TikTok has launched a new app for its seller community taking advantage of its suite of TikTok Shopping features, but the app is only available in Indonesia at present. TikTok Seller, as the app is called, allows TikTok’s seller community to run all aspects of their TikTok shop from their mobile device, from initially registering as a seller to managing inventory and orders to analyzing their online business, among other things.

The app also lets sellers register their campaigns and manage their promotions, engage in customer service, as well as access seller education materials, the app store listing explains.

The app was made available on iOS devices as of December 3rd, but had launched on Android last month. According to data from Sensor Tower, the app is ranked No. 42 in Google Play’s Top Shopping category, and No. 5 in its Top New Shopping category. On iOS, the app is No. 52 in Shopping on the Indonesian App Store, per its app’s listing page.

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok confirmed the app is launching in Indonesia where the company is running its TikTok Shopping pilot programs and continues to test a growing suite of commercial solutions.

“We are always looking at ways to enhance our community’s experience and regularly test new features that inspire creativity, bring joy and innovate the TikTok experience,” a TikTok spokesperson said. “Brands on TikTok have found a creative outlet to authentically connect with audiences, and we’re excited to experiment with new commerce opportunities that enable our community to discover and engage with what they love,” they added.

Indonesia for some time has served as a test market for many of TikTok’s investments in its e-commerce business, thanks in part to the growing adoption of smartphones in the country and a hunger for online services catering to its mobile-first population. In 2020, around 64% of the country’s population was accessing the internet from their mobile phone, and that figure is expected to grow to 81% by 2026, per Statista data.

Earlier this year, for example, TikTok launched a “Seller University” website aimed at its Indonesian audience, where it detailed how brands could advertise their products on videos and helped sellers get started on its app. The company confirmed at the time the site was one of many tests of its e-commerce solutions in Indonesia. Later in 2021, TikTok more formally introduced its suite of TikTok Shopping tools, allowing merchants to add a “Shopping” tab to their TikTok profiles and sync product catalogs to create mini-storefronts on the app. Shopify was a debut partner on this initiative in select markets, including the U.S., but TikTlok later expanded its range of partners to include others like Square, Ecwid and PrestaShop, and more.

Today, sellers can highlight their products in TikTok videos and direct users to product pages on their website. The newer LIVE shopping features allow brands and sellers to share dynamic links while streaming a live broadcast. And sellers have access to a handful of ad formats for online shopping, which allow them to target users with personalized videos, generate leads, and offer swipeable product catalogs.

It makes sense, then, that the company would see a dedicated app as the next step in addressing the needs of its mobile selling community, particularly in a smartphone-heavy market like Indonesia.

There’s no word on if or when TikTok will make its new dedicated Seller app available to other markets.

The European Commission has given its clearest signal yet that it’s prepared to intervene over weak enforcement of the EU’s data protection rules against big tech.

Today the bloc’s executive also had a warning for adtech giants Google and Facebook — accusing them of choosing “legal tricks” over true compliance with the EU’s standard of “privacy by design” — and emphasizing the imperative for them to take data protection “seriously”.

Speaking at a privacy conference this morning, Vera Jourová, the EU’s commissioner for values and transparency, said enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) at a national level must buck up — and become “effective” — or else it “will have to change”, warning specifying that any “potential changes” will move toward centralized enforcement.

“When I was looking at existing enforcement decisions and pending cases, I also came to another conclusion,” she also said.  “So, we have penalties or decisions against Google, Facebook, WhatsApp.

“To me this means that clearly there is a problem with compliance culture among those companies that live off our personal data. Despite the fact that they have the best legal teams, presence in Brussels and spent countless hours discussing with us the GDPR. Sadly, I fear this is not privacy by design.

“I think it is high time for those companies to take protection of personal data seriously. I want to see full compliance, not legal tricks. It’s time not to hide behind small print, but tackle the challenges head on.”

In parallel, an influential advisor to the bloc’s top court has today published an opinion which states that EU law does not preclude consumer protection agencies from bringing representative actions at a national level — following a referral by a German court in a case against Facebook Ireland — which, if the CJEU’s judges agree, could open up a fresh wave of challenges to tech giants’ misuse of people’s data without the need to funnel complaints through the single point of failure of gatekeeper regulators like Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC).

Towards centralized privacy oversight?

On paper, EU law provides people in the region with a suite of rights and protections attached to their data. And while the regulation has attracted huge international attention, as other regions grapple with how to protect people in an age of data-mining giants, the problem for many GDPR critics, as it stands, is that the law decentralizes oversight of these rules and rights to a patchwork of supervisory agencies at the EU Member State level.

While this can work well for cases involving locally bounded services, major problems arise where complaints span borders within the EU — as is always the case with tech giants’ (global) services. This is because a one-stop-shop (OSS) mechanism kicks in, ostensibly to reduce the administrative burden for businesses.

But it also enables a huge get-out clause for tech giants, allowing them to forum shop for a ‘friendly’ regulator through their choice of where to locate their regional HQ. And working from a local EU base, corporate giants can use investment and job creation in that Member State as a lever to work against and erode national political will to press for vigorous oversight of their European business at the local authority level.

“In my view, it does take too long to address the key questions around processing of personal data for big tech,” said Jourová giving a keynote speech to the Forum Europe data protection & privacy conference. “Yes, I understand the lack of resources. I understand there is no pan-European procedural law to help the cross-border cases. I understand that the first cases need to be rock-solid because they will be challenged in court.

“But I want to be honest — we are in the crunch time now. Either we will all collectively show that GDPR enforcement is effective or it will have to change. And there is no way back to decentralised model that was there before the GDPR. Any potential changes will go towards more centralisation, bigger role of the EDPB [European Data Protection Board] or Commission.”

Jourová added that the “pressure” to make enforcement effective “is already here” — pointing to debate around incoming legislation that will update the EU’s rules around ecommerce, and emphasizing that, on the Digital Services Act, Member States have been advocating for enforcement change — and “want to see more central role of the European Commission”.

Point being that if there’s political will for structural changes to centralize EU enforcement among Member States, the Commission has the powers to propose the necessary amendments — and will hardly turn its nose up at being asked to take on more responsibility itself.

Jourová’s remarks are a notable step up on her approach to the thorny issue of GDPR enforcement back in summer 2020 — when, at the two year review mark of the regulation entering into application, she was still talking about the need to properly resource DPAs — in order that they could “step up their work” and deliver “vigorous but uniform enforcement”, as she put it then.

Now, in the dying days of 2021 — with a still massive backlog of decisions yet to be issued around cross-border cases, some of which are highly strategic, targeting adtech platforms’ core surveillance business model (Jourová’s speech, for example, noted that 809 procedures related to the OSS have been triggered but only 290 Final Decisions have been issued) — the Commission appears to be signalling that it’s finally running out of patience on enforcement.

And that it is already eyeing a Plan B to make the GDPR truly effective.

Criticism of weak enforcement against tech giants has been a rising chorus in Europe for years. Most recently frustration with regulatory inaction led privacy campaigner Max Schrems’ not-for-profit, noyb, to file a complaint of criminal corruption against the GDPR’s most infamous bottleneck: Ireland’s DPC, accusing the regulator of engaging in “procedural blackmail” which it suggested would help Facebook by keeping key developments out of the public eye, among other eye-raising charges.

The Irish regulator has faced the strongest criticism of all the EU DPAs over its role in hampering effective GDPR enforcement.

Although it’s not the only authority to be accused of creating a bottleneck by letting major complaints pile up on its desk and taking a painstaking ice-age to investigate complaints and issue decisions (assuming it opens an investigation at all).

The UK’s ICO — when the country was still in the EU — did nothing about complaints against real-time-bidding’s abuse of people’s data, for example, despite sounding a public warning over behavioral ads’ unlawfulness as early as 2019. While Belgium’s DPA has been taking a painstaking amount of time to issue a final decision on the IAB Europe’s TCF’s failure to comply with the GDPR. But Ireland’s central role in regulating most of big tech means it attracts the most flak. 

The sheer number of tech giants that have converged on Ireland — wooed by low corporate tax rates (likely with the added cherry of business-friendly data oversight) — gives it an outsized role in overseeing what’s done with European’s data.

Hence Ireland has open investigations into Apple, Google, Facebook and many others — yet has only issued two final decisions on cross-border cases so far (Twitter last year; and WhatsApp this year).

Both of those decisions went through a dispute mechanism that’s also baked into the GDPR — which kicks in when other EU DPAs don’t agree with a draft decision by the lead authority.

That mechanism further slowed down the DPC’s enforcement in those cases — but substantially cranked up the intervention the two companies ultimately faced. Ireland had wanted to be a lot more lenient vs the collective verdict once all of the bloc’s oversight bodies had had their say.

That too, critics say, demonstrates the DPC’s regulatory capture by platform power.

An opinion piece in yesterday’s Washington Post skewered the DPC as “the wrong privacy watchdog for Europe” — citing a study by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties that found it had only published decisions on about 2% of the 164 cross border cases it has taken on.

The number of complaints the DPC has chosen to entirely ignore — i.e. by not opening a formal investigation — or else to quietly shutter (“resolve”) without issuing a decision or taking any enforcement action is likely considerably higher. 

The agency is shielded by a very narrow application of Freedom of Information law, which applies only in relation to DPC records pertaining to the “general administration” of its office. So when TechCrunch asked the DPC, last December, how many times it had used GDPR powers such as the ability to order a ban on processing it declined to respond to our FOIs — arguing the information did not fall under Ireland’s implementation of the law.

Silence and stonewalling only go so far, though.

Calls for root and branch reform of the DPC specifically, and enforcement of the GDPR more generally, can now be heard from Ireland’s own parliament all the way up to the European Commission. And big tech’s game of tying EU regulators in knots looks as if it’s — gradually, gradually — getting toward the end of its rope.

What comes next is an interesting question. Last month the European Data Protection Superviso (EDPS) announced a conference on the future of “effective” digital enforcement — which will take place in June 2022 — and which he said would discuss best practice and also “explore alternative models of enforcement for the digital future”.

“We are ambitious,” said Wojciech Wiewiorowski as he announced the conference. “There is much scope for discussion and much potential improvement on the way current governance models are implemented in practice. We envisage a dialogue across different fields of regulation — from data protection to competition, digital markets and services, and artificial intelligence as well — both in the EU, and Europe as a continent, but also on the global level.”

Discussion of “different” and “alternative” models of enforcement will be a focus of the event, per Wiewiorowski — who further specified that this will include discussion of “a more centralized approach”. So the EDPS and the Commission appear to be singing a similar tune on reforming GDPR enforcement.

As well as the Commission itself (potentially) taking on an enforcement role in the future — perhaps specifically on major, cross border cases related to big tech, in order to beef up GDPR’s application against the most powerful offenders (as is already proposed in the case of the DSA and enforcing those rules against ‘very large online platforms’; aka vLOPs) — the GDPR steering and advisory body, the EDPB, also looks set to play an increasingly strategic and important role.

Indeed, it already has a ‘last resort’ decision making power to resolve disputes over cross border GDPR enforcement — and Ireland’s intransigence has led to it exercising this power for the first time.

In the future, the Board’s role could expand further if EU lawmakers decide that more centralization is the only way to deliver effective enforcement against tech giants that have become experts in exhausting regulators with bad faith arguments and whack-a-mole procedures, in order to delay, defer and deny compliance with European law.

The EDPB’s chair, Andrea Jelinek, was also speaking at the Forum Europe conference today. Asked for her thoughts on how GDPR enforcement could improve, including problematic elements like the OSS, she cautioned that change will be a “long term project”, while simultaneously agreeing there are notable “challenges” at the point where national oversight intersects with the needs of cross border enforcement.

“Enforcing at a national level and at the same time resolving cross border cases is time and resource intensive,” she said. “Supervisory authorities need to carry out investigations, observe procedural rules, coordinate and share information with other supervisory authorities. For the current system to work properly it is of vital important that supervisory authorities have enough resources and staff.

“The differences in national administrative procedures and the fact that in some Member States no deadlines are foreseen for handling a case also creates an obstacle to the efficient functioning of the OSS.”

Jelinek made a point of emphasizing that EDPB has been taking action to try to remedy some of issues identified — implementing what she described as “a series of practical solutions” to tackle problems around enforcement.

She said this has included developing (last year) a co-ordinated enforcement framework to facilitate joint actions (“in a flexible and coordinated manner”) — such as launching enforcement sweeps and joint investigations.

The EPBD is also establishing a pilot project to provide a pool of experts to support investigations and enforcement activities “of significant common interest”, she noted, predicting: “This will enhance the cooperation and solidarity between all the supervisory authorities by addressing their operational needs.”

“Finally we should not forget that the GDPR is a long term project and so is strengthening cooperation between supervisory authorities,” she added. “Any transformation of the GDPR will take years. I think the best solution is therefore to deploy the GDPR fully — it is likely that most of the issues identified by Member States and stakeholders will benefit from more experience in the application of the regulation in the coming years.”

However it is already well over three years since GDPR came into application. So many EU citizens may query the logic of waiting years more for regulators to figure out how to jointly work together to get the job of upholding people’s rights done. Not least because this enforcement impasse leaves data-mining tech giants free to direct their vast data-enabled wealth and engineering resource at developing new ‘innovations’ — to better evade legal restrictions on what they can do with people’s data.

One thing is clear: The next wave of big tech regulatory evasion will come dressed up in claims of privacy “innovation” from the get-go.

Indeed, that is already how adtech giants like Google are trying to re-channel regulators’ attention from enforcing against their core attention-manipulation, surveillance-based business model.

Google SVP Kent Walker also took to the (virtual) conference stage this morning for a keynote slot in which he argued that the novel ad targeting technologies Google is developing under its “Privacy Sandbox” badge (such as FloCs; aka federated learning of cohorts) will provide the answer to what big (ad)tech likes to claim is an inherent tension between European fundamental rights like privacy and economic growth.

The truth, as ever, is a lot more nuanced than that. For one thing, there are plenty of ways to target ads that don’t require processing people’s data. But as most of Europe’s regulators remain bogged down in a mire of corporate capture, under-resourcing, culture cowardice/risk aversion, internecine squabbles and, at times, a sheer lack of national political will to enforce the law against the world’s wealthiest companies, the adtech duopoly is sounding cockily confident that it will be allowed to carry on and reset the terms of the game in its own interests once again.

(The added irony here is that Google is currently working under the oversight of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and ICO on shaping behavioral remedies attached to its Sandbox proposals — and has said that these commitments will be applied globally if the UK is minded to accept them; which does risk tarnishing the GDPR’s geopolitical shine, given the UK is no longer a member of the EU… )

For EU citizens, it could well mean that — once again — it’s up to the CJEU to come to the rescue of their fundamental rights — assuming the court ends up concurring with advocate general Richard de la Tour’s opinion today that the GDPR:

” … does not preclude national legislation which allows consumer protection associations to bring legal proceedings against the person alleged to be responsible for an infringement of the protection of personal data, on the basis of the prohibition of unfair commercial practices, the infringement of a law relating to consumer protection or the prohibition of the use of invalid general terms and conditions, provided that the objective of the representative action in question is to ensure observance of the rights which the persons affected by the contested processing derive directly from that regulation.”

Consumer protection agencies being able to pursue representative legal actions to defend fundamental rights against tech giants’ self interest — at the Member State level, and therefore, all across the EU — could actually unblock GDPR enforcement via a genuinely decentralized wave of enforcement that’s able to route around the damage of captured gatekeepers and call out big adtech’s manipulative tricks in court.

Spain’s Jobandtalent, a “workforce marketplace”-cum-digital temping agency which uses AI to match workers to casual labor gigs in sectors like warehousing, ecommerce and logistics, has closed a $500 million Series E round of funding led by Kinnevik and with what it bills as a “significant” follow on by SoftBank VisionFund 2.

Existing investors including Atomico, DN, Infravia, Kibo and Quadrille also participated in the round — which the startup said values its business at $2.35BN (post-money).

Alongside the equity raise, the 2009-founded startup has secured another chunk of debt financing ($75M) from Blackrock.

Jobandtalent says the latest funds will be used to accelerate its expansion in key markets, including the US — its most recent focus. Earlier this year (March), it announced a $120M Series D (as well as $100M in debt financing) which it said it would use to enter the US.

Flush with Series E cash, it plans to “significantly” increase the size of its tech and sales team over the next two years, and also says it will add “key” exec roles — as it seeks to scale in the US and deepen its business in Europe.

Currently it offers a temporary labor service in nine markets globally: Spain, the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Portugal, Mexico, Colombia and the US — matching workers looking for temp roles with employers in need of casual labor in (with a focus on sectors like manufacturing and logistics).

“Jobandtalent is by far the largest job platform in Europe. We are just starting to grow in the US, and this round of funding will help us accelerate those plans and become market leaders there as well,” the startup told us.

Its gig-finding pitch also comes with a promise of “stability” for the temps on its books — via an AI-aided pipeline of “consistent work”; and benefits for temps that it says are more akin to being employed (and can include pensions, sick and holiday pay, health insurance, and training courses).

Temp workers apply for and manage roles, submit paperwork, sign contracts, and get paid via the Jobandtalent app — so it’s streamlining and taking over a range of back office functions for employers dealing with temps (who it directly employs) in addition to helping simplify the process of finding work (and, indeed, being paid for it) for those who rely on seasonal and/or temp gigs to earn a living.

Its UK website includes fairly visible links to a whistleblowing policy and a statement on modern slavery — as well as a link to (multi-lingual) instructions on reporting hidden labor exploitation.

The startup touts an average NPS score for workers on its platform of 56 vs an industry average that it says stands at just 18.

In the first nine months of 2021, Jobandtalent says its platform was used to match more than 100,000 workers to casual roles. (That’s up on since earlier this year, when it said more than 80,000 workers had used its marketplace to find temporary roles at that point.)

It also says more than 1,300 companies are now signed up to source workers via its platform, including DHL, FedEx, XPO, Ceva Logistics, eBay, IKEA, Kuehne & Nagel, JD Sports, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Argos and GLS — up from 850+ companies back in March.

Its business growth rate is 130% annually, with Jobandtalent adding that it’s been EBITDA positive since the second half of 2020. It also told us its annual revenue run rate is now more than €1BN.

“Even with the current pressure in the labour market, we are able to find and match workers with roles at a much higher success rate than other,” suggested Juan Urdiales, co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “We are excited to accelerate the expansion of our team and grow our presence in both new and existing markets — helping more workers find the jobs they want, and helping businesses fill the roles they need.”

Also commenting on the funding in a statement, Natalie Tydeman, senior investment director at Kinnevik, added: “Jobandtalent’s workforce-as-a-service platform is disrupting the modern labour market and placing people back at the centre of employment. By offering a personalised service driven by data and proprietary technology, Jobandtalent is simplifying the experience of finding work for thousands of people and transforming it for the better. We’re proud to be working with Juan and the team to accelerate the growth of the business.”

Consumer awareness of supply chain shortages and even earlier deals may have contributed to a slight decline in U.S. e-commerce sales during Cyber Week — the kickoff to the holiday shopping season that runs from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. Last year, U.S. consumers spent a record $34.4 billion during Cyber Week, up 20.7% from the year prior. But this year, that figure dropped by 1.4% to $33.9 billion in online spend, according to data from Adobe’s Digital Economy Index.

Adobe’s analysis comes from data from over one trillion visits to U.S. e-commerce websites, which feature 100 million individual SKUs across 18 product categories, giving it a comprehensive window into holiday shopping trends.

The company noticed the declines this year starting on Black Friday. This year, retailers pulled in $8.9 billion in Black Friday online sales, down 1.3% from last year’s record of $9.03 billion — its first-ever year-over-year decline. Cyber Monday 2021 sales also dropped 1.4% year-over-year to $10.7 billion — just $100 million shy of what consumers spent last year, at $10.8 billion. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving Day online sales stayed flat at $5.1 billion.

These declines, while relatively small, represent a reverse in the usual trend of holiday shopping sales that jump up with every subsequent year. For an industry supposedly accelerated several years by the pandemic, according to reports from last year, it’s a notable demonstration of how the long-lasting impacts of the pandemic — which now include supply chain shortages — may have played out in consumers’ psyches. Worried about possible shortages, consumers may have shopped even earlier this year, Adobe says.

The data seems to back this up. During the month of November (Nov. 1 to Nov. 29), consumers spent $109.8 billion, a significant jump of 11.9% over last year. That means 22 days of the month have exceeded $3 billion in online spending, Adobe notes. This is a new record, as only 9 days in 2020 hit that same milestone. Plus, consumers may have shopped last month, as well, the company points out.

“With early deals in October, consumers were not waiting around for discounts on big shopping days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday,” said Taylor Schreiner, Director at Adobe Digital Insights, in an announcement about the Cyber Week findings. “This was further fueled by growing awareness of supply chain challenges and product availability. It spread out e-commerce spending across the months of October and November, putting us on track for a season that still will break online shopping records,” Schreiner added.

In other words, sales aren’t necessarily going to be down in 2021 overall, they’re just not going to be as concentrated as before. In fact, the pandemic may have may online shopping such a regular habit that now consumers are placing their holiday purchases alongside their usual activity, instead of waiting for a big Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales event as in years past.

Despite the declines, the peak holiday shopping period otherwise looked a lot like it would have otherwise. Cyber Monday shoppers went for the usual categories in greater numbers compared with September 2021 sales, across categories like toys (sales were up by nearly 11x the pre-season levels in Sept. 2021), gift cards (up by 7x), books (up by 7x), video games (up by 6x), and baby and toddler products (up by 6x). Appliances, including microwave ovens and small kitchen appliances, were also up 9.6x and 7.1x respectively, leading to the category’s increase of 5.6x.

Smartphone-driven sales were also up this year, with Cyber Monday smartphone-driven sales up 8.4% year-over-year, for example. This actually represents a change in course, however. Pre-pandemic, smartphone sales were expected to top 50% of online sales. But consumers now working from home may not need to shop from their phones as much as before, Adobe noted.

Although the shopping patterns look different, Adobe says it expects the overall holiday season to break a new record. It forecasts that consumers will drive 10% year-over-year growth in sales to hit $207 billion from November 1 through December 31.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce has been on a tear. Lockdowns, a move to remote work and other impacts of COVID pushed a great number of global citizens to spend more of their money online through e-commerce sites and on-demand services.

For companies like Shopify, the period since March 2020 has proven a bonanza. The Canadian e-commerce giant spent last March bouncing between $350 and $420 per share. Today, the company is worth $1,554.74 per share.

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Other players saw their businesses scale as consumers spent more time buying online and less time in stores. Instacart’s grocery delivery business accelerated. DoorDash went public on the back of a demand surge. Roblox usage skyrocketed, sending it to the public markets on a high. The list goes on.

But while some sectors did well, and many have continued to wow investors, the investor-thrilling run that e-commerce companies, in particular, has been on for five quarters could be slowing.

Black Friday and earnings warnings

While I despise astroturfed holidays that revolve around shopping, they can provide useful data points. You will not be shocked that Black Friday was a bit of a bust in terms of U.S. retail foot traffic. New COVID variants will do that, frankly.

But it may surprise you that online shopping as part of the Black Friday fauxliday fell compared to 2020 levels. Not that the declines were severe, but seeing online spending drift to $8.9 billion this year from $9.0 billion last year made me sit up and take note.

Perhaps we should not have been surprised. There were warning signs.

Shopify’s Q3 earnings, reported October 28, 2021, were a letdown. The company’s posted revenues of $1.12 billion missed estimates, despite posting 46% year-over-year growth. Earnings per share and gross merchandise volume also missed analyst guesses.

Online marketplace eBay is further investing in its sneaker business with today’s news that it’s acquiring Sneaker Con Digital’s authentication business, which verifies the authenticity of high-value footwear. The business has operations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and Germany, and had been previously working with eBay to vet the sneakers being bought and sold on its platform.

Sneakers have become a large category on eBay’s marketplace, where today there are over 1.9 million pairs available to buy every day.

In October 2020, eBay launched an “Authenticity Guarantee” service in partnership with Sneaker Con, whose team of experts would verify the sneakers at no cost to sellers before items were shipped to the buyers. If the buyer then returns the sneakers, the authenticators would inspect them again before they’re sent back to the seller. This multi-point inspection system involves checking various aspects of the shoes in question, including the sizing, labels, stitching, logos, heel tabs, laces, and more, and even the box itself.

When the shoes were verified, the left sneaker is given an NFC-enabled tag that provides more detailed information about the sneakers’ authenticity when scanned. Verifiable listings also receive a blue check mark next to the item. The service was available for any sneaker over $100 being sold on eBay’s platform.

Many buyers and sellers preferred to shop sneakers through eBay as they’d be able to see photos of the exact shoes they’d be getting, instead of stock photos, and there were fewer fees compared with some rival sneaker marketplaces. Attracting this kind of buyer is also part of eBay’s larger strategy to drive enthusiasts to its site across various high-end categories, like handbags, watches, and sneakers, then benefit as they shop more items on eBay. The company recently noted the average sneaker buyer on eBay spends approximately $2,000 in other categories, for example.

Ebay says its Authenticity Guarantee service led to quarter-over-quarter category growth and, in just over a year, it’s authenticated over 1.55 million sneakers worldwide.

In its Q3 2021 earnings, eBay also noted its U.S. sneaker business was healthy and growing at double-digit rates, and it was expanding to other markets, including Germany. The company additionally announced plans to invest in 3D image capability on sneaker listings that would allow buyers to interact with a 360-degree view of the item they’re purchasing, as another means of instilling buyer confidence.

With the acquisition, eBay is bringing its partnered authentication business in-house where it will continue to build on its offerings to accommodate resale market trends, the company said about today’s news. Deal terms were not disclosed.

However, the deal is only for Sneaker Con’s authentication business — its events business will continue to operate separately. The deal was signed and closed on November 24, 2021, notes eBay.

“eBay has always been a vibrant community of enthusiasts, with deeply knowledgeable buyers, sellers and employees,” said Jordan Sweetnam, SVP and General Manager of eBay North America, in a statement. “We partnered with Sneaker Con to launch sneaker authentication on eBay last year because the team shared our passion for the category – with best-in-class capabilities to deliver what our customers want most. The response to our authentication offering has been overwhelming, and this acquisition allows us to continue to transform eBay and bring a higher level of trust and confidence to every transaction,” he added.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps and games to try, too.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

Twitter launches livestream shopping

Image Credits: Twitter

Twitter’s e-commerce initiatives now include livestream shopping, the company announced this week, and Walmart will be the first retailer to test the new platform. The Live Shopping service will take advantage of Twitter’s existing capabilities in livestreaming content and its newer e-commerce features, like the Shop Module for business profiles. During the upcoming livestream event, users will be able to watch the show, tweet to join the conversation from the Live Events page, and browse products on the “Shop” and “Latest” tabs just below the video. When ready to purchase, users will click through to the retailer’s website where the livestream will continue — so they don’t have to miss any of the show.

Walmart was a sensible first partner for the new effort, as the retailer has been increasingly investing in livestream events across social media. Over the past year, it hosted more than 15 livestream events across five platforms, including YouTube, TikTok and its own website, among others.

Its Twitter livestream will focus on Cyber Deals and will kick off on November 28 at 7 PM ET in the U.S. The stream will also be broadcast on Walmart.com/live, and across the retailer’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts.

Twitter says this is the first-ever e-commerce livestream on its platform, but it plans to bring more experiences like this to its customers in the future.

The event will also serve as a means of testing the Twitter user base’s appetite for live shopping, which today often takes place on other social apps, like Instagram and Facebook, on dedicated live commerce platforms and on video services like YouTube and TikTok. But Twitter —  a place where users tend to track news, events, pop culture trends, politics and more — hasn’t yet defined itself as a platform. Its overabundance of new features released in the past year feel more like spaghetti being thrown at the wall to see what sticks, instead of a carefully planned roadmap. Twitter today wants to be a home to live audio, creator subscriptions, newsletters, bitcoin tipping, NFTs, private communities and more. But, in reality, only some of these things will actually work. For example, Twitter already had to kill its Stories feature (Fleets) due to lack of traction. And its early days of Super Follow, subscriptions didn’t produce much revenue.

Whether or not it will be able to offer the sort of live commerce experience that resonates with consumers and delivers retailers’ objectives still remains to be seen.

Weekly News

Platforms: Google

• Google’s Play Store is testing out a new “Offers” section that’s different from the existing “Offers & Notifications” page in the app menu. Instead, it’s being used to bring up carousels of deals, limited-time specials and paid apps going free, while the “Offers & Notifications” section had only delivered a heavily curated list of offers, or, if none were available, the option to add a promo code.
• Android 10 is still the most-used version of the Android OS, according to numbers crunched by 9to5Google using data provided through Android Studio. The Android 10 OS has a 26.5% market share, edging out Android 11’s 24.2%. Android 12 hasn’t yet made an appearance in the numbers.

E-commerce and delivery services

• Uber enters the cannabis delivery market. The ride-hailing app announced that users in Ontario, Canada would be able to place cannabis orders on its Uber Eats app following its listing of cannabis retailer Tokyo Smoke on its marketplace. The company had said it would consider expanding cannabis delivery in the U.S. when the legality of doing so is made more clear.
• Mobile advertising and app monetization company Tapjoy announced the launch of a rewarded shopping product, Tapjoy Shopping. The in-app marketplace lets consumers shop from hundreds of brands and retailers, and earn rewards in their favorite apps — like virtual currency — for their purchases. The feature is available in any of the over 10,000 apps that belong to Tapjoy’s network. Tapjoy says shopping offers like this have been increasingly important to mobile publishers after Cost Per Engagement app ads were banned on iOS.
• France has asked search engines and app stores to remove the popular e-commerce platform Wish, which mostly sources products from China-based merchants. The order comes following France’s investigations into fraud, product safety and counterfeit goods on Wish, which found that 95% of toys on Wish didn’t comply with EU regulation, 45% were dangerous, 95% of electronics didn’t comply with regulation and 90% were dangerous.

Augmented Reality

Image Credits: Snap

• Snapchat is bringing AR to holiday shopping. On Black Friday (11/26), the company will launch the Snap Holiday Market, which will feature immersive AR experiences from a half-dozen brand partners, including Amazon Prime Video, Coca-Cola, Hollister, Under Armour, Verizon and Walmart. Each brand will have a dedicated storefront where Snapchat users can browse their products and deal in an AR space designed for each brand. The market will be available from the Lens Carousel and the top of the “For You” tab in the Lens Explorer.
• Snap also plans to offer AR try-on and e-commerce Lenses throughout the holiday shopping season, including those from brands like American Eagle, Fendi, Diork Kaja Beauty, NYX Cosmetics, Shein and Tory Burch.
• The company announced a new AR stat, as well: Snapchat now sees over 6 billion AR Lens plays every day on average, it said.

Fintech

• The German neobank N26 will shutter its U.S. operations. The company’s 500,000 U.S. customers will see their accounts closed on January 11 and will be provided with instructions on how to withdraw their funds. The company said it made the decision to better focus on its core European business and plans to launch to more countries in Eastern Europe, as well as Brazil. The bank had previously shut down its business in the U.K., citing post-Brexit difficulties.

Social

• TikTok hires a new head of diversity and inclusion. The company has hired Shavone Charles, previously of VSCO, Instagram and Twitter, to fill the newly created role. The exec will be LA-based and report to TikTok’s head of comms, Hilary McQuaide.
• Kuaishou, the Chinese maker of the largest short-form video platform after TikTok, reported earnings. Revenue rose 33% as the company reported 20.5 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) for the three months ended September, versus the 20.1 billion yuan average forecast. Total MAUs on its main app reached 573 million, though the company had to shut down its U.S. TikTok rival Zynn earlier this year.
• Twitter made a change to its crowdsourced fact-checking program, Birdwatch, which now allows users to submit their contributions anonymously. Twitter says pilot users “overwhelmingly” requested this feature, particularly women and Black contributors. “Research has shown that aliases have the potential to reduce bias, by putting focus on the content of a note, not the author,” Twitter said, adding that aliases may also “reduce polarization by helping people feel comfortable crossing partisan lines.”

• Twitter also updated its iOS app to address the annoying bug (which Twitter must have thought was a feature) where your timeline would refresh automatically, making the tweets you were actively reading disappear from view. After first fixing this issue on the web, Twitter is now rolling it out to iOS users.
• Reddit said it’s shutting down Dubsmash, the short-form video app it acquired late last year, and is integrating video tools into its own app.  Reddit said its camera features will now include the ability to change recording speeds and the option to set a timer, similar to other short-form video apps. Users can now also upload videos in landscape, portrait mode and fill, as well as adjust and trim multiple clips. The company is also adding a new editing screen that includes text Stickers, a drawing tool and filters. And users have the option to add voiceovers or adjust the volume directly on the editing screen.
• Social networking app for women Peanut announced a new feature called “Go Global,” which will allow its users to connect with other women around the world, instead of only those nearby. The company said there was demand for the option after it launched its live audio feature Pods. But it could also make Peanut more useful in markets where there just aren’t that many local users to connect with.

Image Credits: Peanut

• The TikTok app ecosystem is huge. Correction! In our last newsletter, we pointed to Sensor Tower’s analysis of the TikTok app ecosystem and mistakenly referred to its “400 or so mobile apps.” The ecosystem saw 400 apps debut in 2020, but in total, there are some 900 apps tied to TikTok to offer things like downloading videos, viewing analytics, tracking hashtags and more. Meanwhile, those 900 apps reached over 1 billion downloads worldwide, not 3 billion. (But TikTok, including its sister app Douyin, have 3.3 billion installs, for comparison.)

Messaging

• Facebook, err Meta, said it’s delaying the launch of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) across its messaging products until 2023 following warnings from child safety campaigns, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Such a system would prevent law enforcement and tech platforms from being able to detect child abusers, critics warned, and asked Meta to not proceed until it had a plan in place to prevent child abuse from being undetected on its platform. A former Facebook employee also accused Meta of announcing an absurdly accelerated timeline for E2EE to preempt antitrust action and for “good marketing,” which would have resulted in systems to identify child grooming, sextortion and CSAM distribution operating at less than 10% of the effectiveness of the systems that did inspect content.
• WhatsApp introduced a new feature that would allow its web and desktop users to make their own custom stickers for use in the messaging app. The sticker maker is available from any chat from the paperclip icon, then clicking on “Sticker.”

Streaming & Entertainment

• Apple Podcasts gets a suspicious boost in its App Store ratings. At first, it looked like angry podcast listeners and creators would finally have their say about the app’s decline by downrating Apple’s Podcasts app after Apple, for the first time, made its first-party apps reviewable by the public. But soon thereafter, the previously (embarrassingly) 1.8 star-rated app jumped, in a little over a month, to a 4.6 star rating. What gives? Apple critic Kosta Eleftheriou first noticed the change, and theorizes it’s because Apple is now intelligently prompting users for reviews — which, to be fair, is its right. But many of the reviews seem to be people reviewing the podcasts themselves, not the actual app, which is odd and…a bit suspicious.
• Spotify will drop its shuffle feature on albums, after Adele asked. The streamer would previously default to shuffle mode but Adele had asked Spotify to allow her new album to play in the intended order. The artist tweeted that “our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended,” when thanking Spotify for the adjustment.
• Music streaming app Tidal introduced direct artist payments, which aims to more equitably distribute funds to artists, compared with the models used by Apple and Spotify. With this user-centric payment system, subscription fees are directly distributed to the artists a user streams.
• TikTok expands its TV footprint. The short-form video app rolled out to more TV devices across the U.S. and Canada with the addition of support for Google TV and Android TV OS, as well as LG and Samsung Smart TVs. Amazon Fire TV was previously supported.
• Spotify tests a TikTok-like feed. The company is the latest to experiment with short-form video in its app as a means of content discovery. Except in Spotify’s case, it’s capitalizing on its existing Canvas video format but presenting it in a new place.
• Spotify also debuted a “Netflix Hub” on its app, which features playlists, soundtracks and podcasts tied to Netlflix shows and movies. The companies had partnered on other initiatives before now, and see the hub as a way to serve their respective audiences with new and, sometimes exclusive, entertainment content.

Image Credits: Spotify/Netflix

Gaming

• Netflix’s new gaming service added two more titles, including the return of Gameloft’s “Asphalt Xtreme.” The streamer recently expanded its service worldwide across iOS and Android, with a handful of titles, including a few casual games and two “Stranger Things”-themed games. Now, it’s added another arcade title, “Bowling Ballers,” and a reboot of Gameloft’s action racing game, “Asphalt Xtreme,” which had officially shut down just in September.

Travel and Transportation 

• Telsa’s app experienced an outage that prevented car owners from opening their doors or starting their vehicles. Users reported getting a 500 server error on their iOS app, leading them to tweet at Elon Musk directly for help.

Government & Policy

• The EU passed new rules that may impact major European and U.S. tech companies. The Digital Markets Act’ would make messaging apps interoperable, bans behavioral ad targeting to minors and would fine a company as much as 20% of total global annual sales for breaches of the law. The vote was the final step toward finalizing the rules, expected to come into action in 2022.
• WhatsApp is reorganizing its privacy policy to provide more information on the data it collects and how it’s protected, used and shared across borders, after Irish regulators fined the service a record €225 million ($267 million USD) for breaching EU data privacy rules.
• Instagram head Adam Mosseri is the next big tech rep who will testify before Congress. The exec will appear before lawmakers for the first time, and will answer the senators’ questions about Instagram’s impact on young people following the whistleblower leaks.
• China’s state media reported Tencent has to submit new apps or updates for regulatory inspection through December 31 after Beijing determine Tencent’s apps infringed on users’ rights and interests. Tencent said its apps are still functional and available for download.
• Apple pushed back the feature that would allow U.S. users to store their state’s driver’s license or state ID on their iPhone. The company said Arizona and Georgia would be the first states to get the feature, with Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma and Utah to follow. The feature was originally set to launch in late 2021, but will now arrive in early 2022.

Security & Privacy

• Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo added to its Android app the ability to block hidden trackers, as part of its new “App Tracking Protection for Android” feature. The new option, now in beta, aims to block data collection from happening inside apps, where third-party trackers are hidden away in the app’s code.
• Apple sued NSO Group, the maker of the nation-state spyware Pegasus. The suit is asking for a permanent injunction that would prevent NSO Group from using any Apple product or service, to “prevent further abuse and harm to its users.”

Funding and M&A

 Family locator and communication app Life360 announced it would acquire lost-item tracking company Tile for $205 million. The deal will see Tile continue to be led as its own brand under its existing CEO CJ Prober. The company says no further changes to the Tile team are currently planned and Prober will also now join the Life360 board of directors. Tile, an Apple critic, claims that its business suffered from the AirTag’s arrival and Apple’s anti-competitive practices. It had recently announced a $40 million debt round to keep the business going.

Niantic raised $300 million from Coatue at a $9 billion valuation to build the “real-world metaverse.” The Pokémon GO maker is betting on a metaverse that blends the real world with augmented reality, not virtual reality. This month, Niantic unveiled the Lightship AR Developer Kit which offers tools for AR game development. It also recently launched a new AR game, Pikmin Bloom.

Triller, the one-time TikTok rival turned live events company, has acquired Thuzio, a live events company co-founded by NY Giants’ Tiki Barber. The business had suffered during the pandemic when live events were shuttered. TrillerNet (Triller’s parent) confirmed the deal to the New York Post but didn’t disclose terms.

Creator-driven marketplace LTK raised $300 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, valuing the business at $2 billion. The company, which was previously branded RewardStyle and LIKEtoKNOW.it, helps social media influencers make their posts shoppable from a centralized marketplace on the web and the LTK app. Brands can also use LTK to connect with creators on marketing campaigns.

Mobile DevOps company Bitrise announced a $60 million round of funding led by Insight Partners to help developers build better mobile apps. Bitrise aims to create an end-to-end platform for mobile development that automates core workflows, shortens release cycles and provides a better understanding of how new pieces of code will affect live apps before their release, and counts over 100,000 developers as users.

Column Tax, a company that makes income tax software designed to be embedded in other fintech apps, raised $5.1 million in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company’s Tax Refund Unlock feature also recently became available to 2 million users of the cash advance app Klover.

Berlin-based same-day grocery delivery app Yababa raised $15.5 million in seed funding led by Creandum and Project A, to expand its service within Germany and across Europe. The service, which currently offers items that cater to Turkish and Arabic communities, plans to expand its product mix in the future.

Coinbase acqui-hired the team behind BRD, a crypto wallet startup that first launched its mobile wallet back in 2014. BRD’s co-founders say nothing will be changing for BRD users for the time being, but users will have the option to migrate to Coinbase’s wallet in 2022.

TabTrader raised $5.8 million in Series A funding for its mobile app that aggregates crypto exchange data. The app has more than 400,000 active users, with a particularly strong presence in Europe and Asia. Investors include 100X Ventures, Hashkey Capital, Spartan Capital, SGH Capital, SOSV and Artesian Venture Partners.

Downloads

Fold AR (Fold)

Image Credits: Fold

Of course, the metaverse has bitcoin? I mean, for sheer rubbernecking purposes we have to check out Niantic’s latest app. The Pokémon GO maker has weirdly teamed up with a bitcoin rewards and payments app, Fold, to launch an AR bitcoin mining experience called Fold AR. Currently in beta, Fold AR lets users earn bitcoin and other in-app benefits by exploring their physical surroundings using augmented reality. Unlike in Pokémon GO, where users seek out rare creatures, Fold users will collect bitcoin and other prizes, including those that increase their bitcoin cashback rewards. The company believes the game will appeal to bitcoin newcomers and existing cryptocurrency fans alike and will drive users to Fold’s app — where the in-app AR experience lives. Before the AR launch, Fold was focused on its bitcoin cashback experience where users connect their credit card, their Fold card or a bitcoin wallet, in order to purchase gift cards and receive cash back in the form of BTC. Fold AR rolls out on November 23 to select users and will add more users over time.

Several French ministers have issued a common statement announcing that they have asked the main search engines and mobile app stores operating in France to hide Wish’s website and mobile app altogether. Wish is a popular e-commerce platform that mostly references products from China-based merchants. It doesn’t hold inventory as products are shipped directly from merchants to customers.

Last year, the French administration in charge of consumer rights and fraud started investigating Wish. At the time, the direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes (DGCCRF) suspected that it was a bit too easy to mislead consumers and sell counterfeit goods on Wish, such as sneakers and perfumes with images incorrectly showing the logos of famous brands.

The French administration then ordered 140 different goods on Wish — most of them were imported products. This time, they wanted to find out whether those products were safe or not.

95% of toys that they acquired on the platform didn’t comply with European regulation — 45% of them were deemed dangerous. When it comes to electronics goods, 95% of them also shouldn’t be available in Europe, and 90% of them were dangerous in one way or another.

And even cheap costume jewelry sold on the platform presented a risk — 62% of those that they ordered are considered as dangerous. Again, these metrics are based on a very small sample of 140 products.

When Wish is notified that it is selling a dangerous good, those products are removed from the marketplace within 24 hours as expected. And yet, “in most cases, those products remain available under a different name, and sometimes even from the same seller. The company doesn’t keep any log related to transactions of non-compliant and dangerous products,” France’s Ministry of the Economy says in its statement.

According to the same investigation, when Wish notifies customers that they have purchased a dangerous product, it doesn’t mention the reason of the product recall.

In July 2021, the French administration in charge of consumer rights and fraud notified Wish and asked them to comply with European regulation on e-commerce and product safety. The administration gave them a two-month notice before further action.

Four months later, the French government is taking advantage of recent changes in European regulation to dereference or block problematic websites and apps. It’s a convoluted process, but the Ministry of the Economy asked the French administration in charge to ask search engines and app stores to dereference Wish. It’s going to take a bit of time — at the time of writing, Wish is still available in the App Store and you can still find Wish’s website in Google search results.

After that, Wish will be shadowbanned in France. The website will still be available and the app will still work if you already have it on your phone. But you won’t see it in search results in the App Store, the Play Store or Google.

If the French administration thinks Wish has implemented proper changes to comply with French regulation, it could lift the shadowban. With this radical decision, France is setting a precedent and shows once again that the web is becoming more and more fragmented. In that case, it says it is acting in the consumers’ best interests.

It’s also going to be interesting to see whether Europe’s upcoming Digital Services Act will have a bigger impact on drop shipping as a whole. Europe is expected to overhaul the e-commerce directive from 2000 with the Digital Services Act.

In what looks like bad news for adtech giants like Facebook and Google, MEPs in the European Parliament have voted for tougher restrictions on how Internet users’ data can be combined for ad targeting purposes — backing a series of amendments to draft legislation that’s set to apply to the most powerful platforms on the web.

The Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) today voted overwhelmingly to support beefed up consent requirements on the use of personal data for ad targeting within the Digital Markets Act (DMA); and for a complete prohibition on the biggest platforms being able to process the personal data of minors for commercial purposes — such as marketing, profiling or behaviorally targeted ads — to be added to the draft legislation.

The original Commission proposal for the DMA was notably weak in the area of surveillance business models — with the EU’s executive targeting the package of measures at other types of digital market abuse, such as self-preferencing and unfair T&Cs for platform developers, which its central competition authority was more familiar with.

“The text says that a gatekeeper shall, ‘for its own commercial purposes, and the placement of third-party advertising in its own services, refrain from combining personal data for the purpose of delivering targeted or micro-targeted advertising’, except if there is a ‘clear, explicit, renewed, informed consent’, in line with the General Data Protection Regulation,” IMCO writes in a press release. “In particular, personal data of minors shall not be processed for commercial purposes, such as direct marketing, profiling and behaviourally targeted advertising.”

It’s fair to say that adtech giants are masters of manipulating user consent at scale — through the use of techniques like A/B testing and dark pattern design — so beefed up consent requirements (for adults) aren’t likely to offer as much of a barrier against ad-targeting abuse as the committee seems to think they might.

Although if Facebook was finally forced to offer an actual opt-out of tracking ads that would still be a major win (as it doesn’t currently give users any choice over being surveilled and profiled for ads).

However the stipulation that children should be totally protected from commercial stuff like profiling and behavioral ads is potentially a lot more problematic for the likes of Facebook and Google — given the general lack of robust age assurance across the entire Internet.

It suggests that if this partial prohibition makes it into EU law, adtech platforms may end up deciding it’s less legally risky to turn off tracking-based ads altogether (in favor of using alternatives that don’t require processing users’ personal data, such as contextual targeting) vs trying to correctly age verify their entire user base in order to firewall only minors’ eyeballs from behavioral ads.

At the very least, such a ban could present big (ad)tech with a compliance headache — and more work for their armies of in-house lawyers — though MEPs have not proposed to torpedo their entire surveillance business model at this juncture.

In recent months a number of parliamentarians have been pushing for just that: An outright ban on tracking-based advertising period to be included, as an amendment, to another pan-EU digital regulation that’s yet to be voted on by the committee (aka the Digital Services Act; DSA).

However IMCO does not look likely to go so far in amending either legislative package — despite a call this week by the European Data Protection Board for the bloc to move towards a total ban on behavioral ads given the risks posed to citizens fundamental rights.

Digital Markets Act

The European Parliament is in the process of finalizing its negotiating mandate on one of the aforementioned digital reforms — aka, the DMA — which is set to apply to Internet platforms that have amassed market power by occupying a so-called ‘gatekeeping’ role as online intermediaries, typically giving them a high degree of market leverage over consumers and other digital businesses.

Critics argue this can lead to abusive behaviors that negatively impact consumers (in areas like privacy) — while also chilling fair competition and impeding genuine innovation (including in business models).

For this subset of powerful platforms, the DMA — which was presented as a legislative proposal at the end of last year — will apply a list of pre-emptive ‘dos and don’ts’ in an attempt to rebalance digital markets that have become dominated by a handful of (largely) US-based giants.

EU lawmakers argue the regulation is necessary to respond to evidence that digital markets are prone to tipping and unfair practices as a result of asymmetrical dynamics such as network effects, big data and ‘winner takes all’ investor strategies.

Under the EU’s co-legislative process, once the Commission proposes legislation the European Parliament (consisting of directly elected MEPs) and the Council (the body that represents Member States’ governments) must adopt their own negotiating mandates — and then attempt to reach consensus — meaning there’s always scope for changes to the original draft, as well as a long period where lobbying pressure can be brought to bear to try to influence the final shape of the law.

The IMCO committee vote this morning will be followed by a plenary vote in the European Parliament next month to confirm MEPs’ negotiating mandate — before the baton passes to the Council next year. There trilogue negotiations, between the Parliament, Commission and Member States’ governments, are slated to start under the French presidency in the first semester of 2022. Which means more jockeying, horse-trading and opportunities for corporate lobbying lie ahead. And (likely) many months before any vote to approve a final DMA text.

Still, MEPs’ push to strengthen the tech giant-targeting package is notable nonetheless.

A second flagship digital update, the DSA, which will apply more broadly to digital services — dealing with issues like illegal content and algorithmic recommendations — is still being debated by MEPs and committee votes like IMCO’s remain outstanding.

So the DMA has passed through parliamentary debate relatively quickly (vs the DSA), suggesting there’s political consensus (and appetite) to rein in tech giants.

In its press release summarizing the DMA amendments, rapporteur Andreas Schwab (of the EPP and DE political grouping) made this point, loud and clear, writing: “The EU stands for competition on the merits, but we do not want bigger companies getting bigger and bigger without getting any better and at the expense of consumers and the European economy. Today, it is clear that competition rules alone cannot address all the problems we are facing with tech giants and their ability to set the rules by engaging in unfair business practices. The Digital Markets Act will rule out these practices, sending a strong signal to all consumers and businesses in the Single Market: rules are set by the co-legislators, not private companies!”

In other interesting tweaks, the committee has voted to expand the scope of the DMA — to cover not just online intermediation services, social networks, search engines, operating systems, online advertising services, cloud computing, and video-sharing services (i.e. where those platforms meet the relevant criteria to be designated “gatekeepers”) — but also add in web browsers (hi Google Chrome!), virtual assistants (Ok Google; hey Siri!) and connected TV (hi, Android TV) too.

On gatekeeper criteria, MEPs backed an increase in the quantitative thresholds for a company to fall under scope — to €8 billion in annual turnover in the European Economic Area; and a market capitalisation of €80 billion.

The sorts of tech giants who would qualify — based on that turnover and market cap alone (NB: other criteria would also apply) — include the usual suspects of Apple, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Google, Microsoft etc but also — potentially — the European booking platform, Booking.com.

Although the raised threshold may keep another European gatekeeper, music streaming giant Spotify, out of scope.

MEPs supported the additional criteria for a platform to qualify as a gatekeeper and fall under scope of the DMA of: Namely, providing a “core platform service” in at least three EU countries; having at least 45M monthly end users and 10,000+ business users. The committee also noted their support that these thresholds do not prevent the Commission from designating other companies as gatekeepers — “when they meet certain conditions”.

In other changes, the committee backed adding new provisions around the interoperability of services, such as for number-independent interpersonal communication services and social network services.

And — making an intervention on so-called ‘killer acquisitions’ — MEPs voted for the Commission to have powers to impose “structural or behavioural remedies” where gatekeepers have engaged in systematic non-compliance.

“The approved text foresees in particular the possibility for the Commission to restrict gatekeepers from making acquisitions in areas relevant to the DMA in order to remedy or prevent further damage to the internal market. Gatekeepers would also be obliged to inform the Commission of any intended concentration,” they note on that.

The committee backed a centralized enforcement role for the Commission — while adding some clarifications around the role of national competition authorities.

Failures of enforcement have been a major bone of contention around the EU’s flagship data protection regime, the GDPR, which allows for enforcement to be devolved to Member States but also for forum shopping and gaming of the system — as a couple of EU countries have outsized concentrations of tech giants on their soil and have been critized as bottlenecks to effective GDPR enforcement.

(Only today, for example, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has been hit with a criminal complaint accusing it of procedural blackmail in an attempt to gag complainants in a way that benefits tech giants like Facebook… )

On sanctions for gatekeepers which break the DMA rules, MEPs want the Commission to impose fines of “not less than 4% and not exceeding 20%” of total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year — which, in the case of adtech giants Facebook’s and Google’s full year 2020 revenue would allow for theoretical sanctions in the $3.4BN-$17.2BN and $7.2BN-$36.3BN range, respectively.

Which would be a significant step up on the sorts of regulatory sanctions tech giants have faced to date in the EU.

Facebook has yet to face any fines under GDPR, for example — over three years since it came into application, despite facing numerous complaints. (Although Facebook-owned WhatsApp was recently fined $267M for transparency failures.)

While Google received an early $57M GDPR from France before it moved users to fall under Ireland’s legal jurisdiction — where its adtech has been under formal investigation since 2019 (without any decisions/sanctions as yet).

Mountain View has also faced a number of penalties elsewhere in Europe, though — with France again leading the charge and slapping Google with a $120M fine for dropping tracking cookies without consent (under the EU ePrivacy Directive) last year.

Its competition watchdog has also gone after Google — issuing a $268M penalty this summer for adtech abuses and a $592M sanction (also this summer) related to requirements to negotiate licensing fees with news publishers over content reuse.

It’s interesting to imagine such stings as a mere amuse-bouche compared to the sanctions EU lawmakers want to be able to hand out under the DMA.

Travel and tourism are slowly starting to move again in the wake of Covid-19 crashing over the world and sending us to shelter in place. Today a company focused on experiences — museum visits, skydiving, local cooking classes and more — is announcing a round of growth funding on the back of seeing its own business bounce back. Peek, which provides both a marketplace for consumers to discover and book experiences, a platform for businesses to book team building and other internal events, and tech for tourism companies to digitize, manage and run their own experience businesses online — “like a Shopify for experiences,” CEO and co-founder Ruzwana Bashir said — has raised $80 million. It plans to use the funds to continue expanding its product, hiring more talent, and taking Peek to more places, after passing some $2 billion in bookings from some 35 million customers, mostly in North America.

The round, a Series C, is notable in part because of who is behind it: the funding is being led by WestCap — the investment firm founded by another major player in the business of travel, the former CFO of Airbnb, Laurence Tosi. New investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management is also in the round, along with 3L, Cathay Innovation, I2BF Global Ventures, Manta Ray and Apeiron. Other high profile past backers include Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, and Kayak founder Paul English.

San Francisco-based Peek is not disclosing its valuation, but Bashir told us the figure “has increased substantially because we grew the business a lot and hit profitability this year.” Peek has now raised over $100 million in the last 10 years.

“Now that we are starting to invest again, we are going into investment mode,” she added. Worth pointing out, too, that this round was originally pitched to me as a $60 million investment, and then it grew by $20 million just days ago, which speaks also to the confidence investors currently have in the travel and tourism space.

That’s a big shift from a year ago, when travel-related companies were regrouping and trying to figure out how to continue weathering what had turned out to be a very long storm. Many of them had gone into the summer of 2020 hopeful that the pandemic (which really kicked off earlier in the year) would have subsided and led to a wave of exuberant movement in the warmer months, only to find any bounce short-lived. One of the more well-capitalized of the travel experience startups — Berlin’s GetYourGuide, valued at over $1 billion just 6 months before Covid-19 first started appearing — found itself raising first a big convertible note, and then a big credit facility, as it shored up its business as the pandemic wore on.

Peek was also not immune. When Covid-19 hit, “it was pretty terrifying for us. We were growing great and then, all of the sudden, bookings crashed,” Bashir, who co-founded the company with Oskar Bruening (pictured, below) said. “We then did all the hard things.” That included Peek laying off 30% of its staff to help it get through the slump.

Peek also took to the offensive, thinking of how it could work differently with its customers on both sides of the business. With end users, it doubled down on virtual experiences (for example, online cooking classes); and rethinking and expanding who “customers” could be by building out experiences booking for corporate and internal events.

But the real key sounds like how it rethought that it worked with experience providers, where it helped them get their own emergency loans, and it equipped them with the tools to work within the “new normal” by helping them shift to focusing more on local activities for local people rather than tourists; and providing them with more software and functionality to run those businesses.

“We are the operating system for those merchants,” she said.

It turned out to be the right move: it meant that as those businesses picked up in activity, so did Peek, which found itself turning profitable in the midst of the pandemic. Software currently accounts for “the majority” of Peek’s business, she said, although that could well change over the next year as consumer travel starts to rebound and that brings more activity to Peek’s own marketplace.

“There is a lot of opportunity, $1 trillion in gross merchandise value, and still a lot of businesses haven’t made the leap online,” he said. Many of the experiences customers were previously using pen, paper, phone calls, and managing through spreadsheets, she said, “but [now] you can’t connect with customers now before you connect.”

Activities that Peek covers range from wine tours and watersports to skydiving and art classes, while Peek Pro, as the B2B2C product is called, offers tech to enable online booking, point-of-sale services, and “hundreds” of automations covering things like inventory management, dynamic pricing, waivers, and marketing analytics. Peek says that it has ‘thousands’ customers, including businesses like the Museum of Ice Cream, Color Factory, Artechouse (the experiential art venues) and Pennekamp State Park.

Some of those businesses, without a doubt, target younger adults and thus were already pretty digitally savvy to begin with, but more generally Bashir believes that Peek’s success in building B2B2C tech for experiences companies is part of the bigger trend in the world of business software specifically for offline businesses.

“People underestimate what happened in offline. There was a leap forward in e-commerce,” she said of the story that’s often told about the impact Covid-19 had on businesses that were already online. But offline businesses were faced with needing to suddenly make what she calls “a ten-year leap” to catch up. Peek is part of the battalion of tech companies have rushed to fill that void for various other use cases, such as building software for restaurants, or building logistics or curbside pickup for brick-and-mortar retailers.

“We have been early adopters and investors in travel technology companies, and have been following Peek.com for years,” said Tosi of WestCap, in a statement. “Ruzwana Bashir is a dynamic leader and Peek.com’s unique approach has allowed them to serve millions of people. This is a transformative solution that will allow a wider audience of travelers and locals to have meaningful experiences, and for activity operators to grow their businesses.”

Twitter’s e-commerce initiatives now include livestream shopping and Walmart will be the first retailer to test the new platform. Over the past year, Walmart has invested in live shopping by hosting events across social platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and soon it will debut Twitter’s first-ever shoppable livestream. On November 28, Walmart will kick off a Cyber Deals live event on Twitter, where users will be able to watch a live broadcast, shop the featured products, and join the conversation around the event by posting tweets.

The livestream will begin at 7 PM ET on Nov. 28, 2021, and will allow Walmart customers to shop from Twitter as well as a number of other platforms, including Walmart.com/live, and the retailer’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube accounts. Musician-turned-creator Jason Derulo will host the livestream where he’ll introduce the audience to deals in electronics, home goods, apparel, seasonal décor, and more during a 30-minute variety show. Surprise special guests will also drop in, says Walmart.

Image Credits: Walmart

Walmart has been broadening its support for livestream shopping throughout 2021. It hosted its first shoppable livestream last December when it worked with TikTok on its Holiday Shop-Along Spectacular event, shortly after its planned investment in the video app fell through. (Walmart was interested in a deal for TikTok following Trump’s executive order that would have forced a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations. But Trump’s order was blocked by the courts.)

That first TikTok live event proved successful, Walmart said at the time, having delivered 7x more views than had been anticipated. It also helped Walmart grow its TikTok follower base by 25%. Though the retailer didn’t detail the sales revenue the event delivered, it ran a second TikTok livestream shopping event just a few months later.

While Walmart’s bid for TikTok had signaled the retailer’s interest in live, social e-commerce, it saw potential outside of TikTok, as well. Over the past year, Walmart expanded livestream shopping tests to include other platforms. To date, Walmart has hosted more than 15 livestream events across five platforms, including its own website.

Those live commerce initiatives will now include Twitter, which is today revealing its new livestream shopping platform to the public.

Twitter says the Walmart Cyber Deals livestream will serve as the initial test of Live Shopping on Twitter in the U.S.

Image Credits: Twitter

This new platform expands upon Twitter’s existing shopping products and livestream capabilities.

It will include a live broadcast that streams at the top of a Live Event page, followed by a Shoppable Banner and Shop Tab where the products shown in the livestream are featured. Twitter users will be able to toggle back and forth between the “Lastest” tab and the “Shop” tab during the event as they preview the products. When consumers want to make a purchase, they’re directed to the retailer’s website within an in-app browser where the livestream will continue to be broadcast. That way, users won’t miss anything during checkout, Twitter says.

At the bottom of the Live Event page, there’s also a text box where consumers can tweet about the livestream with a suggested hashtag.

“We are honored to have Walmart onboard as the first-ever brand to host a Live Shopping event on Twitter. Walmart is renowned for bringing customers an immersive look into their products and we are excited to bring this experience onto Twitter with them, while helping them reach their business objectives,” said Sarah Personette, Chief Customer Officer at Twitter, in a statement.  “This is just the first of many Live Shopping events we hope brands will be able to bring to market, and we can’t wait for people to watch, chat, and shop — all through Twitter,” she added.

Image Credits: Twitter

The livestream shopping platform builds on Twitter’s earlier tests of a Shop Module, launched in July, that gave brands, businesses, and retailers a way to showcase their products directly on their Twitter profiles. The test was meant to better understand if there was demand for shopping on Twitter, and had included a handful of pilot partners like gaming retailer GameStop and travel brand Arden Cove, among others.

Walmart said it was interested in testing Twitter’s new capabilities because it consistently sees high returns across top- and middle-of-funnel content on Twitter’s platform, which makes it a natural next step for Walmart’s explorations into social commerce.

The new Twitter livestream event represents the start of a bigger push into live shopping over the 2021 holiday season for Walmart. The company says it has over 30 shoppable livestream events planned across eight social and media platforms, including BuyWith, BuzzFeed, Facebook, IGN, TalkShopLive, Tasty, Twitter, and YouTube. (TikTok was not listed, but Walmart told us it’s working closely with the TikTok team on future shoppable livestreams.)

“Twitter continues to be an important platform for Walmart’s business and our customers,” said William White, Chief Marketing Officer at Walmart U.S. “We’ve been focused on charting new territory in shoppable livestreams and are excited to celebrate an important milestone together with the first Livestream Shopping event on Twitter. We’re meeting customers where they are and making it easier to shop incredible deals and find inspiration through dynamic, interactive experiences. We look forward to continuing to bring engaging experiences to our customers that allow them to shop seamlessly while also being entertained,” he added.

Following the initial test of Live Shopping with Walmart, Twitter says it will start testing a new way to house merchant onboarding and product catalog management tools through an interface called the “Twitter Shopping Manager.” This will simplify the process of getting started with Shopping on Twitter, the company says. It also plans to make the Shop Module available to more retailers over the coming weeks.

Twitter told TechCrunch it doesn’t take a cut of the e-commerce revenues delivered through Live Shopping nor are brands paying to be included. But offering live shopping on Twitter could entice more users to join the platform, which has historically struggled with growing consumer adoption.

The live event will be available on Twitter on iOS and desktop in the U.S., starting on Nov. 28th at 7 PM ET/4 PM PT.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it would stop accepting Visa credit cards issued in the U.K. due to high interchange fees on transactions. The company gave a deadline of January 19 and is offering consumers who primarily use Visa cards £20 off a purchase as an incentive to update their preferred payment method.

The move followed similar efforts by Amazon to curtail the use of Visa-issued credit cards in Singapore and Australia, markets where the e-commerce giant introduced a 0.5% surcharge on transactions made with those cards. In both cases, Amazon also offered customers gift cards to encourage them to switch payment methods.

While Amazon is asserting its market dominance in an effort to lower transaction fees — which a company spokesperson said “[continue] to be an obstacle for businesses striving to provide the best prices for customers” — it is hardly alone in its desire to ween customers off high-cost payment methods.

For merchants, the introduction of “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) payment options, the rise of digital wallets and a broader push toward ACH or account-to-account (A2A) transactions are all part of a strategy to reduce consumers’ overreliance on credit cards.

For today, let’s focus on BNPL and why it is becoming a more attractive payment option for big e-commerce companies like Amazon and Walmart, as well as merchant marketplaces like Square and Shopify.

Not just bigger shopping carts

For years, the key selling point of BNPL services like Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna was that they allowed merchants to increase the average order value while also reducing cart abandonment.

Affirm’s merchant transaction fees vary depending on the structure of the installment offering, which takes into account things like the cart size, length of term and whether those loans are offered to the consumer as 0% APR or interest-bearing installments.