🚨 An AI Agent Is Selling Your Products Without Your Checkout. It Just Crossed $2B in GMV.

This week's signal: The Section 301 hearings wrapped yesterday after three days of testimony. The tariff swap is 16 days away. Amazon overhauled its FBA storage fees on July 1. Shopify is in acquisition talks with wholesale marketplace Faire. And Perplexity's AI shopping agent just crossed 2 million monthly shoppers, selling products without the brand's checkout. Here's your briefing.

1. Section 301 Hearings Are Done. Rebuttal Comments Due ~July 14. The Tariff Swap Is 16 Days Away.

USTR's Section 301 Committee convened three days of public hearings at the U.S. International Trade Commission (July 7-9). Nearly 60 witnesses testified. Over 500 written comments were submitted before the July 6 deadline. Post-hearing rebuttal comments are due five days after the last hearing day, which puts the deadline around July 14. After that, USTR can finalize the tariff rates and implementation date. The clock is running.

What this means for importers: Section 122's 10% surcharge expires July 24. Congress hasn't acted to extend it. White & Case's analysis confirms the hearing timeline "closely tracks the expiration date" and says the proposed rates are designed to "provide continuity." Gibson Dunn called it "an early test of whether the Trump Administration can use traditional trade authorities to rebuild broad tariff coverage." The 10% rate covers 14 entities (Canada, EU, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, plus 8 others). The 12.5% covers 46 economies including China, Japan, India, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, and Australia. Annex A exclusions cover ag, aviation, minerals, pharma, and industrial inputs. A textile mechanism would reduce rates on some apparel. The Board of Trade proposal for US-China bilateral trade has a separate comment deadline of July 10. If you import from any of the 60 named economies and goods arrive after July 24, model your landed costs against a 10-12.5% adder. The swap is not theoretical anymore.

2. Amazon Just Overhauled FBA Storage Fees. The Math Changed for Every Seller.

Amazon's revised FBA storage fee schedule went into effect July 1 and it's forcing sellers to rerun their entire inventory economics for H2. Standard-size units now cost $0.87 per cubic foot from January through September and $2.40 per cubic foot from October through December. The aged-inventory surcharge now triggers at 180 days rather than 271. Long-term surcharges climb toward $6.90 per cubic foot after 365 days. The low-inventory-level fee still applies under 28 days of cover.

What this means in practice: The optimal inventory band has narrowed on both ends. Carry too much and you hit the aged surcharge 91 days earlier than before. Carry too little and the low-inventory fee kicks in. The Q4 rate jump from $0.87 to $2.40 per cubic foot (a 176% increase) means your October-December storage costs nearly triple. If you're planning holiday inventory loads, factor the new fee schedule into your replenishment cadence now. The 3.5% FBA fuel surcharge from April is still in effect on top of all of this. Sellers who ran lean through Prime Day and planned to restock for Q4 need to time their shipments carefully: arrive too early and you're paying higher storage, arrive too late and you miss the holiday window.

3. Shopify Is in Acquisition Talks With Faire. Wholesale Could Become a First-Class Channel.

Reports surfaced last week that Shopify is in substantive conversations with Faire, the wholesale marketplace that connects over 700,000 retailers with hundreds of thousands of brand suppliers. Shopify invested in Faire back in 2023, but has never matched Faire's retail-buyer network. A deal would make wholesale a first-class channel alongside DTC and retail for every Shopify merchant. Amazon reportedly had earlier, less-serious conversations, with cultural fit cited as the barrier.

Why this matters for DTC brands on Shopify: If this deal closes, Shopify merchants would get built-in access to a wholesale distribution network that currently requires separate tools, separate catalogs, and separate logistics. Faire's buyer network is curated and high-intent. For brands in the $5M-$50M range that are looking to expand beyond DTC without taking on full retail distribution, this could collapse several steps in the wholesale process into one platform. The timing lines up with Shopify's Summer '26 Editions, which brought B2B selling to all plans (not just Plus) and launched composable checkout. If Shopify acquires Faire, it would control a full stack from DTC through wholesale through retail. No deal is confirmed yet. We'll cover it when it is.

4. Perplexity's AI Shopping Agent Hit 2M Monthly Shoppers. It Bypasses Your Checkout Entirely.

This is the agentic commerce story getting uncomfortably real. Perplexity's Buy Now AI shopping agent crossed 2 million monthly active shoppers and is running at a $2 billion annualized GMV rate. Here's what makes this different from Google's Universal Cart or Amazon's Rufus: the transaction completely bypasses the brand's owned checkout. No post-purchase email. No loyalty enrollment. No pixel fire. No first-party data. Perplexity takes 8-12% of GMV on top of Stripe fees.

The DTC implications are serious: Amazon restricted Perplexity's pricing and inventory access in April and cut Amazon-attributed GMV roughly 30% within 60 days. That forced Perplexity to accelerate its direct-merchant catalog build-out, which means more brands are now discoverable through Perplexity without Amazon as the intermediary. If someone buys your product through a Perplexity AI agent, you get the revenue minus Perplexity's cut, but you lose the customer relationship entirely. No email capture. No retargeting pixel. No lifetime value. This is the trade-off agentic commerce is creating. Google's UCP at least keeps you as merchant of record. Perplexity doesn't. Pay attention to which agents are selling your products and on what terms.

5. Prime Day's Hidden Story: AOV Dropped $10, Amazon Stock Lost 12% in June, and the Margin Math Changed

The $26.4 billion headline was strong. But the unit economics underneath it tell a different story. Numerator's live tracker pegged average order value at $46.89, down from $57.12 at the same point in 2025. That's roughly a $10 per-order drop. Average spend per item fell to $23.23 from $24.59. Two-thirds of items purchased were under $20. More baskets, smaller baskets. For FBA sellers, a $10 drop in AOV against variable order costs that don't scale linearly is the difference between healthy contribution margin and break-even.

The bigger picture: PYMNTS Intelligence data shows Amazon now holds 9.3% of total US consumer retail spending, up from 8.6% a year ago. Walmart holds 7.8%, flat. Amazon stock dropped 12% in June on investor concerns about $200 billion in planned capital expenditure this year. The market is asking whether Amazon can maintain margins while spending that aggressively on AI and logistics infrastructure. For DTC operators who sell on Amazon, pull your Prime Day unit economics now. If your average order dropped $10 and your FBA fees, fuel surcharges, and storage costs went up, your effective contribution margin per order may have shrunk more than the topline growth suggests. The $26.4B number is real. Whether it was profitable for you specifically is a different question.

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