By Francis Baloyi. The Anthropic commerce agents blueprint launched on 2 September: prebuilt code for a shopping agent that searches a catalogue, compares products and builds a cart, and a merchant agent for the back office. It ships with demo stores for retail, travel, telecom and ticketing, plus a Claude Code plugin. Most of what’s … Read more
Most South African eCommerce operators can tell you which buy now, pay later providers sit on their checkout. Very few can tell you what each one costs them per transaction, or whether the provider they chose fits what they actually sell. BNPL merchant fees in South Africa are seldom published, rarely compared, and almost never … Read more
Your email marketing platform has an 18 to 22% open rate on a good day. Your WhatsApp messages have a 98% open rate. You are spending thousands of rands a month on email. You are using WhatsApp to answer queries from a personal phone. That gap is the opportunity, and it’s exactly why WhatsApp eCommerce … Read more
Customers have changed how they search. The shift is significant and it is already happening. Google AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly active users globally, and the data on how people are using it should change how you think about both your visibility on Google and the search experience on your own website. This … Read more
Now that the Google Marketing Live 2026 buzz has calmed down a bit, let’s quickly go through what was announced and how you should feel about it (and definitely also do something about it). Here’s the interesting list first, the spicy bits: Quite a long list of announcements and updates. With this, Google signalled going … Read more
On May 15, 2026, Google published its first official guide to optimising for AI search. It is the first time the company has consolidated its guidance on how content surfaces in AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single, navigable document. It was announced by John Mueller from the Google Search Relations team, which signals … Read more
There is no shortage of AI tools competing for your attention right now. Personalisation platforms. Catalog automation software. AI-powered search engines. Demand forecasting models. Conversational shopping agents. The vendor landscape has exploded, and every product claims to be the one that will transform your eCommerce operation. Most of them won’t. Not because the technology doesn’t … Read more
If your organic traffic dropped in late March or early April and you haven’t found a clean explanation, stop looking at your ad account. The answer is in your content. Google’s March 2026 core update, the first broad core update of 2026, began rolling out on March 27 and completed on April 8. Over 55% … Read more
