This Week in M&A Issue #243
June 29, 2026
Hello friends!
Today’s trend of the week is “luxury aquariums ”. 🐟
Looking for a high-ticket product to sell? You might want to stop thinking about designer handbags or watches and start looking at fish tanks.
Wealthy homeowners are spending anywhere from $25,000 to over $1 million on custom aquariums, with some paying thousands of dollars per month for maintenance. These massive installations have become a status symbol, fueled by demand for unique, visually striking home features.
The opportunity doesn’t only lie with the fish tanks. This trend creates demand for ongoing products and services. Owners need fish, equipment, maintenance, monitoring systems, specialty supplies, and expert guidance to keep these ecosystems running.
The aquarium market also benefits from passionate hobbyists who often start small and upgrade over time. As interest grows, customers typically spend more on higher-end setups, accessories, and automation tools.
If you’re fishing for your next big opportunity, this might be one worth diving into.
Today we have for you:
- Prime Day is turning summer into a second holiday shopping season
- A guide to understanding U.S. eCommerce market share
And:
- Inside the rise of passive investing in online businesses
- Google rolls out June 2026 Spam Update
- Shopify launches AI tool that runs marketing campaigns for merchants
Alright, let’s dive in.
Ecommerce
Image Source: Giphy (upsidejelly)
Shoppers Spent $8.3B on Day One of Prime Day
Summer deal season is starting to look like the new holiday rush.
On day one of Amazon’s Prime Day event, U.S. online sales reached roughly $8.3 billion, up 5% year over year, according to Adobe Analytics. That’s a strong result considering consumer spending is still uneven. People are still buying, but they’re planning purchases around major discount events instead of spending steadily throughout the month.
As a result, instead of focusing mainly on big-ticket items, Amazon is leaning into groceries, household essentials, school supplies, and everyday products. Discounts now span more than 35 product categories, a noticeable expansion compared to previous years.
Adobe expects U.S. consumers to spend $26.3 billion online from June 23 to June 26. That excludes sales directly on Amazon’s own marketplace. If accurate, it would represent 9% year-over-year growth and about $2.5 billion more than the same period last year. It would also edge out Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 combined, which totaled $26.05 billion.
At the same time, rivals are aligning their own promotions. Target is running Circle Days during the same window, while Walmart Deals spans a full week. A Numerator survey of more than 3,000 consumers and analyzed purchase data from 200,000 panelists, found 64% of consumers plan to shop multiple summer sales events.
Adobe also estimates that 59% of Prime Day spending will happen in the first two days, with daily online spending running about 84% higher than the June average. Overall U.S. online retail sales for Q2 are projected to reach $301.4 billion, up 11.9% year over year.
Mobile is expected to account for 54.2% of sales. Buy now, pay later usage is projected at $2.04 billion, and traffic from generative AI shopping tools is rising sharply, up 103% compared to last year.
Numerator estimates that 43% of U.S. households, about 59 million people, will shop Prime Day, spending around $187 each.
The Opportunity podcast
![The Future of Online Business Investing With Mike Swigunski [Ep.216] (1)](https://1745913.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/1745913/The%20Future%20of%20Online%20Business%20Investing%20With%20Mike%20Swigunski%20%5BEp.216%5D%20(1).png)
Building Wealth Through Online Business Portfolios and Investor Funds
There are more ways than ever to build wealth through online businesses.
Some entrepreneurs start businesses from scratch. Others buy existing businesses and grow them. Some build portfolios of cash-flowing companies that generate income across multiple niches.
Mike Swigunski is taking a different approach by creating ways for investors to gain exposure to online businesses without having to run them.
In this week’s episode of the Opportunity Podcast, Greg sits down with Mike to to discuss his journey from employee #4 at Empire Flippers to acquiring his own portfolio of businesses and launching a platform designed to make online business investing more accessible.
Mike discusses the transition from buying businesses himself to managing investor capital, the realities of raising a fund, and his vision for making online business investing accessible to a wider audience. Along the way, he shares lessons from years of acquiring, operating, and growing online businesses.
Whether you’re interested in buying businesses, investing in digital assets, or simply understanding where the online business market is headed next, this episode is packed with practical insights.
eCommerce
How to Analyze Ecommerce Market Share in the USA
If you’re building, investing in, or operating an ecommerce business in the US, it helps to understand where online sales are actually happening and who controls them.
A new step-by-step guide from Small Business Trends outlines how businesses can evaluate ecommerce market share in the U.S.
Step 1: Start with the size of the market
The US is the largest ecommerce market globally, with annual online retail sales estimated at over $1 trillion. It makes up roughly 17% to 22% of all retail sales.
That number keeps growing as more people shift from physical stores to buying online. But the important part is not just the size. It is how concentrated that spending has become.
Step 2: Understand where most sales actually happen
A small number of platforms drive a large share of all online sales.
Amazon is the biggest by far, responsible for roughly 35% to 40% of US ecommerce sales. Shopify is second, estimated to support around 10% to 14% of US ecommerce sales through its merchant base.
Together, Amazon and Shopify account for close to half of all ecommerce activity in the US.
Step 3: The rest of the ecosystem
Outside of Amazon and Shopify, the remaining share is split across Walmart, eBay, Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce, and a very large number of smaller independent stores.
This segment is large, but fragmented. No single player dominates it in the same way Amazon does, and competition is spread across many smaller channels.
Step 4: Separate the layers of the stack
It helps to separate ecommerce into different layers:
- Marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart, where customers shop directly
- Store builders like Shopify and Wix, where brands run their own sites
- Infrastructure tools that support payments, hosting, and logistics
Understanding which layer you are operating in is critical. A Shopify store does not compete with Amazon in the same way an Amazon seller does.
Step 5: Interpret what this means for your business
A small number of platforms control a large share of ecommerce activity, while the rest is distributed across a long tail of smaller operators.
For ecommerce business owners, this means your growth is closely tied to platform dynamics. For investors, it means risk and opportunity depend heavily on where in the stack a business sits and how much control it has over traffic and customers.
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Google’s June 2026 Spam Update Is Live
Google has started rolling out its June 2026 spam update, a global search update focused on reducing the visibility of content that violates spam policies or attempts to manipulate rankings.
It began on June 24, 2026, and will take a few days to fully roll out across all languages.
This is a spam-focused update, not a broad core update. That means Google is not rethinking how it ranks content, but tightening enforcement around specific behaviors that break its spam rules. Systems like SpamBrain are used to detect patterns that suggest manipulation rather than genuine usefulness.
The types of sites most likely to be affected include large-scale low-value content production, AI-generated pages published without meaningful editing or oversight, expired domains reused to capture existing authority, third-party content hosted mainly to rank unrelated topics, and technical manipulation tactics like cloaking.
Google is not targeting AI content itself. The focus is whether the content is useful, not how it was created.
If there is an impact, it usually appears as specific pages or sections dropping in rankings rather than an entire site losing visibility at once.
Google’s guidance stays consistent: avoid reacting too quickly during the rollout, wait until it finishes before making decisions, and look at patterns in affected pages instead of isolated traffic changes.
Recovery depends on the type of issue. Some spam-related problems can improve over time once changes are made and Google reprocesses the site. However, more deliberate manipulation tactics, especially link schemes, often do not fully recover even after cleanup.
This is the second spam update of 2026. So far, Google is getting better at detecting scaled, low-effort content systems, which means sites relying heavily on automation without strong editorial input are increasingly exposed.
Marketing
Shopify’s AI can now build and manage ads across Meta, email, and more
Running ads and email across multiple platforms can quickly become a full-time job for small ecommerce teams. That’s why Shopify is introducing its new AI-powered marketing automation feature, Campaign Autopilot.
The tool allows merchants to set a monthly budget, define rules and approval levels, and then let AI handle campaign creation and distribution across channels like Meta ads, Shop campaigns, and email. Shopify says more channels are coming, including integrations with platforms such as Microsoft Advertising, Snapchat, and ChatGPT.
The goal is to reduce the manual work involved in running marketing campaigns. Instead of building separate campaigns across different tools, merchants provide constraints and goals, and the system allocates budget, creates ads, and adjusts performance over time based on results. Merchants can still override decisions, pause activity, or require approval before anything goes live.
Campaign Autopilot also taps into Shopify’s broader data advantage. The system draws on performance patterns across millions of stores to inform recommendations, such as which channels tend to convert for specific categories or stages of growth. That makes it less about isolated campaign optimization and more about cross-merchant learning at scale.
Campaign Autopilot runs separately from existing campaigns, meaning merchants already running Meta or Shop ads should not see those campaigns altered.
The feature is currently in early access. It’s free for merchants on paid Shopify plans, though normal ad spend costs still apply.
Money Nomad
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Amazon FBA | Home & garden
Established French Amazon FBA brand in the Home & Garden space generating $5,535/month in revenue with 17% profit margins. Built over 2 years with a single product, this business has proven demand and multiple untapped growth opportunities including PPC optimization, marketplace expansion, and product line extension. Learn More
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