Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast
Feed your growth mindset. Ecommerce is growing, and so are the challenges and opportunities for online retailers. In the Growing Ecommerce podcast, Mike Ryan and other smec experts are joined by industry leaders in ecommerce, digital marketing, and data science. By sharing business trends, practical solutions, and best practices, this podcast helps online retailers solve the challenges of tomorrow.
Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast
A German Court Just Made Google Liable for Its AI | Plus: Temu & Shein Fall Off a Cliff
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A small regional court in Germany just handed down a ruling with global consequences: Google is liable for what its AI Overviews say. The "AI can make mistakes" disclaimer? Insufficient. Text generated by Gemini counts as Google’s own words — and Mike Ryan and Chris break down why this precedent could quickly spread from publishing to shopping, consumer protection, and the product recommendations AI assistants are already making every day.
Then: a victory lap. Five weeks ago we called it — the EU’s July 1st de minimis change would break the business model of Temu, Shein & AliExpress in Europe. Now the data is in (and quoted by Reuters): Temu fell from 70%+ of advertisers facing daily competition down to just 23%. Shein dropped to 5%. We cover what the €3-per-item fee actually does, why one major German fashion retailer is overspending by 70% to grab the open market, and why UK retailers should brace for what comes next.
In this episode:
• The German libel ruling: why Google’s AI disclaimer didn’t protect it
• "Those are your own words" — hallucinations as legal exposure
• Why the precedent could spread to shopping, consumer protection & false advertising
• The feed as deterministic anchor: why Google grounds its AI in merchant data
• The €3 de minimis fee — and why it’s worse than a 10% tariff
• smec’s data in Reuters: Temu 70% → 23%, Shein down to 5% of advertisers
• The playbook: profitable CPCs are on tap — but maybe not for long
• Shein’s IPO trouble, the shift to Europe & the warning for the UK, Canada & Australia
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Intro — a German courtroom & a victory lap
SPEAKER_01Welcome to another episode of Growing E-Commerce. I am one of your hosts, Mike Ryan, and with me as always is Chris enjoying a Red Bull.
SPEAKER_00I'm a Red Bull fanboy. You're steadfast. You know that we're not getting any sponsorship money for this. Yes. Re- reiterate on that because it's true, but you're enjoying one as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because you bought it for me. Thank you, Chris. So in today's episode, we are going to talk about a precedent set in a jor in a German courtroom that could have impacts on merchant center feeds all over the world. Big one, yes. Absolutely. And then we'll move on to yeah, actually taking a little bit of a victory lap, to be honest. We got it totally right with Timu and Sheehan and the impact of tariffs, and we're going to give you an update there. So let's get into it.
SPEAKER_00Two great topics. I'm always pumped when we talk about the Chinese shines. I don't know why. Because for me, you're still Mr. Timu. You don't
Google sued over AI Overviews: the case
SPEAKER_00know.
SPEAKER_01No, I told you. Don't say it too loud. Um, I love whenever I see them squirming, and they're squirming right now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I think uh Timu and Shane, but we'll probably we do it uh as as the last point of today. Yeah. But that's that's certainly um yeah, massive news there. Let's start with the ruling, which might be way bigger than a lot of people think.
SPEAKER_01Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00You want to shed some light on it?
SPEAKER_01Sure, I'll I'll kick it off. So um there was a suit brought against Google. I have to check it was actually a little while back, you know, court cases take a while. But the ruling just landed, so it's fresh. This was brought to a rather small regional court in Germany. Um, but as we know, things can spread fast in Europe. We're we're fast at regulating, we're fast at uh court cases like we're wolf champions it. Yeah, everyone's good at something, Chris. Uh thanks, man. Yeah. Well, uh that I mean we'll talk about that again with Timu later. So but um this is quite interesting. Basically, uh two publishers, there was really more or less one publisher and a subsidiary. Uh, they filed uh more or less a libel suit against Google AI overviews. Um and libel is just slander in written form. So it's when you, you know, non-lawyer here, but if you make a disparaging claim or a claim that can inflict m monetary harm against someone and it's false, you're not allowed to do that.
SPEAKER_00And uh and I think a very important uh side note here is uh the precondition for that is that you literally have to own the statement. So you're responsible for the statement. You're not citing something. Yeah, it's basically your own idea. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah, you're not quoting someone or something like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's right. So um AI overviews uh stated that these publishers were doing shady business practices, scams, this kind of stuff. Um details are not too important. But what
Those are your own words" — why Google’s disclaimer failed
SPEAKER_01happened was Google said, hey, this is just AI overviews. It's based on information synthesized from the web and stuff like that. And AI can make mistakes. Yeah, we say in every response, AI can make mistakes. You are using an AI feature, all this kind of stuff. And the court said, um, sorry. Thank you. Yeah, basically. Sorry to be politically incorrect. The court said uh that disclaimer is insufficient. And um because Google has pr been protected in the past on their general search engine result page for surfacing sometimes objectionable content or stuff like that. They can't really be held liable for that. Um but this this is text that was generated by Gemini by Google's AI models, and the court decided that those are your own words, and your disclaimer does not protect you from making slanderous or libeless statements. So you are on the hook for what AI overviews say.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And I think you hit the nail on the head here because I think the the reason why that, by the way, I mean the fact that Google was in front of court again, that's not big news. Yeah. That they lost is somehow big news because they lose barely. And that the reason, and I think this is so important to understand, the reason why they basically were protected for such a long time with regards to the results on the search result page was because everything was rooted in basically data they were getting from some structured source, data features, the website itself. This time they say, Hold on, yeah, guys, this was generated by product you created, which is Gemini.
SPEAKER_01And and by the way, to make matters worse, my understanding is that it was a hallucination.
SPEAKER_00There wasn't even like so it wasn't except please be let's be frank, yeah. You're right. It was not it was not true. Yeah. Everything we read about it, it was not true. It was literally not true. Yeah, so hallucination. Yeah, you're right.
SPEAKER_01So I mean, we've known from the early days uh BARD and so on that these companies were moving fast with this technology and that there could be exposure. Um and but where I think this gets interesting for e-commerce specifically, I mean, again, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm gonna go out on a bit of a limb here. Based on what I've seen living in Europe the last uh several years, almost 10 years, um, I've noticed that jurisdictions are very collaborative and they will often uh cite each other's precedents or kind of learn from each other. They learn from each other, let's say like that. Um court cases get replicated. If one has been successful in one market, it'll quickly get replicated. There might even be active cases in other markets right now, I'm not sure. Um and and
Why this precedent could spread to shopping & consumer protection
SPEAKER_01you know, there's a a lot of shared common law in Europe, and these things can quickly escalate. Yes. Just spread like a wildfire. The other thing is that um I I believe that a precedent like this could quickly spread to consumer protection, shopping, and stuff like that. Because there are existing directives. There's just plenty of precedent here that you are not allowed to make misleading statements about product characteristics, price, availability. This is all very frowned upon as a retailer, as a marketplace, which Google is in this case, or in as a content, you know, what do you want to call it? There's some kind of hybrid between a content outlet and a and a marketplace here. Um so I think you could sum it up as false advertising, basically. If someone buys a product and um Google had made mislading misleading statements about that or recommended it based on misleading premises, hallucinations, I'm I'm pretty sure we're not too far away from a scenario where Google will be on the hook for this stuff.
SPEAKER_00I think you mentioned it you you're willing to go out on a limb here. I by the way, you you can't be more wrong than I was wrong about my prediction uh with regards to US Belgium Belgium, where I said my US boys will win. Uh they didn't. What you said makes perfect sense. And I tell I tell you why. Uh and I think we have been talking about this a couple of times before off the record. The again, another reason why Google had basically had no issues with inaccurate product data was because everything was rooted basically in the data feed, right? Yeah, yeah. Almost every campaign is drawing information from the product feed, and here the liability was fully on the side of the of the online retailer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, true.
SPEAKER_00And Google was quite uh quite heavy on them, right, to stick to these rules. Yeah, in this new AI, enchantic surfaces, what is happening here? That the shopping assistance uh is is working and it's it's going deep. I mean, I I'm using it almost every week, and you get real additional information, you get recommendations. So it's like talking to a person. So it I I feel like there is way more room to make an error.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because we're talking about literal recommendations. And I I could think about so many cases, man. I have some issues with my leg and I want the best fitting running shoe. I get recommendation. Maybe it gets worse. Worst case is I rupture something. Yeah, you don't think that there are a lot of lawyers out there, by the way. Our lawyer of our company, I love him dearly, is sometimes watching this. Please don't be offended. But I assume there are many lawyers out there who look at this case and think about thousands of similar cases where they can learn from this. That's why this case might be so much bigger than a lot of people think.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. E-commerce, by the way, has been a rich target. There are there are whole because, for example, there are um accessibility laws in Europe, and there are you know, I don't I don't even like this practice, I'm very uncomfortable with. There are law firms that set up scripts that run on e-commerce websites and look for little violations and just file suit. And it's a just a big bank machine for them. And it's like, come on. Yes, these are businesses, they're it's all in good faith. Yes. Yeah, but anyway, no doubt about that. That's another topic.
SPEAKER_00That's another topic. But the the human nature, right? I mean, we we know how it is. And just one thing, Mike, uh before I hand over to you. As a
From feed errors to AI recommendations: the new liability frontier
SPEAKER_00matter of fact, the the big difference here is as as far as I see that we are potentially not talking about inaccurate product data, right? So if if I have inaccurate product, let's say that the price is inaccurate, or we're not talking about real issues here. That the real issue will probably look like I try the true recommendation from Chemini, and the recommendation leads to something bad.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And this is a whole different story. And I don't know how much Google might be protected in the future looking at this very case.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think that they I mean, we've mentioned in the past that Google could have liability, and I think that's moving from theory closer to practice. Um but to your point, the feed has been this deterministic anchor. That content is owned and provided by the merchants, and shopping ads just use it as Lego blocks. Um there's there's that's changing. There are going to be writing titles more and stuff like this. By the way, there are new terms of services as of July, which might have some cover your ass type language in there too, uh, because it's a lot of it is about AI creatives. But um you know, and Google also, Google Shopping uh uh if you look at the European Union has a database of they call it the statements of reasons database. It's a terrible name, but um it looks at it exactly at content moderation. We talked about it on this podcast once a long time back with with Mark Zuckerberg. Yes. Uh but Google Google is the most heavily regulated platform in Europe by far. By far, yes. By far. And you can look at other e-commerce platforms like Amazon, and it's nothing. It's a 10x, 20x, I can remember. It's it's insane. So Google Google has been very tough. Everyone knows, everyone's seen disapprovals and so on. But I think when we've talked in past episodes about conversational attributes and stuff like that, that's why there is this push to anchor to the feed and to because they they could crawl your page or stuff like that. But the I think they don't want to. No, the risk I think the risk of hallucination is too high. Of course. It's not only just a bad experience from a consumer satisfaction standpoint. I had a bad experience shopping on Gemini, I don't want to do it again. But it could be from a consumer protection standpoint a liability. Of course. So this stuff is going to be critical for sure.
SPEAKER_00We have, by the way, we have covered this topic a couple of episodes ago. The to quote you, uh Google is is is applying a strategy which is based on the idea to have Gemini running on grounded data. Yeah. So you could say, hold on, they are basically outsourcing uh all this information architecture which is required to have a good experience on these Atlantic surfaces to the merchants. That's what they do. This will probably cost them some time to market because Google could, like you said, they could probably do it as of today, just crawl the data somewhere, yeah, but they don't want to because it's that the risk reward ratio is probably not worth it. It makes perfect sense now. Yeah. Uh the case still doesn't help. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's uh to lose that. I really, man, when you told me this, I was like, this might be big.
SPEAKER_01I think it's I think it's gonna be a massive precedent for Google on the publisher side too. Of course, that's but for e-commerce as well. And um, yeah, I mean, we see OpenAI, look what they were doing in the past. They had these same problems. So they were scraping Google Shopping because it's a well-structured deterministic system. Um yeah, we'll see where where this all heads.
SPEAKER_00One last statement. I I I just can't hold back. I'm I I bet my butt off that when you know where I'm going, right? When when when when Google got got the the information that they got sued, yeah, the lawyers of Google were like, in which country? Germany. Oh shit. God damn it. God damn it. Because let's face it, the I mean whoever took this decision, by the way, I'm neutral on this because I I I I don't know the details, but most certainly the whole atmosphere with regards to Google is not good in Europe in general. You know, the big tech companies, yeah, this this hurt them. And Germany was probably the worst worst case to to get to get in front of a court.
SPEAKER_01For sure. I mean, and you know, publishers that a publisher brought the suit is not publishers are pissed about AI overviews. In the first place, yes.
The Temu & Shein prediction that made Reuters
SPEAKER_01Actually, we'll be talking about this. Is a perfect segue to our next topic. Yes. We're good at it for market protection. Yes. And they've used that against Google and big tech, and also perfect segue.
SPEAKER_00How to product protect the market against T-Moin Chain. Yeah. May I start with something here, Mike? Go for it. Again, uh, dear listeners, this uh very charming gentleman uh in front of me has a tendency to undersell himself. Uh, I think by the way, this is this is something the company is is doing in general. I think we are some sometimes way bigger and smarter than we think we are. I want to make sure now that this is not undersold now. You you have the tendency to oversell me. Yes, of course. We need to balance the shit out. All right, fair enough. Uh I'm not even overselling it, but I want to say dearly, this is why I'm I'm I'm now 16 years with this firm, and I'm still to this day. I have these really days where you feel being just to be proud being part of this company. And this was another moment to get quoted by Reuters in a in a big headlining article made for a company based and located and founded in Austria. Yeah, Austria is known for a lot of shit, but certainly not being the center of the universe for e-commerce. Being quoted by Reuters made a testament to our hard work, a testament to your hard work, and I just want to say, Oh, hey, man, I'm proud of this shit. Really, I am thank thanks, Chris.
SPEAKER_01It means a lot. Austria, the country. So the selling is done now. You can you can take it. The country, the country known for skiing, mixing beer and lemonade, ski, being being late banned, yeah, being being cooler than a lot of other countries. But well, thanks, Chris. So um, I mean, you heard it first here on this podcast five weeks back. We were talking about how these new tariffs that will be landing in Europe July
The €3 de minimis fee — worse than a tariff
SPEAKER_011st uh are going to break the business models of companies like Timu and Sheehan, AliExpress, these are ones you hear of every day.
SPEAKER_00But also So what happened here that there were basically everything below 150 Euros, I think, uh basket value, right? Was basically there was no tariffs on them. Correct. And exactly. And this basically was was ruled um against, and we have this de minimis act now, so everything there is at minimum a a three three euro uh tax on it, right? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So what ha so the way this works, this is actually a temporary measure because uh beginning sometime next year, if it stays on schedule, um, they're going to have a whole digital infrastructure that powers a true closure of de minimis exemption. Yes. Um in the meanwhile, because it takes time to build that infrastructure, um, they found uh this other very easy thing to do. And it's actually worse than just paying. Way worse. It's way worse. Because, you know, I I guess it varies. Uh and again, I'm also not a customs expert, but you probably pay anywhere between 8 to 12 percent, let's just say 10 percent um on imports. And um what this does, they're instead applying a for packages under 150, they're applying a three euro fee per declaration item. And so to spell that out, if you would order um five items. Yeah, let five items in five different categories. You know, it doesn't matter. If you order multiples of one, you're only gonna pay three. But for each of those five items, you'll pay three bucks. So and that can end up being way more than 10%. Way more.
SPEAKER_00So it's absolutely crippling it. And and let's let's face it, uh, and I think this is so this this is now basically set up in a new way. You have to pay these three euros, basically, which can be way more than three euros and way more than the 15%. And this impacts mostly, of course, this big hyperscalers, where we know that the average basket value tends to be significantly lower than the 150, given their business model. Sure. Yeah. So this we talked about that uh a couple of weeks ago. We saw the first impacts back then in the day. We were talking about uh lowering CPCs because it it we we it was an indication that the advertising pressure of Timo and Shane
The data: Temu 70% → 23%, Shein down to 5%
SPEAKER_00is maybe maybe not as high anymore because the business model starts to crumble because of that. And now we have new data. Exactly. And this data basically validates that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there were the first signs of softness um back then. And uh, you know, I I worked hard on this uh data, and so re-running it, um, I brought this down to like a daily granularity level and um looked at basically how present are these. It's a proprietary metric I made. It shows how what percentage of advertisers, like we have a sample of 500, um are facing daily competition from Timu, Sheen, AliExpress, and so on. And this we've used this metric in the past. Uh we we broke the news on Amazon turning off ads last summer. We broke the news on Timu turning off ads in the US in response to tariffs in the past. Um so this is a robust tool that we've used. But again, here it shows that Timu's spend fell off a cliff already um at the beginning of June. So they were much more conservative. And uh uh T Timu, on the other hand, played it pr, you know, they were winding it down a bit, but then they catastrophically fell off. Um can we show it a chart? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I'm pulling up the data here, which was published by by Reuters. So um to just dig in the numbers for a second here, like Timu was at or above 70 percent of advertisers facing competition, quite quite intense. And uh after July 1st, they were down at 23 percent. So that's a massive drop.
SPEAKER_00It's massive. Yes.
SPEAKER_01And I'll observe how that develops over time, where the floor is, um, do they start to come back a bit? Uh but yeah. And then Sheehan um fell from about a third of advertisers. You have to bear in mind that they're not in as many categories as Timu. So within fashion, for example, insanely dominant, um, and they fell down to just five percent of advertisers off a cliff, and they've been at that level.
SPEAKER_00Uh, may I ask an obvious question? Uh and we certainly don't know it because we we don't talk to top management there, but it has to be the answer to this De Minimis Act, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. The exemption. It it has to be.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and some other fines. There's no other reason. So there well, there were some other fines that they faced. It could like I have to look at Sheehan's timing. They jumped off earlier, and maybe some of these regional fines were part of that, but it's a it's about the minimis for sure.
SPEAKER_00May I tell you uh um we haven't talked about this. May I tell you just uh based on this data? Because that the big question now, of course, is what do I do with this information? Yeah. And I can tell you firsthand, uh, last week I had a chat with a very I can't drop the name here, but a very, very big and dominant fashion retailer in in Germany. They basically took the decision to overspend by 70%. So basically they're completely re-rebudgeting the whole year because they saw massive market chances. So the market is just there. They were directly impacted mainly by Bashin. Yes. Uh and I think this this is the big chance now for I mean, depending on how big this overlap was, but you probably have a market on tap now at way more profitable CPCs. Uh, and whenever you have the flexibility and budget, uh uh go for it because you don't know when they're coming back.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. We're gonna have to see if and how they adapt to this. Um they will probably, right? Yeah. And I you know, I have a I have a call, I can't say with who, but I have a call this afternoon with uh a very large uh German retailer about this topic as well, and I'm curious what we'll hear, but um i it varies by category, like Timu dropping
The retailer playbook: cheap clicks won’t last forever
SPEAKER_01out, for example, um that has a that affects a lot of categories, but it's complicated because there's a huge amount of overlap with Amazon there. Amazon's going to soak up some of this. Uh but for example, Sheehan dropping out, the the Amazon can't pick that up. Exactly. So it's a protected. Yeah, so in those categories, it's even a larger opportunity. So it really varies case by case per advertiser.
SPEAKER_00So to the listeners, if if you're interested in talking with us about, we are super open to that because there's a very, very high chance that this has already had impact on your icon and maybe you didn't know it, you should look this up. Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_01Uh and I've and I have tips as well. I'm a reporting nerd, and I can I can help you figure out how to find that. But um yeah, I just want to mention back to the Reuters article real quick and we can wrap it up. You you know, their their ultimate interest in this um, because there are what I love about this data is that it has information to different people for or has value to different people for different reasons. For example, obviously if you're in advertising, there's a clear reason why. Um you could but you can be watching the stock market, you can wonder what happens to Alphabet's uh stock or things like that. And in this case, uh Reuters was really interested in Sheehan's IPO after. IPO. Yeah. Yes. Uh because didn't it get delayed? Um it's they oh they've they've moved it, they've switched locations multiple. It's I don't know the whole history, but it's been it's been a roller coaster. Yeah. This hurts them badly.
SPEAKER_00This is the next pit. Because guess what? We talked about that as well. The domestic demand in China is I don't know, crumbling, maybe maybe too strong of a word, but it's not there. That's why this international expansion is so important for the needed growth rates.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00And I don't think that they can compensate this massive drop in ads visibility with organic traffic. No way.
SPEAKER_01Definitely not. And and by the way, if you are um if you are in the UK, or I have to fact-check myself here, but I think Australia, Canada, I I think certainly the UK, these are some of the last few sizable Western markets that are not protected from this kind of dominance abuse.
SPEAKER_00So to our UK listeners, talk with our
Shein’s IPO, the shift to Europe & the UK warning
SPEAKER_00teams or talk to us because yeah, you might see way more pressure coming from these guys.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, here, just before we let the topic go, because there was for Reuters, I did pull one more insight, which they didn't, which they didn't print, but it's an interesting movie.
SPEAKER_00Shame on them. Wow.
SPEAKER_01Um so I looked at what happened um to the same metric in Europe. Yeah. So I looked at what happened to um Sheehan's advertising spend in Europe last year when they got forced out of, it was a similar situation. They got forced out of the US due to tariffs on de minimis stuff and and other sources. But um, you know, they were back then uh before the tariffs, they were hitting about one-fourth of our, like a quarter of our advertisers, 25%. Then beginning in May, that had immediately jumped up to a third. Um the change happened in April. And then beginning in June, it was at an all-time high of over half. So they from 25, it's it's basically a two-year-old. It doubled, it doubled. They massively shifted their investment to Europe. Yeah, because the US market closed. The money goes where profitability is. Yeah, and if you're in the UK right now, I'm sorry, but you can guess what happens next, and you can thank Brexit for that, to be frank.
SPEAKER_00We will mon keep monitoring this data because this this this is globally impacting the e-commerce world. And um I think there will certainly be another
Wrap-up
SPEAKER_00episode in the next couple of weeks to keep the world posted. What's going on here? Definitely. But I think we've chatted long enough and um, but I enjoyed it. Yeah, always enjoyed. Mike, thanks for the time. Thank you, Chris. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01And listeners, if you enjoyed it too, then this was another episode of Growing E-Commerce, uh, brought to you as always by Smarter E-Commerce. And please give us a shout out on LinkedIn or Twitter X, wherever you are, um, Reddit, anywhere. And we also appreciate your comments in YouTube and elsewhere. I try to respond to them as timely as I can. Thanks. I already responded to. I'm very proud of myself.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Chris. You always have to have to start with uh with yourself. Exactly. Thanks. We'll see you next time. All right, guys.