Pooled and anonymized across thousands of merchants, we looked at where eCommerce brands actually put their money. The spending data points to one name: Higgsfield, an AI image and video app that first showed up in that spend in April 2025.

A year on, Higgsfield is the second-most-common AI image and video generator in that spend, behind only Midjourney, and it is growing faster than any other generator we track. In the four months after January 2026, the number of DTC brands paying for it grew 83%. Midjourney grew 7%.

Every line starts together at 100 in November and fans out from there. Higgsfield's is the steepest by a wide margin.

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AI content generation growth is in video now. The two fastest-growing tools in the chart, Higgsfield and Kling, both generate video. The slowest is Midjourney, the image generator most teams already had a year ago. Higgsfield grew roughly twice as fast as Kling, the next quickest, over the same four months. Read together, the lines describe a category that has finished adopting AI images and is now adopting AI video.

It came from nowhere. The other four tools were already in merchant spend well before Higgsfield’s first payments, which land in April 2025. Every line in the chart starts level at 100 in November, but Higgsfield reached that point from a standing start in a matter of months, and from there it pulls away from the pack.

The open question is whether they stay. This is where AI video earns its reputation. Among the generators built around credits rather than seats, retention is brutal. Of the merchants who start paying Runway or Kling, roughly half lapse within a single month, and fewer than 3 in 10 are still paying six months later. Brands buy the credits, run the campaign, and leave. Higgsfield is holding up better than its video peers so far, keeping about 43% of merchants at six months against Runway’s 27% and Kling’s 23%. That gap is the bull case. It’s also an early read on a tool barely a year old, so I’d want another two quarters before leaning on it.

If you run a DTC brand and have moved spend onto one of these tools, or off one, reply and tell me which and why!

_{Wayflyer Insights are based on aggregated, anonymized data from our base and are provided for general informational purposes only. They are not industry benchmarks, investment advice, or guarantees of outcomes, and may not be representative of the broader market.}

I’m calling it the Wayflyer eCommerce Stack, and it comes in two parts.

The first is the map: every app category our brands run, with each tool sized by the share of brands that have it installed. It’s interactive, so you can filter by annual GMV, by industry, and down to the top 25% fastest-growing brands, then switch between adoption and month-over-month momentum. We have left out infrastructure like tracking pixels and warehouse management systems.

Explore the full stack yourself at wayflyer.com/data. Filter it to your GMV band and industry, flip it to momentum, and see what your peers are adding right now.

Here are the three patterns from the map I’d point to.

Email and SMS is the most concentrated category in the stack

Klaviyo is installed by 76% of our brands, and most run a second or third tool alongside it. The category is crowded because email and SMS are channels a brand owns. You reach your own list directly, without paying for each ad impression, so the revenue holds up even as ads get more expensive.

That is also why the tool itself has become close to interchangeable. With three in four brands already on the same platform, what sets them apart is no longer which app they pick, but how well they use it; the most common gap I see is a brand paying for the full platform and using only a fraction of it.

BNPL is close to standard at checkout

Afterpay (25%) and Klarna (23%) sit almost level at the top of payments, and Klarna is the third fastest-growing app this month, so brands are still adding these options. The pull is straightforward: the provider pays the brand upfront and takes on the credit risk and collections, while the shopper gets interest-free installments after only a soft credit check. That converts customers who would have abandoned a full-price cart, and it skews younger than a card-only checkout.

That access has a cost. BNPL fees can run up to 4% to 6% of the order, against 2% to 3% for card processing; a brand is paying about double for the privilege. The math works when order values and margins are high enough to absorb the fee, which is why adoption clusters in discretionary categories like apparel rather than thinner-margin goods like Food & Beverage.

New to the top 100 this month: Forter

Each month the Stack tracks the 100 most-installed apps in our base, and a signal I find useful is who joins that list rather than who sits at the top of it. This month the standout new entrant is Forter, and it arrives straight at the top of the Fastest Growing chart.

Forter isn’t a startup. It screens transactions for some of the largest retailers in the world, and over the past few years has been moving into smaller and mid-market stores. It's a compliance tool, a category most operators rarely think about, and one that is starting to matter more for eCommerce.

My working guess is that some of it is worries around payment fraud that travels with BNPL, and the returns and promotion abuse that grows alongside generous policies. The newer piece is AI shopping agents that check out on a person’s behalf, which nobody has a settled way to verify yet. A tool built for the biggest retailers showing up in mid-market stores may signal the same problems are arriving there too.

Top performing apps

The second part is the leaderboard, published every month in two versions. Fastest growing ranks the apps gaining the most net new installs month on month. Trending ranks the apps with the strongest momentum relative to their current size.

Two apps sit near the top of both lists, and both are worth explaining.

Instant is a no-code landing page builder that lets teams ship and test store pages without a developer. Landing pages are the first thing paid traffic hits, so a tool that makes them faster to build earns adoption quickly, which is what climbing both leaderboards at once tends to look like.

Redo is a returns app with an unusual model: the shopper pays a small fee at checkout, around two dollars, for return coverage, and that fee funds the return label, so the brand can offer free returns without absorbing the shipping. Redo has since widened into package protection, exchanges, support, and shipping, and that expanding footprint might be why it keeps adding brands.

Analytics shows up most on the leaderboards

Analytics takes three of the leaderboard slots (Rokt, Amplitude, and Triple Whale), and in the map no single analytics tool comes close to Klaviyo’s dominance. Triple Whale leads at 22% over a long tail of Hotjar, Elevar, Amplitude, and others. The easy read is that brands are churning through tools in search of one winner. I don't think that's the story. These tools do different jobs: attribution, session and heatmap analysis, server-side event tracking, so the leaderboard is more likely capturing brands adding a second and third measurement layer on top of the first, rather than replacing it.

After the privacy changes that broke much of ad attribution, working out where sales actually come from stopped being a back-office task and became a competitive edge, and brands are assembling that capability from several tools at once. If that read holds, analytics is the category where being early to a genuinely better tool pays off most, which is why the Trending column is worth watching most closely here.

Next month I’ll be watching two things: whether Forter’s climb holds or fades, and whether cheap, shopper-funded returns coverage starts pulling smaller brands into software they’ve never needed before.

Explore the full stack yourself at wayflyer.com/data. Filter it to your GMV band and your category, flip it to momentum, and see what your peers are adding right now. If there’s a cut you’d like us to publish, reply and tell me.

See you next month.

Naoise

_{Wayflyer Insights are based on aggregated, anonymized data from our base and are provided for general informational purposes only. They are not industry benchmarks, investment advice, or guarantees of outcomes, and may not be representative of the broader market.}

In the EU and UK, the payday economy is real: online revenue runs 14% above the daily average at the end of the month. The US moves much less: 8% at the most.

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Two things worth calling out in the pattern:

1. Europe’s surge is a clear end-of-month payday window. The EU and UK both climb from around day 25, peaking at 114 to 115 at the end of the month. Between the weakest day and the strongest, European markets swing 21 index points, compared to the US’s 11.

2. The US gets paid twice, and you can see both. A mild bump around the 15th (index 104) and a larger one at month-end (108) where Americans are paid bi-weekly, but neither comes close to European magnitudes. Twice-monthly pay is part of it: when purchasing power arrives more often, no single day becomes high-stakes (though it still influences spending). Wider access to credit is plausibly the other part. A consumer who reaches for a credit card doesn't need to wait for payday.

The index measures relative timing, not how much people spend overall: an EU figure of 114 means 14% above that market’s own average day, not that Europeans outspend Americans.

The takeaway is simple: in the EU and UK, payday is a buy-now event; in the US everyday is payday. If you sell into Europe, that month-end window is the highest-intent moment in your consumer calendar, and the mid-month trough might be the worst week to spend on acquisition. If you sell into Europe and watch your own revenue concentrate at month-end, reply and tell me which categories you sell.

For more analysis of Wayflyer data, follow me on LinkedIn and check out Wayflyer Insights