment failures made the channel loss-making and eventually indefensible, even after 14 years online. The channel never broke 10% of group revenue. On the back of the closure The Works upgraded their FY27 earnings guidance from £12.7m to £15m. Shares rose 19% on the news.
Your Move: Third parties can have an outsized impact on your P&L. Audit your key supplier and fulfilment relationships for profit leakage, and look at whether it makes more sense to stem the outflow or bring those services in-house.
DTC | MARKET MOVE
🍼 Danone acquires Huel for ~€1bn (via CityAM)
TL;DR: Danone has agreed to buy the Steven Bartlett-backed meal replacement brand in one of the biggest DTC-to-FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) deals in recent UK history.
Why it Matters: Huel was built almost entirely on direct channels, subscription, community, owned media. Danone paid ~€1bn for what that looks like at scale. It's a clear signal that health brands with loyal, data-rich customer bases have an acquisition path into mainstream FMCG.
Your Move: If you're building a subscription or health-adjacent brand, this is the exit story worth knowing. Think about what you own that a big consumer goods company can't buy off the shelf — your customer data, your community, your subscription base. Those are the assets that command a premium.
AI COMMERCE
🤖 Alexa+ is live in the UK - and Amazon claims it's 3x purchasing rates (via Modern Retail)
TL;DR: Amazon's AI-upgraded voice assistant went live in the UK on 19 March, the first European market to get access, and Amazon claims it's driving purchase rates three times higher than its predecessor.
Why it Matters: Amazon claims customers purchase at three times the rate on Alexa+ versus its predecessor. More importantly, it can now handle multi-step shopping, find, add, buy, without the customer touching a screen. That's a different purchase journey, landing on millions of Echo devices right now.
Your Move: You can't optimise for Alexa+ the way you can for search. But clean, accurate, well-structured Amazon listings are the baseline. Consider how the AI will surface your listings in a voice led channel such as a smart speaker. Messy product data means you could be invisible in this channel before it even gets started.
ECOMMERCE
🛒 AI checkout: discovery is moving, conversion isn't (via Martech)
TL;DR: Walmart tested checkout inside ChatGPT and conversions ran at roughly one-third of what their own site achieves. OpenAI is already pulling back from in-chat checkout as a result.
Why it Matters: This is one of the first real-world data points we have on agentic commerce, and it's a reality check. The assumption has been that reducing friction, letting customers buy inside whatever interface they're already in, would lift conversion. Walmart's data suggests the opposite. Shoppers still want context, trust, and familiarity at the point of purchase. Those things live on your site, not inside a chatbot. That's as true for a UK seller on Shopify as it is for Walmart.
Your Move: AI interfaces are increasingly where shoppers discover products, worth investing in. But don't hand over your checkout. Keep the purchase moment on owned ground and make sure the experience customers land on is frictionless. A slow, clunky checkout will cost you regardless of where the customer came from.
MARKETING INSIGHT
📊Your best customers are already in your database
New research from Square finds that regular customers generate up to five times more annual revenue than one-off buyers. Most ecommerce brands would never guess that from looking at where their marketing budget goes.
Most spend the majority of their time and money chasing new customers, paid social, Google, influencers, all pointed at people who've never heard of them. Meanwhile, the customers who already bought, liked what they got, and would probably buy again are sitting in the email list getting the same generic newsletter as everyone else.
"Retention is the new acquisition" has become a boardroom cliché. But there's a real gap between knowing it matters and building the programmes that deliver it. The data makes the case:
Regular customers generate up to 5x more annual revenue than one-off buyers
Loyal regulars return an average of 11 times per year
69% of consumers would stick with a brand through a price rise, if the value was clear
Loyalty subscriptions on Square grew 46% in 2025
A post-purchase email sequence. A loyalty incentive for second purchases. A win-back campaign for lapsed customers. None of this needs a big budget. It just needs your existing customers to be treated like the asset they are.
This week: Pull a list of customers who bought 6-12 months ago and haven't returned, then work out what percentage of last year's revenue came from repeat buyers. If that number is under 30%, retention deserves more of your attention than it's currently getting. That lapsed list is also your fastest win, a single straightforward email is all it takes to find out how many of them are still reachable.
PLAN AHEAD
📆 On The Radar
25 March - Retail Connect An afternoon event for retail and hospitality professionals at Somerset House, London. Covers AI adoption, infrastructure, and customer experience. Keynote from Holly Tucker, plus case studies from CeX and Kurt Geiger. Closes with networking. Details here
2 April - eBay Business Seller Meetup, Portsmouth Community-focused meet up connecting eBay business sellers with eBay staff and ecommerce experts. Practical format, good for marketplace sellers. Details here
22–23 April - Retail Technology Show, ExCeL London The UK's largest retail tech event. 16,000+ attendees. Free for retailers. Details Here
28–29 April - eComm Live, Belfast Community-focused ecommerce conference. Around 400 attendees from across the UK and Ireland. Practical content and good networking reputation. Details Here
That's today’s issue. If you found it useful, I’d love if you could forward it to someone else running an online store, it costs nothing and means a lot.
How was today's issue?
See you on Friday 👋 - Mike
Was this forwarded to you? Join other eCommerce founders and operators reading Beyond the Basket twice weekly.
Sign up here for free