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Online Shopping

E-commerce giants of the late ’90s and early ’00s like Amazon and eBay changed how the world shopped. Some of those companies have stuck around, but a new generation of commerce platforms is quickly gaining ground. Ultracheap retailers like Temu, Shein, and AliExpress are winning over customers, luring them in with bargain bin prices on products shipped directly from manufacturers in China. Shopping has also become a core part of business for social media companies — your TikTok feed is both a stream of videos and an endless shelf of products for sale. The Verge’s online shopping section covers how and what we buy and the forces driving this sprawling and opaque market.

The birth of a salesman

The Flip shopping app is a TikTok knockoff, filled with wannabe influencers making pennies per video view — myself included.

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
Mia Sato
Who reviews the reviewers?

House Fresh, a blog focused on air quality, is just the kind of source you might want when you’re shopping for an air purifier — but it’s getting harder and harder to find them.

In a post titled, “How Google is killing independent sites like ours,” managing editor Gisele Navarro explains how bigger publishers like BuzzFeed, Better Homes & Gardens, and Rolling Stone outrank the independent site in Google Search:

These Digital Goliaths shouldn’t be able to use product recommendations as their personal piggy bank, simply flying through Google updates off the back of ‘the right signals,’ an old domain, or the echo of a reputable brand that is no longer.

As a team that has dedicated the last few years to testing and reviewing air purifiers, it’s disheartening to see our independent site be outranked by big-name publications that haven’t even bothered to check if a company is bankrupt before telling millions of readers to buy their products.