After it was delayed earlier in the year, Prime Day 2020 will kick off partway through next month, according to The Verge. The website says it obtained an internal Amazon email that states the two-day shopping event will start on October 13th. The company will reportedly share its plans on September 27th.

When asked about the email, a spokesperson for Amazon told The Verge, “Stay tuned for more details on Prime Day.” They added that customers can ask their Alexa devices to keep them updated on the status of the annual shopping event.

The move reflected a spike in demand from people staying at home, according to Amazon. It also reflected a need to respect anti-coronavirus safety precautions, the company said. The restrictions only affect sales fulfilled through Amazon. You can still buy non-essentials through Amazon in France and Italy if they’re fulfilled through third parties.

This is an escalation for Amazon, which just days earlier restricted supply deliveries to its US and European warehouses. Now, the company is outright limiting customers’ options. Not that it necessarily had much choice. Coronavirus infection rates have been disproportionately high in France and Italy, prompting effective lockdowns. If Amazon and other online retailers can’t cope with the volume of orders, daily life in affected countries could suffer.

The loss of FedEx ground shipping put many third-party Amazon sellers in a bind over the busy holiday period. CNBC reported some merchants had to resort to other methods, sometimes at a higher cost, for Prime orders. They were still able to use FedEx Ground for non-Prime packages, as well as FedEx Express over the holidays.

FedEx might not be a permanent option for ground shipping, though. The courier said in August it wouldn’t renew its ground delivery contract with Amazon’s own packages (though third-party sellers could still use the service). Amazon has expanded its own delivery network in recent years, including using drones, as it takes more direct control over distribution.

“We highly respect the vision of the Libra Association; however, eBay has made the decision to not move forward as a founding member,” eBay said in a statement. “At this time, we are focused on rolling out eBay’s managed payments experience for our customers.”

“Stripe is supportive of projects that aim to make online commerce more accessible for people around the world.,” Stripe told the FT. Libra has this potential. We will follow its progress closely and remain open to working with the Libra Association at a later stage.”

PayPal dropped its support for Libra last week. Visa and Mastercard are reportedly reconsidering whether to stay involved.

Amazon is now straight copying Allbirds.

We have reached “peak cloning” in Silicon Valley.

There are no rules anymore – if you build a product that works, Amazon or Facebook will copy it.

People used to care. Not anymore. pic.twitter.com/73bDMgruMX

— Jeff Morris Jr. (@jmj) September 19, 2019

Copying a hugely successful product is nothing new for Amazon. For example, the company has offered an Instant Pot clone for more than a year now. However, what makes this latest instance of creative theft so brazen is the way in which Amazon has tried to hide the copying. With the company’s Instant Pot clone, there’s no mistaking the slow cooker’s origins; it says right on the front that it’s an AmazonBasics product. With its newest clone, however, Amazon markets the shoes under its private 206 Collective label.

As The Verge points out, blatant copying is nothing new to the fashion world. However, Amazon’s copying underlines an uncomfortable aspect of the company’s power. With its vast amounts of data, Amazon can easily identify popular products. With its unprecedented scale, it can then offer those products at a fraction of the cost that other companies sell their wares. It’s an aspect of the company that regulators have struggled with for a while. One potential solution to the problem is to not allow big e-commerce platforms to sell their own products on their platforms. This is something India does. With Amazon’s new shoes, you can see why that might be a good idea. A pair of Allbirds typically cost around $95. Amazon’s new shoes, by contrast, cost as little as $35. And while copying a pair of shoes is a relatively minor offense, the episode is likely to feed into the perception that Amazon and other companies should be regulated as part of the government’s recent antitrust investigations into big tech.

Basically, users can snap a photo or upload a screenshot on the Pinterest app, and its Lens feature will identify similar products they can buy online. Google last year unveiled something similar for its own Lens feature.

The site says that its updated Lens feature can identify 2.5 billion objects across home and fashion pins. “Now, when you use Lens within a fashion or home Pin to hone in on a specific product or object, you’ll see shoppable Product Pins (Pins with the current price and a direct link to checkout on the retailer’s site) along with visually similar ideas to try or buy,” wrote Pinterest on its blog.

In the case of Pinterest — which most users already use to catalog fashion and homeware finds — the addition of visual search will be an especially useful tool. Lens, which first launched back in 2017, has already become a vital feature for Pinterest’s highly-visual user base. The tool contributes to around 600 million visual searches every month on the platform. Fine-tuning the AI-based feature to make it easier for Pinterest users to shop is a surefire way to make sure they keep returning to the app.

With today’s expansion, Drive Up is available at 1,750 Target retail locations nationwide, including at stores in states where the service was previously unavailable: Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. As part of the expansion, Target is promising first-time Drive Up customers free product samples as a way to encourage people to try out the service.

After a pilot in Minneapolis and St. Paul in 2017, Target officially launched Drive Up in 2018. Since then, the footprint of the service has grown dramatically, with the company’s most recent expansion before today making Drive Up available at 1,550 stores nationwide. Additionally, what started as a two-hour delivery service now promises to complete orders within an hour. Drive Up has been so successful that Amazon has felt pressure to match Target. In June, the company announced a partnership with Rite Aid that will offer Amazon customers free in-store pickup at 1,500 Rite Aid drug stores across the US before the end of the year. By then, Target plans to roll out Drive Up to the majority of the 1,855 stores the company operates across the US.

Kroger became the first company to test out the new feature last week with their #TransformUrDorm challenge. TikTok users were asked to post before and after videos of their dorm makeovers. They were also invited to buy products such as a toaster and a popcorn maker through a dedicated Kroger brand page on the TikTok app. The hashtag now has over 447 million views across hundreds of different videos.

Companies have already experimented with their own influencer campaigns on the app. As Buzzfeed noted in a recent profile, teenage TikTok influencers have been approached by music labels to use certain songs in their videos. Beauty brands are using TikTok to corner the under-24 market. Both Sephora and TooFaced have launched campaigns on the app in recent weeks, reported Glossy.

Venturing into ecommerce is a bold move for the relatively new TikTok, which recently celebrated its one year anniversary. But the app’s international scope and primarily Gen-Z audience will no doubt be irresistible for advertisers. Much like Instagram in 2013 before the advent of sponsored posts and hyper-targeted ads, TikTok remains one of the few places on the internet where young people can be free from advertisers. With sponsored hashtags and dedicated brand pages on the way, that’s likely to change.

As FedEx told its investors, only 1.3 percent of its 2018 revenue came from Amazon. It says it’s prepared to serve “thousands” of retailers in the e-commerce space, which it expects to grow from 50 million packages to 100 million packages per day in the US by 2026. “We are excited about the future of e-commerce and our role as a leader in it,” FedEx said. This decision won’t impact international deliveries or contracts between Amazon and other FedEx business units, such as FedEx Ground.

The news may not be too concerning for Amazon, as the company has other carriers to choose from. It’s also working on its own drone delivery service. Just this week, it released new details, stating that it hopes the drones will have a 15-mile range and the ability to haul packages under 5lbs to customers within 30 minutes. It’s not yet clear when the fleet will be ready or if the loss of this FedEx contract will be any incentive to speed things up.

Engadget has reached out to FedEx for more information.

Before 2014, eBay had some automatic translation options, but it seems the use of AI has been a boon for sellers as it’s said to have improved translation by around 10 percent. The AI only affected search queries and listing titles (and not product descriptions), but it seems that more accurate translation helped people find the items they were looking for, leading to increased sales.

The economists behind the study also looked at AI translations for French, Italian and Russian. They found similar results, though focused on Latin America due to the way in which eBay rolled out the translation tools.

The researchers considered mitigating factors, such as the length of title listings and marketing spend. They also noted that when eBay added AI translations for Latin America, it added other localization options, including prices in buyers’ own currencies and local deals and promotions.

It makes sense that when people have access to more accurate translations, it’s easier for them to conduct business with folks in other countries. The researchers noted that since they completed their research, Google has released a translation tool that’s even more powerful and has “significantly improved translation quality” as it looks at the context of entire sentences instead of simply converting individual words into another language. Google’s translation services are naturally used more broadly than those on eBay, and as such the economists suggest that, based on their findings, its effect “on cross-border trade could be large.”