Hi r/ecommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Every week for the past 6 years I've posted a summary recap of the week's top stories on this subreddit, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition.

Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news from Edition #301...

STAT OF THE WEEK: The number of Shopify apps is growing twice as fast as the number of stores, according to research from Barn2 founder Katie Keith. App store counts are growing 28% per year, while the number of Shopify stores grows just 14%, leaving 8.8 apps per 1,000 stores compared with 5.5 in July 2023.

Shopify and its app developers spent the last two weeks cleaning up after attackers hijacked the checkout buttons on an unknown number of merchants’ stores, beginning on October 10. The attackers didn’t touch Shopify’s own systems. Instead, they broke into third-party apps and used them to send shoppers to fake payment pages built to steal card details. Within two weeks, about 480 apps had disappeared from the App Store, and Shopify still hasn’t publicly explained most of the removals. There’s also been at least one attack on a Shopify app unrelated to the hijacked checkout buttons. None of the vendors has said how many stores were hit or how many shoppers handed over card numbers — even though one of the apps alone runs on more than 49,000 stores. We also don’t know whether this was one attacker or several running the same playbook.

Meanwhile, in the same week… On October 21, the PHP Foundation pushed emergency patches for “php2shell,” a pair of critical flaws that let an attacker run code on a web server with one crafted request and no login. Palo Alto Networks counted 22.6M instances potentially exposed. PHP runs a huge part of the web — WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento — so the vulnerability is far-reaching. Here’s the wild part: the bug had been sitting in PHP for 14 years, but Calif, OpenAI, and Wiz only recently each found pieces of it independently using various AI models. October 2026 will forever be remembered as a glimpse of what’s to come. AI just found a bug that humans missed for 14 years, and attackers have the same tools. The same week, The Information reported that a hacking group called CyberCartel used AI agents built on Claude, Grok, and Kimi to automate attacks on 400-plus Latin American financial firms with little human effort. The tools that find holes now also exploit them, and they’re getting cheaper and faster by the day.

Walmart announced a new framework that lets AI agents shop Walmart and Sam’s Club, while giving customers control over what the agents can buy, how much they can spend, and what data they can see. It comes in three parts: 1) Agent Profiles: Each AI agent a customer uses gets its own profile inside their Walmart account, so its purchases show up separately from the customer’s own orders or from other agents’ orders. Customers can either approve every agent purchase one by one or let the agent buy on its own under a spending limit. 2) Walmart Agent Gateway: An MCP server that lets agents search inventory and place orders directly instead of having to click and scroll through Walmart's website like a primitive two-eyed human. It can also help an agent find your usual choice of sourdough bread, brand of milk, or other shopping preferences without handing over your entire purchase history. 3) Rules for AI agents: Agents can’t act beyond what the shopper intended, can’t see payment card information or change payment methods, and can only access the information needed for the task. Walmart says that rule-breaking agents will be blocked, but it hasn’t said how it’ll decide when an agent crosses the line.

Wonder, the owner of Grubhub and Blue Apron, is launching Wonder Create on November 17, a new service that lets influencers, entrepreneurs, and brands run their own “restaurant” out of its commercial kitchen locations for $10 a month and keep a share of the revenue. Creators enter a prompt for a description of the restaurant they want, and the AI generates a name, logo, recipes, and prices, which they can tweak by editing the prompt. From there, Wonder’s kitchen staff and robots cook and deliver the food, so creators don’t need to put up capital, pay overhead, or oversee a kitchen to launch their dream restaurant and post “OMG, so good!” videos about it. The catch? Every dish has to come from the roughly 700 ingredients Wonder already stocks, and the influencer is just a face on the menu while Wonder controls the kitchen, the staff, and the delivery. It’s hard enough to navigate truthful restaurant reviews and find hidden gems in your city. Now the restaurant market is about to get flooded with AI slop ghost kitchens that are all just the same pig wearing different lipstick.

Walmart pulled the ultimate membership move last week, bundling Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus into one $120 annual membership that gives customers free delivery from both chains, member prices at Sam’s Club, a choice of Peacock or Paramount+ (the Walmarts of streaming services), gas discounts, and 2% cashback in Sam’s Cash. Anyone who already has Sam’s Club Plus gets Walmart+ at no extra cost, while annual Walmart+ members can switch to the bundle for $22 more a year, and people already paying for both can get a prorated refund. He went on to pitch the bundle against paying $139 a year for delivery from a retailer and $130 for a warehouse club, which are the exact prices of Amazon Prime and Costco’s Executive membership. Burn!

Google and Anthropic launched competing AI tools the same week for SMBs...

Google added a small business hub to the Gemini app where owners can work on branding, review finances, and see customer insights in one place. Owners can connect it to Google’s own business tools plus outside apps like Shopify, Canva, and Xero, and Gemini saves their brand kit so every image it generates matches the company’s look. It can also turn receipts and spreadsheets into charts and write product descriptions, newsletters, and social media posts. However, it’s still a prompt-and-respond tool — meaning, you ask, and it answers. It doesn’t take the initiative on its own.

Anthropic launched Claude Duet, an agent app that flags what needs your attention without being asked, starting with a morning brief from your connected apps and check-ins every few hours. Unlike Google’s tool, Duet can take action itself on tasks like managing a Shopify store, running payroll in Gusto, chasing unpaid invoices in QuickBooks, and buying things with Shop Pay, asking for approval before it sends, pays for, signs, or deletes anything. Duet is a fully agentic tool — meaning, it doesn’t wait for you to ask, and it doesn’t stop at just giving you an answer. It can go beyond suggestions and actually perform the work.

Olo launched a nationwide consumer app for restaurant pickup and delivery, letting people order from more than 250 brands, including Five Guys, Waffle House and Dave’s Hot Chicken, at the same prices they’d pay in the store. Unlike DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub, which take a 15% to 30% commission on every delivery order that many restaurants cover by raising their prices on those apps, Olo doesn’t take a commission from restaurants. It instead charges customers a flat 5% fee on the order, plus delivery when a third-party courier brings the food. Olo’s Dispatch tool pulls quotes from the delivery services available to each restaurant and picks the best one, so the driver often still comes from DoorDash or Uber through their white-label services or from the restaurant’s own staff. So yes, DoorDash and Uber still get paid in some cases, but through a delivery fee rather than a 15% to 30% cut of the order, and without the menu markups. Olo also opens the door for other delivery services to compete against those major players for delivery of the order. More than 800 restaurant companies already use Olo’s software to take orders on their own websites and apps, and Olo wants to eventually bring every one of them onto the new app, along with restaurants that aren’t customers.

Meta introduced Ads Super Burst, a new ad format that lets brands reserve between 3 and 24 hours of Facebook and Instagram inventory around a product launch or a big event, with the option to block competitors in the same category from advertising during the same window. For example, an advertiser may purchase an Ads Super Burst to promote a professional sports game or awards show to hype up the event, or to dominate the feed during the first few hours of a new product launch. Meta says the median brand in its tests reached 34M people per window, or about 14% of U.S. adults online in a day, which is pretty impressive. In comparison, Super Bowl commercials are estimated to reach upwards of 120M viewers, so an Ads Super Burst from Meta gets you more than a quarter of the way there. Brands book the slots through Meta’s Reach Planner, which quotes estimated reach and price in advance, and the format is opening to all advertisers in phases this month. Meta is also testing a second reserved placement in the U.S. called First Impression Ads, which gives one brand the first ad slot in the feed for a whole day.

Google started testing ads in AI Mode for people who opt to link their Google apps to Personal Intelligence, referencing summaries, excerpts and inferences from these sources to personalize their experience and ads “so they are even more helpful for you.” Google has been running ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode for over a year, so the ads themselves aren’t new, but it had originally promised to keep users who connect their apps ad-free. Now it just promises that it won’t show personalized ads based on sensitive categories and that advertisers won’t get access to anyone’s connected apps. The privacy goalpost keeps moving. What’s funny / scary / disturbing is that Google says that “ads will not be based directly on your Gmail inbox or your Google Photos library” — just from the “summaries” and “excerpts” derived from those sources. So what’s the difference? For you or Google, there really is no difference. Google AI reads your e-mails and views your photos, creates a summary of its findings, and then personalizes your ads based on that summary. If Morty Smith were here, he’d say, “That just sounds like privacy invasion with extra steps!”

Meta was ordered to pay New Mexico $25B for misleading Facebook users about how it protected their data after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The ruling by Judge Francis Mathew comes a month after a jury found over 43M violations of state consumer protection law, with New Mexico seeking $35B to $40B in damages, while Meta argued for a cap of $3.4B and said anything 10 times that or more would violate the Constitution. The jury had agreed that Facebook misled users about how it policed the quiz app that harvested roughly 87M profiles on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, but rejected the state’s case over how it took down harmful posts. Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the ruling makes it “all but impossible to do business” in New Mexico and that Meta plans to appeal. The ruling comes two months after Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1B to 47 states to settle a trial over teen social media addiction.

OpenAI is turning on creative enhancements by default for every self-serve ChatGPT Ads campaign, starting October 30, according to an e-mail sent to advertisers. The feature lets OpenAI rewrite headlines and descriptions to fit a user’s conversation or interests, translate ad text, resize images, and send clicks to a different page on the advertiser’s site, based on the original ad and landing page, similar to Google Ads’ AI enhancement features. The variations can be generated in real time and run without the advertiser approving each one, though OpenAI’s ad terms say it isn’t responsible for errors in any AI-generated creative its system produces. Well, isn’t that convenient?

In other ChatGPT Ads news… OpenAI expanded ads to 26 additional countries, bringing the program to 89 markets in total including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Ukraine, and Cambodia. Advertisers in those markets can now buy ads through technology partners or set up campaigns themselves in OpenAI’s Ads Manager, reaching users on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans. OpenAI said that more than 100k advertisers have bought ads since the program launched a little over eight months ago. Lastly, OpenAI is asking brands for $300k minimum commitments and $40 CPMs to run ChatGPT ads next to AI-generated images in its pilot that I reported on two weeks ago. The minimum is higher than the $250k it asked for in its first pilot in February, even though brands had trouble spending their commitments because ChatGPT didn’t have enough inventory to fill them.

Speaking of AI-generated slop… Amazon is testing AI-generated main images in search results that place products in staged lifestyle scenes instead of on white backgrounds, according to a screenshot taken by Talal Asad, president of Amazon consultancy Brand Together. The screenshot showed Amazon putting bath products into AI-made bathroom scenes, even though Amazon requires sellers to use a pure white background for main images. Asad argued the test will hurt rankings for the affected brands because shoppers need to be able to read a product’s label in the main image. Personally, I’m all for primary images without white backgrounds, which work for some products and not for others, though sellers should have the choice of doing either themselves, not just Amazon’s AI.

Apple published a blog post explaining that it began blocking certain domains on its browsers earlier this month because they link a person’s e-mail, phone number, IP address, and device details to track them across sites, a practice it calls “identity resolution.” The blocks began without warning and hit The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, ID5, Permutive and Audigent, briefly stopping The Trade Desk from serving any ads at all until Apple fixed it. Apple said people who give a site their email to log in don’t expect it to be passed to other companies for tracking, and it is blocking entire domains so those companies can’t get around the rule. Ad buyers told Business Insider they expect less reach and higher prices on the open web as more people update to iOS 27.

ChatGPT referred only 0.62% as many visits as Google organic search across 100 websites, according to SEO consultant Marie Haynes, who analyzed a year of GA4 data covering more than 145M sessions. All AI chatbots combined only raised that percentage to 0.73% of Google’s organic traffic, which indicates that ChatGPT is leading the way among chatbots in referral traffic. The study notes that ChatGPT visitors convert more often, at 13.8% versus 3.02% for Google organic visitors on the 55 sites that tracked conversions, but Google organic still produced 27 times more conversions than all AI chatbots combined. Haynes, who called GEO a “distraction,” found that ChatGPT referrals stopped growing quickly in August 2025 and have since declined.

Heineken and Amazon launched Pubscription, a free Fire TV app now in a UK pilot that lets adult users pick a bar or pub the same way they’d pick a show on a streaming service. Users can sort through participating Star Pubs venues by “genre,” such as sports pubs or quieter neighborhood spots, and then invite friends to meet them at whichever one they choose. Each month, subscribers get four vouchers on their phones, each good for one Heineken or Heineken 0.0, which they can redeem once per week. Amazon Ads’ creative unit, Brand Innovation Lab, built the app with Heineken, which owns the Star Pubs chain. Very novel idea! However, I’m curious if it’ll actually lead to more sales, or if users will simply cash in their voucher for a free Heineken and then spend the rest of the evening drinking good beer. I guess it’s a win for the participating pubs either way.

Commerce partnered with Cloudflare to add WebMCP support to BigCommerce stores, allowing AI agents running in a shopper’s browser to search a store’s catalog, compare items, and build a cart. The agent doesn’t complete the purchase but instead hands the shopper a link to check out on the store’s own site, with prices and stock pulled live from the merchant’s catalog. Technically, BigCommerce could have built WebMCP support into its storefronts on its own, but it was faster and more efficient to go through Cloudflare. Since BigCommerce stores already run through Cloudflare, it can inject the script at the network edge for every store at once, so no merchant has to edit a theme or install an app. The feature is live by default for eligible merchants, who can turn it off in a new AI settings menu.

Meta’s Muse agent was set up by over 10M people across the US and Canada in its first six weeks, and about a quarter of them use it daily, according to Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s Q3 earnings call. Shopping is the agent’s most popular use, with over 25% of users using it to make purchases with an average order value above $200, and Zuckerberg said purchase volume in the first week ran so far past expectations that Stripe raised its credit limits. Muse is expensive to run, so Meta has held off on a global rollout and plans to start charging for it sooner than it usually would with a new product. Zuckerberg said the company needs compute efficiency to improve more than tenfold over the next year for Muse’s economics to work at scale.

You know all those idiots who looted stores in France earlier this month during the protests? Well, not only were they dumb enough to immediately list the items for sale online, some of them were even stupid enough to tag them with a #October17 hashtag! Now that’s funny! French ministers subsequently held a video call with Vinted, Leboncoin, Amazon, eBay, Meta, and TikTok, demanding that they pull listings for goods looted from over 3,000 businesses during the protests, after cosmetics, skincare, and handbags began appearing on resale sites within hours of the looting. The platforms committed to flagging suspicious listings for police, watching for red flags like unusually low prices, bulk lots, and items still wearing security tags, and reminding buyers that purchasing stolen property is illegal.

Amazon gained additional share of US food sales this year after it began offering same-day delivery of fresh groceries in thousands of US cities and towns, while traditional grocery stores lost share, according to NielsenIQ data. Amazon’s seafood sales jumped 888.2% YoY over the 12 weeks ending in late August, while pork sales rose 1,100% and egg sales rose 750%. The shoppers buying fresh food on Amazon skew older, often have household incomes above $100,000, and already order and spend more on Amazon than the average user. Two weeks ago I reported that Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel said groceries, which brought Amazon more than $150B in sales last year, can turn the company from the “everything store” to the “everyday store” by getting customers to shop more often across the whole site.

Flipkart is testing a food-delivery service with more than 8,000 of its employees before a public launch that would take on Zomato and Swiggy, according to TechCrunch. The service, called “Eat-in by Minutes,” lists restaurants from the government-backed ONDC network alongside ones Flipkart signed directly and uses a dedicated fleet of Ekart riders to deliver the meals. Flipkart told restaurants it plans to open the service to everyone before November and expand into five or six cities before the year ends, according to Sagar Daryani, who heads the National Restaurant Association of India. Daryani said Flipkart offered restaurants a base commission of roughly 10%, while Zomato and Swiggy typically take 20% to 25%. That’ll be great for restaurants! I hope it forces competitors to bring their fees down too.

Google search advertisers paid 4% more per click in Q3 than a year earlier, up from 1% growth in Q2, according to Tinuiti’s latest Digital Ads Benchmark Report. Total spending on Google search ads grew just under 14%, the same pace as the prior quarter, but advertisers got fewer additional clicks for their money. Click prices had barely moved for the previous four quarters, which Tinuiti attributes to Amazon leaving almost every US Google Shopping auction in July 2025 and thinning out the competition. Tinuiti also tied the third-quarter increase to an August 17 Google change affecting campaigns that use target-based bidding and hit their budget limits.

TikTok shifted its ad spending toward YouTube, Pinterest, and app install networks after Meta stopped allowing all ByteDance ads on its platforms earlier this month, according to Sensor Tower estimates. Well, where else can they really go at that scale? YouTube took 17% of TikTok’s ad budget in the week after the ban, compared with 9% in early October, and Pinterest’s share rose to 9% from 3%. The biggest chunk, 58%, now goes to app networks such as Google’s AdMob, versus 19% before Meta shut TikTok out. TikTok had been one of Meta’s biggest advertisers before it was banned across all Meta platforms in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Doesn’t Meta kind of need that money right now, given that it just raised its AI spending commitments to $825B? Oh, and don’t forget all those multi-billion dollar settlements and fines it just got hit with.

eBay will begin automatically enrolling eligible US sellers in eBay Balance on November 4, holding their sales proceeds on its platform instead of sending the funds straight to their bank accounts, according to Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. Sellers on daily, weekly, or monthly payouts will be switched to on-demand withdrawals and have to restore their schedule by hand, and the new terms let eBay drop scheduled payouts entirely in the future with notice. eBay’s terms already let it pool seller funds into investments and keep the interest, so more money sitting in balances could mean more interest for the company. Honestly, what a piece of shit move. I feel like eBay’s only move lately has been to squeeze every possible nickel of margin from sellers, rather than grow the pie.

Meta cut the word “train” out of its new commercial terms, which take effect October 30, after publishers objected that the terms let the company crawl any website linked to a business page and use what it found to build AI models. The revised terms instead only let Meta pull updates from those sites to “develop” its advertising and business products. A Meta spokesperson said the crawling language only ever covered its ads and business tools, and that site owners can still block its crawlers with robots.txt, but who believes anything Meta says at this point? Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the word “develop” can still cover training, and that Meta could ignore robots.txt because the terms never promise to honor it. Publisher groups in the US, UK and Europe are asking regulators to stop the terms before they take effect.

Ready for some more Meta bullshit? Meta paused Muse’s conversation-sharing feature after over 6,800 chat links were discovered to be searchable and accessible to the public. Muse put each conversation’s title in the link’s subdomain, so once a recipient opened it, the address landed in passive DNS databases that anyone can search. In the few hundred links that security firm Claroc opened, it found a small-business loan application, a company revenue review prepared for its CEO, a bank fraud alert showing part of an account number, and an office’s full staff vacation calendar, among other sensitive chats. How is it that literally every fucking major AI company has made the same mistake? Is it that hard to keep shared conversations private between creators and recipients? It’s purely negligence at this point. No other way to describe it.

Shopify began stopping visitors in their tracks after clicking a link to an outside website, displaying the address they were headed to, and asking whether they’d like to continue or return. The company added the prompt a week after attackers changed settings in apps from HulkApps, Selleasy, and Swym to redirect checkout shoppers to fake payment pages, but its changelog doesn’t mention the attacks. After the change, merchants immediately began complaining in Shopify’s community forums that the alerts popped up on intentional links to partners, and one said Shopify Support told them it couldn’t be turned off. Three days later, Shopify narrowed its external link confirmation so that it only appears for websites Shopify considers suspicious. So what happens now if/when a normal non-dangerous website gets incorrectly flagged as suspicious? Are they fucked or does Shopify offer a way to appeal the label? Shopify only says to contact Support with a screenshot if your website gets blocked, without indicating what comes next in the process.

Just Eat paused a trial program that automatically produced AI-generated menu photos for UK restaurants that hadn’t uploaded their own, after the images came out horribly wrong. For example, one Northern Ireland restaurant’s soda bread breakfast sandwiches were shown as sausage, bacon, and fried eggs floating in glasses of soda. In other examples, a burger came out shrunken and sitting inside a sauce pot, sushi rolls were shown stuffed with cheese, and wine glasses were filled with chunks of watermelon. Damn, I’d hate to guess what images the AI came up with for Spotted Dick, Toad in the Hole, and Cock-a-Leekie! (Yes, those are real dish names in the UK.) Just Eat apologized and said it’s pulling the inaccurate photos and won’t resume the rollout until the tool improves.

Amazon renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+ and expanded the audiobooks in the $12 per month subscription to include AI-narrated versions of self-published books. Authors in KDP Select, Amazon’s exclusivity program for self-published e-books, can now turn their books into audiobooks for free with Amazon’s Virtual Voice AI narration tool (much to the dismay of voice actors) and have them automatically included in both Kindle+ and Audible Plus. Virtual Voice, which is still an invite-only beta limited to the US marketplace, pays authors a 40% royalty on its audiobooks, the same rate Audible pays on exclusive human-narrated titles. They should partner with ElevenLabs so I can get my book narrated by Matthew McConaughey. Alright, alright, alright.

Speaking of AI voices… Block released a research preview of Dessa, a speech model from its AI lab that can listen and talk at the same time, as well as pick up sarcasm, laughter, sighs, and sadness from speakers. You should listen to some of the recordings of Dessa in action because it’s wild! It’s the most realistic AI voice I’ve ever heard. Dessa was trained from scratch on recordings of people talking, with no text or pretrained models involved, and runs on-device on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max chip or better. Block is letting a handful of AI safety researchers test the model first to find risks it hasn’t anticipated. Square already offers AI voice ordering to its sellers, but Block hasn’t said whether Dessa will power it.

Pirate Ship said it will no longer e-mail customers about routine carrier rate changes because the carriers have started changing prices several times a week as they move to algorithm-set dynamic pricing. The company said in an e-mail to sellers that it will still flag major service changes, holiday surcharges, and shipping deadlines, but otherwise customers have to check its live-rate calculator. The move reverses Pirate Ship’s own policy, which promised customers advance notice of carrier rate increases so they could prepare, and leaves sellers who offer free or flat-rate shipping to discover cost increases on their own, often after they’ve already priced their products.

In lawsuits this week…

• Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is preparing to sue Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube for failing to keep under-16s off their platforms after the country’s social media ban took effect last December.
• Also in Australia, Meta was hit with a class action on behalf of Australians who say Facebook and Instagram harmed them as minors through addictive features like infinite scroll and autoplay and by showing them harmful content.
• In other Meta troubles, Rhode Island became the first US state to sue Meta over scam ads, alleging it knowingly profited from fraudulent ads on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and that its AI ad tools helped scammers build them.
• Temu agreed to pay Texas $3M to settle a lawsuit claiming it exposed Texans’ data to the Chinese government, and must now keep that data on US servers that people and businesses in China can’t access.
• A judge gave final approval to Google’s $68M settlement over claims that Google Assistant devices recorded conversations without a “Hey Google” prompt, with lawyers taking about $22.7M and device buyers getting roughly $18 to $56 each.
• Meta was ordered to identify every employee and executive who approved downloading pirated books from shadow libraries to train its AI, after unsealed internal messages showed the decision was escalated to “MZ” for final approval — initials that likely refer to “Mark Zuckerberg.”
• Anthropic got hit with two more music lawsuits from Reservoir and from Elvis Presley’s rights holders, who say Claude still reproduces lyrics despite its guardrails.
• Amazon was sued by an employee who alleges it failed to properly investigate her report that a coworker raped her on a 2023 business trip, and that HR told her to keep the allegations confidential in violation of Washington law.
• Google won dismissal of a lawsuit claiming its Contact Center AI illegally listened to customers’ calls to Home Depot, though the judge is letting the plaintiffs refile.

In layoffs this week…

• eBay is cutting about 9% of its workforce, its second round of layoffs this year after eliminating roughly 800 jobs in February.
• Automattic began laying off staff at WordPress-com and its VIP enterprise unit, a month after a failed board attempt to oust CEO Matt Mullenweg ended with the entire board replaced.
• Loop, the Shopify returns platform, laid off an undisclosed number of employees in a reorganization that cuts management layers and moves more engineers onto its largest merchants.
• American Express is cutting about 5% of its workforce to automate more work with AI, and said it will only let AI agents into its systems through approved API or MCP channels. ___

In corporate shakeups this week…

• Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin is leaving the role after about two years and will stay on as an advisor, with no successor named yet.
• Citi hired former Google engineering director Sebastian Gnagnarella as head of applied AI and agent factory to build the bank’s AI agents, its second Google executive hire this year.
• Meta chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan is stepping down after 15 years, months after former Trump administration official Dina Powell McCormick became Meta’s president.
• Amazon plans to hire more than 300,000 holiday workers, about 20% more than last year, even as overall seasonal retail hiring is expected to hit its lowest level since 2008.
• Amazon also pledged to fill 30,000 entry-level UK warehouse jobs for young people by 2030, after cutting about 30,000 corporate roles over the past year.
• Zalando hired Tom Christenson, who launched Amazon’s Seller Fulfilled Prime program, as SVP of its B2B business, combining its Zeos, Tradebyte, and Scayle units under one team.
• Flipkart promoted Renuka Singaram to SVP overseeing Minutes, its quick-commerce business, along with its supply chain for smaller items.
• Anthropic is offering up to $345K for a human executive communications writer, even as its CFO says AI writes 90% of the company’s code.
• Anthropic named Harvard astrophysicist Christopher Stubbs to its Long-Term Benefit Trust, which elects most of its board, ahead of an IPO that could come in November.
• Several Google DeepMind employees resigned over Google’s AI contracts with the US and Israeli militaries, saying Google has no say over how the Pentagon uses its models.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… The refund checks from Amazon’s $2.5B Prime settlement credit “President Trump’s Federal Trade Commission,” making them the first FTC refunds ever to name a president, according to Politico. The phrase appears not just once, but three times in the notice Amazon sent with each check, which former FTC general counsel Stephen Calkins called “unseemly and unfortunate,” and former FTC chairman Bill Kovacic said could hurt the agency’s professional reputation in later cases. The FTC said the settlement belongs to “Trump’s FTC” because he heads the executive branch, but the Biden administration was the one that actually brought the original lawsuit in 2023. You know, I’d be fine crediting the President with “Trump’s Universal Healthcare” or “Trump’s Consumer Protection Laws,” if they were to exist, but a $51 Amazon settlement check? Really? What’s next, Trump’s 5-Cent Bottle Deposit Refund?

Plus 17 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Whop raising $200M and Cuttable raising $20M.

I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!

PAUL

Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter

PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.

Hi all, needing some advice. I have a background in marketing, but I’m new to e-commerce specifically. I’m working with a luxury e-commerce skincare brand (somewhat niche) and I’m not sure which direction to take right now.

Sales are really struggling, I think due to dropping the ball on the digital marketing side and limited knowledge of e-commerce from the previous team. Website is pretty basic, and there have been no new product launches for some time.

However, the existing customer base is loyal and always extremely happy with the product quality. But they are not enough.

As a luxury brand, I’m working a lot on branding with them to really sell the luxury product proposition. But I’m aware branding is more long term, and I wonder if I need to go hard with customer acquisition via ads, promotions etc first. What do you think?

Hi I’m new to this e-commerce. Any tips on how to drive more traffic to your store. I’ve heard of this zeely app?

Thanks for taking the time, it’s Threaditate.com

I'm launching my first physical product business in Australia (supplements) and trying to understand whether my margins are commercially viable.

After accounting for manufacturing costs, GST, shipping and fulfilment, I'm left with approximately 39–40% contribution margin before advertising, payment processing fees, overheads and company tax.

For context:

• Retail price: $59.95 AUD
• Customer pays $9.95 shipping
• Manufacturing cost: $26.21 ex-GST per unit
• Shipping and fulfilment: $14.12 inc-GST
• Contribution per sale: approximately $24.50

I'm considering an initial order of 500 units.

My main concern is whether there's enough margin left to acquire customers profitably through Meta Ads while building a sustainable business.

Hello everyone i have been in ecommerce for two years and im trying to develop my skills and everyone adviced me to watch ecommerce masters by foundr courses but the price of this course is very expensive for me its around 2600$ so im looking for a cheapt alternative or a low cost copy for this course if anyone knows about it please tell me

Hi redditors! I came across a study this week that might interest anyone working with affiliates.

The German digital association (BVDW) pulled the tracking data of 185 advertisers to see how many sales affiliates are really involved in.

On last click, they show up in 12.41% of sales. Across the whole customer journey, they're in 24.92%. Half of what they do just vanishes from the reports.

It's like doing half the work on a project and getting a pat on the back for helping out a bit. And since budgets get decided on those reports, affiliates end up underpaid and first in line when you cut.

A lot of us have dropped a partner because the numbers looked weak, and now there's data on how much last click was hiding.

The authors all come from the affiliate world though, and being in a journey doesn't prove you caused the sale, so I'm curious how you all handle the credit with yours.

I have a client currently using Shift4Shop for their e-commerce website, Oracle NetSuite for backend operations, and Jitterbit to connect the two. They want to migrate to Shopify while keeping NetSuite, and they've already paid for a year of Jitterbit. My plan is to rebuild the website on Shopify, connect it to a separate NetSuite testing environment, and verify everything works before switching off the existing website.

I'm comfortable managing the Shopify website rebuild, but I'd love to get some advice from people who've handled similar migrations, particularly around the following questions:

1. Do we actually need Jitterbit, or is there a reliable way to integrate Shopify directly with NetSuite and eliminate the middleware entirely?
2. Is creating a separate NetSuite sandbox or testing environment the best approach to avoid disrupting existing operations?
3. What kind of specialist should I be looking for on Upwork to help with this, ideally someone who's already implemented Shopify and NetSuite integrations?

I'd also be interested in connecting with someone experienced who could consult on or handle the backend integration, so any recommendations or firsthand experiences would be greatly appreciated!

The EU accessibility law for online shops has applied since last June, so I got curious what a plain automated pass finds on the shops that are obviously covered. I pointed our own checker at the big ones across about ten countries.

More than half either blocked the request or sent an empty page that only fills in with JavaScript, so I threw those out rather than count them as passes. Of the 35 I could read, 33 had at least one finding. The one that stuck with me is the skip link: about half have none, which means anyone on a keyboard tabs through the whole header on every single page.

It only sees the HTML a crawler gets, so it can't say anything about the checkout or what a screen reader actually announces, and the contrast count in particular includes some guesses about backgrounds. I left the shop names out on purpose, a single fetch of a home page isn't a verdict on a company. The checker is ours, so take the framing with some salt.

Method and the full list of what it found are here: https://allthepossibles.com/notes/eaa-35-european-shops

I’m just starting a business and this is the first time I received an order for two items. Each item has a rectangular box that I typically ship without any additional packaging. Now that there are two items (same product, same box size), I’m struggling to see how I should ship them. Would it hurt my brand image if I combine them together and simply put them into a gray poly shipping bag? Is it better to put them into another box? The second option would be a bit more costly for us as it will increase shipping cost and the cost for the extra box too. Thanks!

I run a small Shopify store, and lately I've been trying to clean up our collection and product pages. Nothing major, just little things that make the store easier to browse and the products easier to shop. The problem is that every time I fix one thing, I notice three others. The collection page needs a better layout, some product pages could use more useful details, and the mobile version doesn't always look how I'd like. I can handle basic edits, but redesigning everything takes way more time than I have.

I'm curious how other store owners deal with this without spending all their time tweaking the storefront.

Do you guys handle most design tweaks yourself or hire someone? And what kinds of changes do you think are worth spending time on first?

genuinely curious. i sell in a few eu countries and noticed a lot of stores just run english everywhere and still sell fine

for the ones that did translate, did it actually move your conversion or was it not worth the hassle? and what do you use for it?

I can help e-commerce businesses organize product feeds, inventory files, and supplier data using spreadsheets, SQL, and Power Query.

Skills and Responsibilities

• Accurately enter, transfer, and update information from documents, images, PDFs, and other sources.
• Review data for errors, missing information, duplicates, and inconsistencies.
• Organize product information, inventory records, and supplier data.
• Maintain consistent formatting and accurate digital records.

Additional Skills

I can apply the following skills:

• Database Knowledge (SQL and PL/SQL): Working with tables, records, and fields.
• Bilingual Arabic and English: Handling and transferring information in both languages while maintaining correct spelling and formatting.
• Excel and Google Sheets: Sorting, filtering, removing duplicates, using formulas, applying data validation, and formatting.
• OCR and Document Processing: Extracting text from scanned documents and images, then manually verifying its accuracy.
• Power Query and Automation: Cleaning, transforming, and organizing data using Power Query and Excel formulas.

Additional Information

• Educational Background: Computer Science
• Availability: Full-time, remote
• Rate: $20/hour

I want to gain deeper theoretical knowledge on performance marketing (Google/Meta/native ads) and also learn from experience of someone who’s done it all or at least mastered one of the traffic sources. Any recommendations?

If onsite & LLM discovery + shopper sentiment is combined to inform a brand about their digital shelf strategy (organic/paid visibility, PDP) would this be of value to brands?

The idea is simple: track visibility as per a logical selection of keywords and prompts, measure shopper sentiment, summarize how a client brand’s portfolio scores vs their competition avg on a marketplace, recommend digital shelf actions to help improve. All data capturing and organizing is AI-enabled, a human strategist provides the actions with their reasoning, so think of this as a low cost advisory partnership.
I’ve formulated a way to estimate conversion but this is ofc still theory. A lot of the backend logic is based on published research.

I work for a CPG brand and if this has potential to be a business, I don’t think I should discuss this within my company, I should rather look outside but idk how to validate the idea? And I don’t want to register a business or create a website before I know this idea isn’t BS.

Not promoting and not seeking contacts/services here, just looking for opinion/advice.

There is a massive gap between a bot that explains your return policy and one that actually starts the returns, issues the label, or cancels the order.

Most of what gets marketed as returns automation is really just a faq that quotes the policy back at the customer. The ones that actually act have to be wired into your order and fulfillment system so they can do the thing, not just describe it, and that integration is the entire difference.

platform ROAS can look great while the business barely breaks even. here’s an illustrative example with round numbers

say google reports $4,000 in revenue on $1,000 in ad spend. that’s 4x. after refunds and vat, $3,200 actually reaches you. minus $2,000 in product and fulfillment costs, that leaves $1,200 before ads, which is 1.2x your ad spend. after the $1,000 in ads, $200 remains before overhead. that’s not 4x anything, that’s barely alive.

the platform wasn't lying, it just counts revenue before refunds, before tax, before the product cost, before shipping. all of that only shows up in your own books.

so before giving any product more budget, check one number: what does it leave after all costs, including the ad spend it would take to scale. it’s common for the highest reported-ROAS product to lose money per order while a ‘mediocre’ 2.8x product is the real winner, because its margin absorbs the spend.

one note on terms: it’s tempting to call the adjusted number ‘blended ROAS,’ but it’s contribution margin after ads, not another ROAS. keeping the names separate keeps both numbers honest.

how are you checking margin before you scale a product?

I've been using Instagram to promote my ecommerce store and have started scaling up the number of accounts I'm working with.

The problem is that managing everything myself is becoming pretty time-consuming, so I'm looking into ways to outsource more of the daily work to VAs or a remote team.

Ideally, I'd like to have people handle things like posting Reels, uploading content, and managing the accounts without having to constantly share login details or manage a bunch of physical phones.

I've recently come across the concept of cloud phones, where you can access Android devices remotely and let team members work on them from anywhere.

Has anyone here tried this approach for ecommerce or social media marketing? I'm curious whether it's actually practical at scale or if there are better ways to organize the workflow.

How do you guys manage and outsource Instagram marketing when you're working with a large number of accounts?

I'm running the following offer for one of our clients. Despite sounding like a no-brainer offer to me, it's not getting any traction.

I'm sending this to following persona:

• Head / director of Ecommerce
• Head of Marketing, CMO etc
• Head of sales / growth / revenue
• CEO / Founder / Managing Director

So please help me understand what I'm doing wrong here. I know this is not a cold email sub but you guys can probably help me contextualize it.

What would be your reaction if you got the following message (especially if you belong to the persona I mentioned above):

What if you could stop potential customers from dropping off, {{first_name}}?

{Case study} lifted its revenue per website visit by X% using our tool. Also live at X, Y, and Z.

Open to discussing a pilot where you only pay if it works?

Thank you.

Hello everyone,

so i just updated my Store/Website, before i was on wordpress and now i moved to shopify. Basicly it has been 1week or more from the launch of our website going live,in the meantime i got bunch of views,likes and so on tiktok,insta which some converted to actual visitor of the Store. I got around 1k or more site views in one week, and only 1 of them actually bought smth... So i decided to switch to a new website and create a fresh one so i was hoping if anyone is willing to check it out and give me a honest opinion of it. - vyroglobal.com -

If anyone has any advice what could be improved, also maybe any opinion or ideas for marketing, i currently use social media as marketing,organic posting and its not so bad i get views. On Tiktok i got like 2.5k followers, insta and facebook need more work. Basicly any kind of opinion or advice is welcome.

Thank you very much!!

I've been working on my small wax melt business and recently spent a lot of time redesigning and improving my website. I had so many production and budget issues so took me forever, but I'm finally almost ready to launch and I'd really appreciate some honest feedback before the store opens.

• First impressions: Does the website look like a legitimate business you'd feel comfortable ordering from?
• Design: Is it too much, too little, or just right? Does anything look cluttered or unnecessary?
• Overall: What would you change, remove, or improve?

I'm still learning and working with a pretty limited budget, so constructive criticism would mean a lot!

Here's the website: https://orchardgrove.co

Thanks so much for taking a look! :)

Hi everyone,

I'm a Myntra seller and need guidance from experienced sellers who have faced a similar issue.

I submitted 24 attar styles. All 24 styles have been sent for cataloging, seller approval is approved, but the status is still showing CATALOGING_IN_PROGRESS and Inventory Upload – PENDING.

Whenever I try to update the stock, I get Error 1034. I've raised support tickets, but I still haven't been able to resolve the issue.

Could someone please guide me step by step on what I should do next? If you've experienced this issue before, please share how you resolved it

Curious how stores here handle support once order volume grows past what the owner can answer alone.

Outsourcing looks cheaper on paper, but I keep wondering about product knowledge. An outside agent can probably handle “where is my order” fine. Sizing questions, compatibility questions, or an angry customer with a damaged item seem much harder for someone who has never touched the product.

For those who tried outsourcing support, did the quality hold up? Did anyone move it back in-house, and if so, what made you switch? Also interested in what order volume made it worth paying for in the first place.

I’ve seen TikTok Shop expand across Asia, the Americas, and Europe, and I’m curious about how many people are actually selling on the platform.

Are you currently selling on TikTok Shop, or not?
If yes, which country are you selling in? If not, what’s stopping you from getting started?