Welcome to R|T: The Retail Times, covering retail tech news from Canada and around the globe. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke took to X this week to make a significant announcement: A small Washington, DC-based business tipped Shopify past $1 trillion in cumulative gross merchandise value. Lütke added that 90 percent of the milestone came in the last five years.
( ) A new court order is requiring Amazon to hand internal records related to its review and ratings programs over to Canada’s competition watchdog. The court order issued by Chief Justice Paul Crampton earlier this week forces Amazon to give the Competition Bureau records prepared for senior management that delve into how star ratings, Amazon’s Choice badges and bestseller labels are applied. Bureau spokesperson Marianne Blondin, meanwhile, said in an email that the organization’s goal is to “determine if Amazon’s marketing practices raise concerns under the deceptive marketing provisions of the Competition Act.
” ( ) Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.-based Descartes Systems Group has acquired English shipment management platform provider BoxTop Technologies for £10.25 million ($18 million CAD).
Based out of Windsor, UK, BoxTop provides a platform for small-to-medium sized logistics service providers to manage their shipping operations, with quoting, routing, booking, and an analytics dashboard. The deal follows a similar across-the-pond acquisition in April when Descartes acquired Irish company Aerospace Software Deve.