This week’s comprehensive rundown of new services and platform updates for merchants spans a wide array of technological advancements, including AI-powered marketing, agentic commerce, return platforms, multichannel distribution, dropshipping, cross-border commerce, international payments, and sales tax solutions. As the digital commerce landscape continues to evolve rapidly, technology providers are rolling out innovative tools designed to help retailers streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and scale globally.
New Tools for Merchants
Algolia, a prominent site-search and product discovery platform, has officially announced native support for Shopify B2B. This new integration allows retailers, brands, wholesalers, and distributors operating on Shopify and selling directly to other businesses to deliver advanced search and product discovery capabilities that automatically adapt to each individual customer. When buyers sign into their accounts, the Algolia-powered search interface dynamically filters results to display only the products their specific company is authorized to purchase, complete with negotiated pricing tiers and the exact quantity rules governing each unique order.
In the realm of global payments, Fiserv has introduced Commerce Hub to orchestrate and simplify cross-border commerce. As a major provider of payments and financial services, Fiserv designed Commerce Hub to give merchants a single, unified integration for onboarding, APIs, reporting, and operational controls. Retailers can leverage Fiserv merchant services—including local payment methods, flexible settlement options, and comprehensive support for emerging transaction types—across every international market. Additionally, the platform grants access to integrated payment optimization, advanced fraud protection, and specialized cross-border capabilities.
Google is also making waves in the domestic market with the official U.S. launch of Universal Cart, an intelligent shopping cart integrated directly across Google Search and the Gemini app. Built on Google’s expansive Shopping Graph, which indexes roughly 60 billion product listings, Universal Cart sends proactive notifications regarding price drops and item availability. The system is designed to understand various credit card perks, actively assisting shoppers in choosing the most advantageous payment method. Consumers can complete their purchases seamlessly using Google Pay or choose to transfer items directly into a merchant’s native cart.
The rise of agentic artificial intelligence continues to reshape point-of-sale systems, with Lightspeed Commerce announcing new agentic capabilities for retail. Moving far beyond traditional analytical tools that merely answer questions or surface insights, Lightspeed AI actively helps retailers take direct action. The system can reason comprehensively across a retailer’s catalog, inventory data, sales figures, and purchasing history, subsequently recommending strategic next steps and preparing actionable workflows for the retailer to review and approve within a single conversational interface. Lightspeed is introducing these advanced capabilities to select customers through an exclusive, opt-in beta program.
Financial management for early-stage companies is also receiving a major boost, as Oracle NetSuite introduces QuickStart, a free, AI-first financial platform tailored for startups. According to Oracle NetSuite, QuickStart enables founders to establish a robust financial foundation in a matter of minutes. The platform relies on embedded artificial intelligence and autonomous AI agents to automate core accounting functions, banking reconciliations, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and complex subscription management workflows.
Performance marketing on major marketplaces is evolving as well. Nectar, an ecommerce performance agency, has launched Customer Atlas, a sophisticated capability built on top of the Amazon Marketing Cloud. This tool shifts the foundational paradigm of Amazon search advertising from traditional keyword targeting to a true shopper-centric approach. Customer Atlas indexes a brand’s historical purchase data against all 6,728 audience segments provided by Amazon, automatically generating both precise targeting lists and suppression lists, and applying them directly where the majority of Amazon advertising budgets are allocated.
Managing reverse logistics remains a critical pain point for modern retailers, prompting Appriss Retail to release Engage Insights for cross-channel returns. As a returns and shrinkage-prevention platform, Appriss Retail developed Engage Insights to replace fragmented reporting systems with a single, unified dashboard displaying all returns and claims data across multiple sales channels, customer profiles, product SKUs, and individual store associates. By consolidating this information, retail teams can investigate potential fraud and abuse more effectively while aligning on strategic initiatives to reduce overall inventory loss. Participating merchants can analyze returns trends ranging from a high-level corporate perspective down to the omnichannel behavior of a single consumer.
U.S. suppliers and manufacturers are also gaining new avenues for growth through TopDawg, which has launched an enhanced multichannel distribution hub. Designed as a wholesale dropshipping and ecommerce technology platform, TopDawg enables suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers, and brands to expand their market reach across diverse online retail channels through one centralized system. The newly introduced TopDawg Supplier Portal allows suppliers to manage wholesale product catalogs, synchronize real-time inventory levels, process incoming orders smoothly, and tap into new distribution opportunities. Registration and participation in the retailer distribution network are provided to suppliers free of charge.
In the restaurant and hospitality sector, Square has unveiled Square Kiosk, a self-service platform enhanced with an agentic voice layer. Combining AI-powered software, conversational voice capabilities, and a large touch display housed in premium hardware, Square Kiosk is built on an agentic voice layer that comprehends a seller’s specific menu and listens and responds to customers in real time. Square is simultaneously rolling out additional operational capabilities designed to help fast-food franchises manage their daily operations seamlessly across multiple physical locations.
European merchants are seeing new expansion opportunities through EasyShop, a multi-category marketplace that has officially launched across 21 European countries. Unlike traditional retail-led marketplaces, EasyShop does not hold inventory, sell private-label products, or compete with the third-party businesses utilizing its platform. Every listed product belongs to an independent retailer, ensuring that every customer order directly generates a sale for that merchant. Retailers can reach shoppers across all 21 markets through a single account, with value-added tax calculated automatically. The marketplace is powered and operated by OnCommerce.
AI-driven marketing platforms are attracting significant investment and adoption. Miracly, a nascent AI-focused marketing platform, has successfully raised $2.42 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Beenext Ventures and Lotus. Having originated as an analytics and content generation tool to help businesses track and improve how external AI platforms describe their brands, Miracly is expanding into a comprehensive platform covering performance marketing, public relations, and advanced analytics, all driven by its proprietary marketing agent, Mira.
Similarly, ShopBack has introduced SparkHub, an AI-powered creator tool designed to help brands partner with content creators and accurately track purchases generated from their content, focusing heavily on Gen Z and college-aged demographics. SparkHub provides creators with end-to-end campaign management tools, while participating brands can maintain discoverable profiles, leverage AI-assisted creator discovery, distribute campaign briefs, approve creative content, and track resulting purchases through specialized ShopBack links.
Marklo, an agentic marketing platform built specifically for Shopify brands, has announced $5 million in seed funding led by Forerunner, alongside the opening of its public beta. Marklo’s platform analyzes business data across operations to identify emerging revenue opportunities, determine optimal upcoming marketing campaigns, and construct complete campaign assets for marketers to review and approve. On a weekly basis, Marklo reviews ongoing sales figures, inventory levels, and the marketing calendar before delivering proposed campaigns and performance reports directly through Slack or email.
In international markets, Alibaba’s workplace AI agent platform, QwenWork, has introduced QwenWork E-Commerce through an invite-only beta in China. Merchants can access the tool instantly by switching to the E-Commerce Operations mode within QwenWork. The platform applies agentic artificial intelligence across the entire merchant workflow, encompassing strategic planning, marketing execution, content creation, and cross-platform advertising management, thereby helping merchants operate stores across multiple platforms with greater efficiency.
Content accessibility and governance are also receiving technological upgrades. Siteimprove has advanced its agentic content intelligence platform by introducing the CMS Remediation Agent and PDF Policies, alongside expansions to the PDF Remediation Agent and Conversational Analytics Agent. These updates empower digital teams to resolve accessibility compliance issues directly within content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, hold PDF documents to the same rigorous compliance standards as standard web pages, automatically generate descriptive alt text for images within PDFs, and configure web analytics parameters using plain language.
In enterprise technology funding, Loops has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round backed by investors including A16z Speedrun, NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures, and Monday Capital. Loops is building an enterprise AI operating system focused on agentic commerce and automation systems for ecommerce brands. The platform is designed to understand a shopper’s underlying intent, surface the most relevant products, and guide business decisions without requiring retailers to stitch together multiple disparate AI products. The newly secured capital will be allocated toward product development, expanding customer deployment capacity, and driving international expansion.
Cross-border payment infrastructure is advancing through a strategic collaboration between Mastercard and BVNK, which have launched the Mastercard Global Money Platform. This infrastructure service integrates traditional fiat currencies and stablecoins through a single API. By combining Mastercard’s extensive global payments network with BVNK’s specialized stablecoin technology, the platform simplifies how businesses access and manage various forms of money across international financial systems. The service supports multi-currency accounts, real-time foreign exchange conversions, stablecoin-linked payment cards, and local bank transfers facilitated by Mastercard Move.
Finally, FinStackk has launched SalesTaxx, an end-to-end U.S. sales tax compliance platform featuring free nexus monitoring. SalesTaxx provides businesses with clear visibility into which U.S. states they owe tax to, the exact financial liabilities involved, and upcoming filing deadlines. Automated alerts warn merchants when they approach state tax thresholds, and every calculated figure ties back directly to the underlying financial books line by line to prevent surprises during filing periods. SalesTaxx integrates seamlessly with major accounting and commerce platforms, including QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, Odoo, Stripe, Shopify, and Amazon, while also supporting standard Excel and CSV data uploads.
