Your commercial news round-up: click and collect, AI agents, shoplifting, anti-aging serum

Ellie Nicholl (she/her) is senior content and engagement coordinator at LawCareers.Net

Reading time: three minutes

Have you been staying up to date with the commercial news this week? John Lewis is facing a legal challenge over click‑and‑collect sales and Lloyds has struck a deal with Google to build its own AI agents. Meanwhile, Co‑op is ramping up anti‑theft measures by forensically marking stolen goods and a £49 face serum advert has been banned for making misleading anti‑ageing claims.

• John Lewis is facing a high court lawsuit over whether online orders collected in store should count towards the rent it pays at its Brent Cross branch. The case has been brought by shopping centre owner Hammerson, alongside Standard Life Investments, which argues that click-and-collect sales should be included when calculating turnover-based rent. The dispute centres on a lease signed in 1979, which requires John Lewis to pay extra rent if annual sales exceed set thresholds, including 0.75% of its revenue if turnover is above £4 million. John Lewis argued that click-and-collect transactions are completed at distribution centres, not in store. Partner at law firm Morr & Co, Kristine Ng, said: “The question before the court is whether wording agreed decades ago, long before online retail and click and collect existed, can fairly be applied to today’s trading models.”
   
• Lloyds Banking Group has entered a tie-up with Google to build its own AI agents. The partnership will see Lloyds use Google Cloud alongside its existing large language model to create an internal platform, called Envoy, enabling teams to develop and share AI tools across the group. The finished agents will also be able to interact with customers and remember details during enquiries. Lloyds said the project “supports the group’s ambition to scale agentic AI responsibly, helping colleagues work more efficiently while improving customer and colleague experiences”. The move follows a broader push by major banks to strengthen in-house digital capabilities amid growing competition from fintech rivals, such as Starling and Revolut, which have both launched AI financial assistants over last few months.
   
• Co-op has begun secretly marking commonly stolen products with a forensic spray to allow the police to track goods that are resold after being stolen from its shops. The spray, which is invisible to shoppers and contains a unique traceable marker, is being applied to items frequently targeted by thieves, including alcohol and laundry detergents. The move forms part of a wider set of security measures, such as body-worn cameras, which helped to cut crime in stores by over a fifth last year.
  
  The retailer has also worked with police in 20 areas to share CCTV footage and target repeat offenders, which resulted in 500 people receiving sentences last year. Policy director at the Co-op Paul Gerrard shared that police responses to incidents increased in 2025, with officers attending 70% of reported incidents, up from 20% in 2023. Gerrard also welcomed new measures under the crime and policing bill, which received royal assent on Wednesday 29 April. The bill includes a new standalone offence for assaulting a retail worker and will make it easier to take action when items worth less than £200 are stolen. He commented: “This is not about an extra avocado going into an M&S bag. That is not the reason we are seeing crime at these levels, it is about people taking out an entire meat section for resale.”
   
• An advert promoting a £49 face serum has been banned after regulators ruled that claims it could make users look up to five years younger were misleading. The billboard for Eucerin’s Hyaluron‑Filler Epigenetic Serum said the claim was “clinically proven”, based on a study of 160 people who used the product for four weeks and then self‑reported how much younger they thought they looked. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) added that the three pieces of evidence submitted by the serum’s manufacturer Beiersdorf were all unpublished research, and said it had concerns about each one. The regulator stated: "We had concerns about the study's methodology, including that there was no control group, nor was there information about how participants were recruited." It also noted that the product was tested outside of the UK, and may perform differently under different climates.

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