PayPal Wants to Be the Engine Behind AI Shopping 💸

Last week, it was a partnership with OpenAI. This week, PayPal’s stepping deeper into agentic commerce 🛒.

Hi there, and welcome to another issue of The Ecom Press 🗞️!

Today, we’re breaking down PayPal’s latest AI suite built for agent-powered shopping. Also, Pinterest Boards gets an AI makeover, and Google’s got something for SMBs 🎯. 

And if affiliate marketing’s your jam, we’ve rounded up some top programs you should seriously have on your radar 💸.

Ready or not, let’s go 🏃!

In a rush? Here's the juice🤭:

💸 PayPal wants to be the engine behind AI shopping.

🤖 Pinterest turns Boards into AI shopping assistants.

⚡Google launches ‘Pomelli’ to help SMBs campaign fast.

🔍 Watchlist: 12 best affiliate marketing programs you need to join in 2025.

⚡️Worthy Mentions

💸 PayPal wants to be the engine behind AI shopping.

PayPal is stepping deeper into the AI-commerce ecosystem with the launch of its new agentic commerce services suite. It's unlocking new ways for merchants to get discovered and paid through AI-powered shopping tools like Perplexity.

Here’s the lowdown ⬇️:

🛒 New AI Commerce Suite: PayPal has rolled out a set of services that help merchants sell directly inside AI shopping platforms. This includes instant payment acceptance and catalog visibility across conversational and automated experiences.

🧠 Agent Ready for Payments: Merchants using PayPal can now be “agent-ready,” meaning they’ll automatically support payments inside AI platforms like Perplexity and PayPal’s own shopping agent, with no technical integration required.

📦 Store Sync for Smarter Product Discovery: Store Sync makes merchant product catalogs searchable and purchasable within AI interfaces, syncing seamlessly with existing fulfillment systems and platforms like Wix, Cymbio, and BigCommerce.

🔗 One Integration, Many Surfaces: With a single PayPal integration, merchants can show up across multiple AI-powered surfaces, with more to come beyond Perplexity.

🧾 Full Merchant Control: Merchants stay the merchant of record, keeping access to customer data, brand visibility, and communication, even as AI agents handle discovery and checkout.

🛍️ Coming Soon

• Store Sync enrollment starts now at PayPal.ai

• Discoverability on Perplexity begins by end of 2025

• Agent Ready goes live in early 2026

Why it matters 🤔

This move gives us a preview of how shopping will look when AI agents run the show. Rather than shoppers typing into search bars, we know they’ll increasingly ask bots to find what they want and check out instantly. 

This means visibility depends on your product data being AI-readable and API-ready. Also, payments need to be flexible, fast, and fraud-proof. It all boils down to the fact that owning the customer relationship matters more than ever.

🤖 Pinterest turns Boards into AI shopping assistants.

Pinterest is turning saved Pins into personalized shopping journeys. The platform is rolling out AI upgrades to Boards, transforming them from passive inspiration hubs to dynamic shopping tools that recommend products, generate outfits, and create curated collections. All of this is powered by your own saved content.

Here are the deets ⬇️: 

🛍️ Boards Become Smarter: New tabs—“Make it yours,” “More ideas,” and “All saves”—are being introduced globally. These features suggest shoppable products and content based on your saved Pins, making Pinterest feel more like a digital shopping assistant.

👗 Styled For You (US & Canada): This experimental feature uses AI to turn saved fashion Pins into mix-and-match outfit collages. Users can explore and shop new looks created from what they already love.

📦 Boards Made For You: Pinterest is testing AI-curated boards that combine machine learning with editorial picks. These boards show up in your home feed and inbox, offering trending styles and weekly outfit inspiration.

📲 Inspiration to Action: The updates are designed to help users not just collect ideas but act on them, whether that means purchasing home décor, building a lookbook, or restocking beauty products.

Why it matters 🤷‍♂️

For ecommerce brands, this is a signal that Pinterest is deepening its role as a commerce engine, not just a discovery platform. Merchants whose products appear in inspirational Pins may now find themselves in AI-generated outfits and boards ready for checkout. Visual content paired with smart data is becoming a powerful product placement channel.

🤑 Sponsored tip of the week

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Easily sync your product catalog, track orders, and engage customers across platforms like POS, Shopify Inbox, and your online store — no need to juggle tools or tabs.

👉 Sign up with Shopify for just $1.

⚡Google launches ‘Pomelli’ to help SMBs campaign fast.

Google has launched Pomelli, an AI-powered marketing experiment from Google Labs and DeepMind, designed specifically to help SMBs generate branded, campaign-ready creative content for social media and digital marketing.

Here’s the scoop 🍨:

🧬 Brand DNA in Seconds: Pomelli scans your website and auto-generates a brand profile, pulling tone, colors, fonts, and imagery to ensure all content matches your identity.

📝 AI-Powered Campaign Ideas: Based on your Business DNA, Pomelli serves up fresh, tailored campaign ideas, or lets you input your own prompts to shape content around your vision.

🎨 Instant Branded Creatives: Pomelli produces editable, ready-to-use assets for social posts, ads, and site visuals, with built-in alignment to your brand’s tone and look.

🌍 Now in Public Beta: Pomelli is now live as a public beta in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (English only), with future expansions likely based on feedback.

See it in action!

Why it matters 🤨

For resource-strapped brands, Pomelli could eliminate the usual bottlenecks of content creation. By learning your brand’s voice and visuals from your site, it helps you scale campaigns with brand-safe assets, with no extra team or agency needed. That’s definitely a win for speed, consistency, and creative control.

🛎️ The Ecom Press Insider

Ecom Fact: New study shows that only 46% of U.S. consumers fully trust AI shopping recommendations. In fact, most shoppers take extra steps after AI suggestions. The study tracked 450+ real AI shopping sessions and surveyed 600 consumers, revealing one major friction point: broken links, outdated specs, and pricing mismatches often kill confidence at the finish line (Source: IAB).

💡 Takeaway: AI can drive discovery, but your website is still the final decision-maker. Keep specs, availability, and pricing up to date, and make sure links from search or shopping assistants land on the right product page. Shoppers may start with AI, but they still finish with you.

🔍 Watchlist: 12 Best Affiliate Marketing Programs You Need To Join in 2025.

Affiliate marketing is still one of the most powerful ways to build passive income, if you know where to look. We’ve tested quite a bunch of affiliate programs over the years, and from experience, these are some of the best affiliate picks. We’ve narrowed it to 6 top programs worth checking out for 2025 👇. 

🎯 1. Amazon Associates: The OG. Low commissions (1–10%) but unbeatable scale. Promote anything on Amazon and get credit for everything your link-clicker buys in 24 hours. High trust, high conversion.

🎨 2. Adobe Creative Cloud: Perfect for content creators. Earn 85% of the first-month payment per sign-up. That’s $30–$50 for each referral across Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, and more.

🛍️ 3. TikTok Shop Affiliate: Leverage your TikTok following to promote viral products. No need to ship anything yourself. Just create content, attach your link, and earn with every sale. You must have a creator account to qualify.

📦 4. Stan Store: A creator storefront platform with 20% recurring commissions. Promote to influencers or solopreneurs building digital businesses and earn monthly for life.

📊 5. FreshBooks: High-ticket goldmine. $200 per sale of this popular accounting software. Great for blog tutorials, explainer videos, or even simple how-tos on business finance tools.

🛏️ 6. Mattress Programs (like Eight Sleep): Luxury affiliate opportunity. Mattresses range $3K–$5K, and some brands pay 10% commission. That’s $300–$500 per mattress sold. Evergreen niche, high intent traffic.

💡 Want to see the full list of all 12? ▶️ Watch the full video here for the entire 12-program breakdown and insider tips.

⚡️Worthy Mentions

• Shopify reports 7x growth in AI traffic since January.

• Amazon sues Perplexity over AI tool automating order placements.

• Instacart debuts enterprise AI suite for grocery retailers.

• Meta’s generative AI creates strange ads starring “AI grandmas.”

• OneOff app uses AI to let users shop celebrity outfits.

Wrapping up…

PayPal is clearly not done redefining how agentic commerce unfolds. Pinterest wants to be your personal stylist now. And Google? It’s handing SMBs a brand-in-a-box powered by AI 🛍️💡.

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that AI isn’t sitting this season out. The tools, the updates, the plays… they’re all heating up ahead of BFCM 🔥.

So, let’s do this again next week, yeah?

Share this with a friend or two, smash that subscribe button, and stay sharp, because we’ve got more ecommerce gold coming your way.

PS: BFCM is creeping up 👀. Are you ready?