Two retail failures, one Kogan win, and the death of the click

The week the funnel finally collapsed. New data shows that when Google serves an AI Overview, only 1% of users click through — down from 15–20% on a standard SERP. People are discovering brands on ChatGPT and Claude, then arriving directly via branded search, if they arrive at all. Traffic isn't dying. Attribution is.

Two retail failures landed in the same 48 hours and both told the same story. Stateside Sports went into voluntary administration, weighed down by 31 stores and licensing fees on US sports merchandise. OzGoods Depot called in liquidators owing $2.5m, with the top three creditors being Meta, Microsoft Advertising and Shopify Capital — a creditor list that is its own diagnosis. Meanwhile Kogan reported gross sales up 13% to $876m, Mighty Ape trimmed its losses, and LVLY did the opposite of every other brand by pulling humans back into customer service and lifting NPS from 58 to 76 in a year.

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• Online retail share has barely moved — Mandala/Inside Retail estimate online shopping saves households around $1,400/year, but online retail is stuck at ~12% of total, up roughly 1% in three years. Omnichannel isn't a buzzword, it's the actual ceiling.
• Stateside Sports enters voluntary administration — 31 stores, a major warehouse, and licensing fees on every unit. The cost stack on licensed retail is brutal at scale.
• OzGoods Depot calls in liquidators owing $2.5m — top three creditors: Meta, Microsoft Advertising, and Shopify Capital. If your debt sheet is paid acquisition and revenue-based finance, the model is the problem.
• Kogan reports gross sales up 13% to $876m, gross profit up 11%, EBITDA up 8.6% — the marketplace flywheel is paying off, and Mighty Ape's loss is shrinking the same way Iconic's eventually did after a decade.
• ACCC takes federal court action against Amazon over 41 unicorn backpacks failing battery warning rules — the first real litmus test for the new platform liability laws. If Amazon wins, the floodgates open.
• Google AI Overviews are killing click-through — 1% versus the 15–20% you'd see on a normal SERP. The research, discovery and intent stages are now collapsing into a single AI conversation, and your traffic metrics will not tell you what's happening.
• Article (Redbubble) narrows its losses to -1.1% from -9.3%, gross profit up 10.2% — print-on-demand and personalisation are accelerating, but the margin stack (artist + print + fulfilment + ads) is what makes the model so hard to run.
• LVLY lifts NPS from 58 to 76 in a year by going the opposite direction on AI — real-time delivery updates, live chat with real humans, and a care team empowered to fix issues without escalations.