Vice President, Technology Partnerships

New ecommerce tools: August 19, 2026. August 19, 2026 - Sig Ueland. My rundown this week of new services for merchants includes updates on page builders, warehousing, dropshipping, real-time tracking, listing tools, installment payments, finance tools, drone deliveries, ecommerce insurance, and more. Got an ecommerce product release? Email [email protected]. New tools for merchants. WP Engine opens Smart Search AI to the WordPress ecosystem. WP Engine, a provider of tools for WordPress sites, has announced Smart Search AI. Purpose-built for WordPress, Smart Search AI offers out-of-the-box compatibility with Advanced Custom Fields and WooCommerce, as well as flexible integration with headless environments via WPGraphQL and REST APIs. The plugin includes access to the Smart Search AI MCP Server, now in open beta. Amazon launches long-term bulk storage for merchants in Europe. Starting on August 20, 2026, Amazon is bringing Warehousing and Distribution to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. Amazon Warehousing and Distribution helps merchants address supply chain challenges by providing long-term bulk storage in distribution centers with automated replenishment to FBA centers across Europe. Merchants can maintain optimal FBA inventory with AWD's auto-replenishment capability, reducing the risk of stock-outs. RankingCoach and Extendify launch WordPress SEO and marketing plugin. RankingCoach has partnered with Extendify, an agentic AI platform for building and managing websites, to install BeyondSEO, a WordPress plugin, as part of Extendify's default setup. BeyondSEO is a freemium plugin and requires no RankingCoach account. Built for small businesses, agencies, and web professionals, BeyondSEO improves visibility across traditional search engines and genAI platforms, according to RankingCoach. Veho announces real-time tracking integration with Shopify. Ecommerce delivery specialist Veho has integrated real-time delivery tracking with Shopify. Veho tracking moves through each stage of delivery, from pre-transit to final drop-off. Merchants can continue creating labels and managing shipments through their existing process, with no additional setup or workflow changes. As part of the integration, Veho is now a Shopify Tracking Partner. TopDawg integrates multichannel dropshipping platform with BigCommerce and TikTok Shop. TopDawg, a U.S.-based dropshipping platform, wholesale supplier network, and ecommerce automation tool, has announced the addition of BigCommerce and TikTok Shop integrations to its platform, which includes Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Shopify, and WooCommerce. According to TopDawg, the integrations help retailers simplify product sourcing, listing management, inventory updates, order routing, and fulfillment across varied selling platforms, all through a centralized portal. Uncanny Automator launches an AI page builder for WordPress. Uncanny Automator has launched Page Builder, an AI-first tool for WordPress. Users describe a page's content, style, or intended audience, and Uncanny Agent generates the layout, hierarchy, and styling. Users can also upload a screenshot, define site-wide brand settings, apply Agent's edits, and more. Ordoro and Arda connect replenishment and ecommerce fulfillment. Ordoro, an ecommerce fulfillment platform, has partnered with Arda, a replenishment tool. Ordoro helps merchants manage orders, inventory, fulfillment, and shipping across sales channels, while Arda helps teams identify when to order materials, packaging, or components. Together, the two providers say they help merchants connect replenishment with the workflows that support inventory, fulfillment, and shipping. Airwallex partners with Affirm on installment payments. Airwallex, a tool to manage international payments, has added installment payment provider Affirm to Airwallex's checkout platform for eligible merchants in 35 markets. Consumers can pay in installments up to 24 months. The partnership aligns with Airwallex's strategy to expand financial services beyond cross-border payments, including investments in AI-powered finance and embedded solutions. Affirm is now available across multiple Airwallex integration methods, including Hosted Payment Page, Drop-in Element, Mobile SDK, Native API, Shopify, and Payment Links. ClearJet secures $25 million to scale SuperCarrier network. ClearJet, a provider of parcel logistics infrastructure and orchestration, has raised a $25 million equity investment led by Edison Partners. The funding will support the company's expansion across its network of 95 U.S. airports. ClearJet says it connects shippers with unused cargo space on commercial flights, delivering packages nationwide at the speed of air freight and the price of ground shipping. ClearJet's delivery network is carrier-agnostic. Blink launches an all-in-one creator platform for digital products. Blink has launched its storefront and checkout platform for sellers of templates, courses, ebooks, and other digital items. Blink stores include a customizable frontend and serve as the legal seller, calculating, collecting, filing, and remitting sales tax, VAT, and GST worldwide, as well as processing refunds, disputes, and chargebacks. Sellers can accept payments across 150 countries in 85 currencies without registering for tax. Post Purchase Upsell launches for Shopify. Abakira LLC has released its Post Purchase Upsell app for Shopify, enabling sellers to put a one-click offer on a page between payment and order confirmation. Accepted offers are added to the order the buyer already placed and paid for, so there's no second checkout and no separate charge. For subscription sales, an accepted offer can extend an existing plan or start a new one. Assureful and CedCommerce deliver insurance to ecommerce merchants. Assureful, an AI-driven commercial insurance program administrator, and CedCommerce, an ecommerce platform, have announced a program to deliver pay-as-you-sell general liability insurance to U.S. merchants on major online marketplaces. The program offers coverage for property damage and bodily and personal injury. Goflow introduces working capital for ecommerce sellers. Goflow, a multichannel operating system for sellers, has launched Capital, a Goflow-native financing experience. Goflow Capital gives eligible sellers options when inventory needs, growth opportunities, or cash-flow timing gaps arise. Sellers can start from their Goflow account, answer a few questions, and view available financing options. eBay launches listing tool in Australia. eBay Australia has introduced an AI-powered listing tool that allows sellers to generate product listings from uploaded photos. The tool functions inside the photography panel of the eBay mobile app. When a seller activates the feature, eBay's software uses a three-stage process to list products for sale. Morph launches platform to accelerate global stablecoin adoption. Morph, a stablecoin-focused network, is launching Morph Payments, a payments platform that lets global businesses and teams accept and send stablecoins. Businesses connect their own self-custodial wallets, and payments settle directly on-chain. Morph says it provides a secure, efficient infrastructure for the $10.2 trillion stablecoin market, facilitating faster cross-border settlements. Customer intelligence and analytics platform Decile launches MCP. Decile, a customer intelligence platform for ecommerce brands, has launched its MCP, enabling marketers to access Decile's ecommerce analytics, customer insights, and audience segment creation tools directly within Claude and ChatGPT. Marketers can ask natural language questions about their customers and turn the insights into advertising and marketing campaigns. Yuno raises $45 million to scale AI-native operating system of global payments. Yuno, a global AI-native payments and financial services provider, has announced a $45 million funding round led by Global PayTech Ventures. Yuno says it connects businesses through a single API to over 1,000 payment methods and more than 460 integrations across 190 countries, with intelligent routing, one-click checkout, and built-in AI-powered fraud detection. Yuno will use the funding for research and development and expansion of its global infrastructure. Xnurta launches MCP for retail media. Xnurta, an AI-powered advertising platform, has announced the availability of Xnurta MCP, a server that connects retail media data with AI assistants and genAI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude. Xnurta MCP eliminates manual data exports for advertisers using AI for reporting and analysis. Users can query ad performance, metrics, campaign structures, managed groups, and product lines, along with a log of human and AI-initiated account activity. Amazon launches drone delivery site in the U.K. Amazon drones are now delivering parcels in Darlington, England, as part of the launch of Prime Air in the U.K., the first outside of the U.S. Consumers within a 7.5-mile radius of the fulfillment center can have select items delivered within 60 minutes of placing an order, via an MK30 drone operating autonomously using detect-and-avoid technology. Sig Ueland Industry IQ

The split-shipment problem: how tactical merchants ship compliantly without losing sales. Create your store and start selling today. Table of Contents Create your new website. See if the BigCommerce platform is a good fit for your business. No credit card required. 08/11/2026 Tired of scrolling? Download a PDF version for easier offline reading and sharing with coworkers. * Mixed carts break compliance: Firearms must ship to an FFL dealer while other items go to the door - most platforms can't handle both. * Native features aren't enough: BigCommerce manages inventory, but routing split carts takes tools like ShipperHQ and Master FFL. * Blackstone proves it works: Flxpoint plus a Master FFL checkout prevents illegal transactions automatically. * Stability is a deciding factor: Volatile platform policies push 2A merchants to migrate; Blackstone chose BigCommerce for scalable integrations. * Growth is sustained: Continued YoY revenue for Blackstone; 23.8% faster mobile load and 15.4% more visits for Army Navy Outdoors. If you sell firearms, ammunition, or tactical gear online, you already know the checkout page is where things get complicated. A customer adds a pistol and a range bag to their cart. One of those items has to go to a licensed FFL dealer. The other can ship straight to their door. Most ecommerce platforms have no idea how to handle that, and if the underlying logic isn't built correctly, the consequences aren't cosmetic. They're operational and legal. At Mira Commerce, Export Connect has spent the last several years building ecommerce experiences for tactical and firearms merchants, and the pattern is consistent: the businesses that get this right treat compliance as a design problem to solve, not a limitation to work around. Here's what that actually looks like in practice. Where checkout breaks. When a cart contains both FFL-regulated and non-regulated items, let's say a firearm, range bag, and a jacket, a traditional ecommerce checkout considers this one transaction with one delivery address. As I mentioned above, that's a problem, because the firearm legally has to go to a licensed dealer while the other two items can be delivered to the customer's doorstep. If your platform doesn't allow you to implement these separate workflows correctly, pricing and inventory can become inconsistent, regulated products can bypass required compliance steps, and checkout can fail for mixed carts containing both restricted and unrestricted items. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It's what happens when the cart and checkout logic hasn't been built to recognize the difference between a restricted and unrestricted SKU in the first place. BigCommerce's Multi-Location Inventory features give merchants the tools to manage stock across warehouses and distributors, but the native checkout doesn't automatically detect that a cart is split across different locations and automatically calculate or route shipping accordingly. Closing that gap takes purpose-built tooling. For split-shipment logistics, that means integrating a platform like ShipperHQ. For the FFL side specifically, it means layering in a solution like Master FFL, which detects when a transfer is required, enforces state-specific restrictions automatically, and walks the customer through selecting a licensed dealer before they ever reach payment. A real build: Blackstone Shooting Sports. Export Connect saw this problem in full at Blackstone Shooting Sports, a firearms and range retailer that runs a hybrid fulfillment model with some inventory held in-house and some drop-shipped through distributors. Its solution combined two pieces. First, Export Connect integrated Flxpoint to automate multi-supplier product syndication, inventory, and pricing, so the storefront always reflects accurate stock and pricing while orders quietly route to the correct supplier behind the scenes. Second, Export Connect customized their BigCommerce checkout with Master FFL, enabling it to automatically detect when a firearm transfer is required, apply the right state restrictions, and prompt the customer to select an FFL dealer. Only then does it route the order through the checkout process. The result is a single, unified shopping experience that never puts a customer in a position to complete an illegal transaction, and never puts the merchant in a position to catch the error manually after the fact. Why merchants end up migrating platforms in the first place. Many of the tactical merchants that come to Export Connect for help are running on a legacy platform that is struggling under the weight of technical debt and operational fragility, but often the bigger driver is the awareness of the volatility of its acceptable use policies. More and more frequently, they hear about a platform updating policies with little warning, forcing their 2A merchants to migrate on extremely short notice to avoid total business disruption. Blackstone's move to BigCommerce was driven by the need for a more modern, scalable ecommerce platform that could support long-term growth. As an older platform, Coreware couldn't support the best-of-breed integrations, including Flxpoint and Master FFL, that they needed to compete in the market. Migrating to BigCommerce provided a high-performance storefront, stronger merchandising and administrative capabilities, improved mobile and SEO performance, and a scalable foundation for future growth. Most importantly, it gave Blackstone the flexibility to continuously evolve its ecommerce experience while supporting the unique compliance requirements of the firearms industry. Their story serves as proof that platform stability isn't a nice-to-have in this vertical. It's often the deciding factor. What the results actually show. Blackstone's most significant result isn't a single number, it's the continued year-over-year growth they've recognized since their migration to BigCommerce. Beyond the launch itself, Mira delivered a highly customized ecommerce solution that integrated Lightspeed POS, Flxpoint, Master FFL, Algolia, and custom middleware to orchestrate complex pricing logic across multiple systems while supporting the unique operational, fulfillment, and compliance requirements of the firearms industry. This combination of complex integrations, custom business logic, and a significantly improved shopping experience created a stronger foundation for growth has translated into sustained year-over-year organic revenue growth for the company, not just a one-time launch bump. "We knew growth wasn't going to come from just switching platforms - it required a partner who could move quickly, think strategically, and adapt to our business in real time. Mira stood out because they listened first, responded fast, and consistently brought solutions tailored to our specific needs. It never felt transactional. It felt like working with an extension of our own team, focused on helping us scale the right way." - Taylor Burke Managing Partner, Head of Sales & Marketing, Blackstone For Army Navy Outdoors, which completed a BigCommerce V2-to-V3 migration alongside a full redesign, the standout metric was a 23.8% improvement in mobile load speed alongside a 15.4% increase in visits and a 12.5% lift in organic click-through rate. While speed doesn't always get the spotlight next to traffic and revenue numbers, it's the foundation everything else sits on: faster sites lower bounce rates and compound into long-term SEO gains across the entire storefront The final word. Split shipments, FFL compliance, and platform volatility aren't separate problems - they're symptoms of the same underlying issue: most ecommerce platforms weren't built with a regulated product category in mind. Solving it takes the right combination of native platform capability and purpose-built third-party tooling, applied correctly from the first line of checkout logic. This is exactly the kind of complexity its Caliber Accelerator was built to solve out of the box - native FFL selection, split-shipment logistics, and the integration patterns above, without every merchant having to reinvent them from scratch. To learn more about Mira Commerce's expertise in the firearms and tactical industry, visit www.miracommerce.com/tactical/. This post is the first installment in its Dialed In series, which spotlights the operational realities of running ecommerce in the tactical and firearms industry. Isn't about time that you evaluated your ecommerce platform?