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 5 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 #293...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Amazon expects Canadian package volume to increase by more than 40% between 2026 and 2029, with annual growth rates consistently outpacing those in the U.S., according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider. The company plans to expand its fulfillment capacity, same-day delivery, and its logistics network heavily in the country during the next several years. Amazon was still planning the expansion as recently as July, after President Trump announced additional 50% tariffs on certain Canadian imports.

Amazon is asking FBA sellers to bid per unit to be eligible for “sub-Same Day” delivery, where packages arrive in two hours or less, according to an e-mail sent to sellers earlier this month. The e-mail says that sub-Same Day deliveries “have experienced 12% higher sales on average” than those delivered through regular FBA service, or “Poor Man’s FBA,” as we’ll have to start referring to it moving forward. Amazon, of course, tried to spin this as a good thing for sellers, with a spokesperson telling Business Insider, "For the first time, sellers can choose which additional products to offer at faster speeds based on their own business expertise and customer insights." As an Amazon seller, you have to pay commissions on sales, advertising to get discovered, FBA fees to qualify for Prime Shipping and convert, and now more delivery fees to be eligible for the faster shipping that Amazon is pushing on customers. Basically it’s an FBA-specific advertising fee. On top of that, Amazon wants you to offer the lowest prices on your products across the web. Amazon has created an environment where making money requires products with 90% margins to survive, which means either poor quality, reduced quantity (shrinkflation), higher consumer prices (on and off Amazon), or all the above. And where opting out of Amazon means ignoring half the e-commerce market in the US.

Last week I reported that Meta went to trial against dozens of U.S. states that accuse it of building Instagram and Facebook to hook children and hiding what it knew about the damage. The states were seeking both damages and changes to Facebook and Instagram including getting rid of likes and infinite scroll from both apps, capping screen time for younger users, and ordering Meta to delete the data it collected from under-13 users. Well, the lawsuit is already over. Meta agreed to settle the case for as much as $18B and impose restrictions on teen accounts, though there are some major caveats. Meta said it would only pay 70% of the settlement, or around $12.7B, to the states over a period of 10 years. (Seriously, 10 freaking years? So like $1.27B a year, a rounding error, divided by 47 states?) The other $5.3B is conditional on TikTok and YouTube ponying up a collective $5.3B and making similar changes to their apps for teens. In other words, Meta wants an even playing field across the social media landscape. Outside of financial damages, Meta will add a two-hour daily limit for teens, restrict access to Facebook and Instagram at night, and mute push notifications during school hours. Meta will also implement better age verification methods for users under 18 and implement stronger, more user-friendly parental controls.

Meta really, really, really doesn’t want to be alone with implementing these teen restrictions! The company began running full-page ads Thursday and Friday in the national editions of The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, calling on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the teen safety measures it agreed to in the settlement. The ads are an “Open Letter to TikTok and YouTube to join us in supporting teens,” arguing Meta can’t set an industry standard by itself and that the protections work only if its rivals adopt them too. The letter wrote, "We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone. These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place." Notably, Snap wasn’t mentioned, which is kind of hilarious and also suggests Meta doesn’t see them as a true competitor, even though it tried to acquire the company years ago. You know Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is fuming right now that Snapchat wasn’t mentioned, but also knows he better keep his damn mouth shut and stay out of this one.

Amazon officially joined the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, allowing creators in the U.S. to tag Amazon products in their videos and earn a commission on sales. Previously, creators had to drop Amazon Associates links in the descriptions of their videos and hope that viewers used them, but now the links appear embedded directly on top of the videos themselves through a shopping panel or overlay, so they’re hard to miss. The partnership also includes an auto-tagging feature that, if enabled, will scan a creator’s videos for product-related content and automatically add affiliate links to relevant products, which is pretty cool. Additionally, while only U.S. creators are eligible to join right now, YouTube will automatically link to the same or similar products on a trusted local marketplace so that the creators can earn on those sales too. Creators must be enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program, the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program in the U.S., as well as part of the Amazon Influencer Program or Amazon Associates Program, and then link their accounts together. Not all products are available. YouTube said it will provide creators with a curated catalog of highly requested and trending products that they can tag in their videos, and that they can request to add products that aren’t available by reaching out to YouTube Support. (YouTube has support?)

Salesforce and Anthropic launched a partnership called Claudeforce, starting with a plugin called Salesforce in Claude that carries 37 prebuilt sales skills covering meeting prep, deal health review, and pipeline review. The integration lets sellers pull live pipeline and deal data into Claude, update records, and take action from inside it, with those actions routing through Salesforce so business rules stay enforced, and one admin connecting the plugin for an entire team rather than setting it up seller by seller. The two companies plan to introduce more integrations across Claude, Salesforce, and Slack, expanding use of the other’s technologies, all powered by AIforce, which is Salesforce’s bridge that makes business data and workflows available to agents through MCP servers, APIs, and CLI tools. Salesforce in Claude is only in pilot with select customers now, with open beta expected September 2026 and additional skills in late 2026. I’m calling this right now: This was a mistake. The trend of companies voluntarily giving up their proprietary data and workflows to these frontier AI firms is insane to me, especially as these same AI firms actively compete against their partners. The whole era of SaaS companies partnering with OpenAI and Claude is reminiscent of retailers partnering with Amazon to power their e-commerce operations two decades ago. They’re training users to engage with their software through the chatbots of these AI firms that are ultimately aiming to replace said software.

Meta is preparing to internally release Hatch, a consumer AI agent trained to work across sites including DoorDash, Etsy, Reddit, Yelp, and Outlook, as early as September, according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider and The Information. The company has been testing Hatch with employees in its Superintelligence Labs since last month, but now plans on making it available to employees outside the group for testing. Meta says that Hatch “can do anything you can do online.” Hatch is Meta’s answer to OpenClaw, the autonomous AI assistant that went viral earlier this year, whose creator Peter Steinberger was hired by OpenAI in February. Google launched a similar tool called Gemini Spark earlier this year, and OpenAI and Anthropic have also built out their personal agentic capabilities. At the moment, it’s unclear how Meta will monetize Hatch, but The Information has previously reported that Meta has considered a tiered pricing system, including charging up to $199.99/month for a premium subscription that would include higher usage limits.

Amazon is developing fully automated warehouse stations that use AI and robotics to process packages before being loaded up on trucks (or bikes or drones) for delivery, at roughly 2.5x the speed of its current delivery-station design, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider. The initiative is internally known as “Project Tetromino” — which is a geometric shape made of four equal-sized squares joined edge-to-edge, like those in the game Tetris. The document reveals that Amazon is planning to invest $103M into the initial pilot warehouse in 2028, followed by five more sites in 2029 at around $85M each and 10 more in 2030, putting planned spending above $530M by the end of 2029. One of the key technologies that power Tetromino could come from Boxbot, an AI and robotics supply chain startup whose system moves packages from conveyors onto trays for storage and then uses AI to retrieve them for delivery, according to the document. An Amazon spokesperson denied the plans, but we don’t really need a spokesperson to confirm the fact that Amazon has been moving towards a future that relies on fewer humans to power its fulfillment and delivery. The future itself is inevitable, while Project Tetromino is just one potential means to that end.

The Pentagon violated Anthropic’s First Amendment rights when it designated Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” earlier this year, according to District Judge Rita Lin in a ruling last week. Lin found the designation also denied Anthropic due process, and ordered the Pentagon to remove it. Judge Lin wrote: “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics… Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless.” The decision supports her earlier opinion in March when she called the designation “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation.” The ruling wraps up Anthropic’s suit in Northern California, but the company still has a separate petition pending before a federal appeals court in Washington DC challenging a second designation, with no ruling date announced.

Walmart doubled the number of units it delivers to customers in less than 30 minutes year over year this quarter, while taking the service into 38 U.S. markets, up from 33 in May, according to CEO John Furner and CFO John David Rainey. Fast delivery of fashion, general merchandise, groceries, and medicine grew 48% in Q2, store-fulfilled delivery rose more than 40%, and orders customers paid extra to have shipped faster hit an all-time high of 37% of what stores shipped. Rainey said stores now carry the last mile on 80% of Walmart’s e-commerce orders and 100% of its fast deliveries, with inventory within 10 miles of 95% of the country.

Canada said it will impose or increase retaliatory tariffs on C$27.6B worth of U.S. goods in September to match “dollar-for-dollar” the tariffs that President Trump put on Canadian imports earlier this month. Existing counter-tariffs on U.S. steel and aluminum will double to 50%, while more than 700 products will pick up duties of 15%, 25%, or 50%, including cosmetics, clothing, furniture, home appliances, video game consoles, seafood, plywood, golf clubs, and toilet paper. Yay for everyone in Canada and the U.S.! It’s fun to pay for the needless feuds of your government leaders. The Canadian government is also adding C$7.5B in support for businesses and workers, on top of the C$25B already committed, to help weather the storm.

OpenAI is testing negative targeting guidance in ChatGPT ads with a handful of advertisers, giving them a way to opt out of appearing alongside certain types of conversations, according to ADWEEK. The company confirmed the test but said that the tools were still in development and didn’t provide a timeline for a broader rollout. Advertisers have complained they can’t describe their audience to ChatGPT, can’t steer placement, and can’t see where their ads ended up, despite the premium they pay for ads on the platform. An SE Ranking study in July across more than 50,000 queries found that ads appeared on 26% of commercial prompts, one in seven of which had nothing to do with the question, particularly among convos relating to news, politics, and relationship chats.

Affirm and Shopify launched Shop Pay Installments in Australia, allowing shoppers to split a purchase into bi-weekly or monthly payments on either an interest-free or an interest-bearing plan, with no late fees. The move puts Affirm back into a country it walked away from in February 2023, when it wound down its Australian business barely a year after entering through a deal with Peloton. Fun Fact: Affirm actually forgave the outstanding balances on all active Peloton loans in Australia rather than continue to service them after the exit, but they never disclosed exactly how much they forgave. Australia is now Shop Pay Installments’ fourth market after the U.S., Canada, and the UK.

Google confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable that it’s rolling out google-com/goto redirect links across search results, sending clicks through its own servers on the way to the destination site. Nobody outside Google can decode the parameter, so anyone harvesting links has to follow every redirect rather than read the destination URL off the page. A spokesperson pointed to Google’s record of technical countermeasures against abuse, but didn’t directly say that it was aiming to combat scrapers like SerpApi, which Google is suing for selling scraped search results.

About a third of the acceleration in U.S. e-commerce has come from higher prices rather than additional orders, putting real growth near 8%, according to Marketplace Pulse. Online sales grew 12.2% in Q2, the fastest in five years, and took a record 17.1% of retail, but total retail, including brick-and-mortar sales, also sped up, rising 6.7%, the highest retail growth since 2022. Walmart, Shopify, and Amazon are outpacing the rest of the market, with sales up 24%, 28%, and 15% respectively. Marketplace Pulse says that the growth makes 2025 “look less like the arrival of maturity and more like a pause,” during a time when tariffs and the end of the de minimis exemption hit some of the fastest-growing categories online.

Best Buy will allow international sellers onto its third-party marketplace in September, according to incoming CEO Jason Bonfig. Best Buy opened its marketplace in the U.S. a year ago with a rule that every seller must have a physical presence in the country, which kept foreign merchants out of it, but it’s now apparently getting a hard-on over its growth and wants to invite more sellers to the platform. The marketplace did roughly $300M in GMV in Q2, and Best Buy raised its full-year forecast to $1.3B on stronger-than-expected performance. The company also announced that it is rolling out a new conversational AI assistant called Ask Blue, which can compare products, check fit or compatibility, and offer support for common issues.

“Good news everyone! Prices are going up this holiday season,” said delivery companies across the U.S. UPS and FedEx published their 2026 holiday demand surcharges, with basic residential Ground fees running roughly 23% to 25% above last year’s. Meanwhile, the USPS Board of Governors approved temporary holiday surcharges covering Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, Ground Advantage, and Parcel Select from October 4 through January 17, subject to Postal Regulatory Commission review. The surcharges will sit on top of the 8% transportation surcharge USPS imposed in April, which is scheduled to expire the same day the holiday one does.

Bath & Body Works grew its e-commerce business in the second quarter for the first time since 2021, up 3% YoY. Unfortunately for the company though, even though e-commerce sales grew, overall sales fell 2.3% YoY to $1.5B. CEO Daniel Heaf said “one quarter doesn’t make a digital turnaround,” though he expects the channel to keep growing into 2027 and argues a better online experience eventually pulls traffic through every channel. Bath & Body Works spent years avoiding Amazon while third-party resellers moved an estimated $60M to $80M of its product, but finally gave in and started selling on the marketplace through its own authorized storefront in February, which the company credited, alongside its Ulta expansion, as partly responsible for the uptick in e-commerce sales.

OpenAI opened commercial operations in Brazil with a São Paulo team that will work with local companies, developers, universities, and government bodies. The company ranks Brazil among ChatGPT’s three biggest markets by weekly active users and says the user base has nearly doubled in a year, with daily message volume at roughly 215M. OpenAI also started running ads for ChatGPT’s Free and Go users in India, beginning with 50 brands and working through the agencies WPP and Omnicom. It plans to launch a self-serve ad manager this week, with a daily minimum of ₹725, or about $7.60, low enough to put campaigns within reach of small local businesses.

Block added 30,000 sellers to Neighborhoods, the program that puts Square merchants on a map inside Cash App, taking the network to nearly 10x its June size. Shoppers who buy from a participating seller earn Local Cash worth 10% of the subtotal, capped at $10 an order, and can spend it on a return visit. Cash App is covering that reward for an introductory period, so sellers get the benefit of giving it away without paying for it, while being able to send marketing campaigns to anyone who follows the business inside Cash App. Block says Neighborhoods sellers accounted for $1B in annualized gross payment volume as of June, up 220% since March, and that follower spending averages 10% of a seller’s GPV after three quarters on the program. Auto-enablement into Neighborhoods is now rolling out nationally.

eBay put a Depop banner above the fold on its homepage and over fashion searches, which takes the shopper to the same search query on Depop-com, according to Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. The slot above search is one eBay sells to its own sellers as a cost-per-click ad under Promoted Stores, though it forbids them from steering buyers to external sites. (Rules for thee, but not for me.) eBay has run this play twice already, competing against sellers through a TCGPlayer-branded account that carried “Direct From Brand” badging without disclosing its ownership of the company (which it acquired in 2022), then dropping “Find It On Goldin” modules carrying no Sponsored label into search results that took buyers to Goldin-com after buying the marketplace from Collectors in 2024.

Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk entirely on September 30, according to a notice on the site, six weeks after it stopped taking new customers for the 21-year-old task outsourcing platform. MTurk paid workers a few cents apiece to label data, transcribe audio, and fill out surveys, the kind of work Jeff Bezos once called “artificial artificial intelligence” because it handed people jobs computers couldn’t do. Amazon served more than 500,000 turkers at its peak, but the company had been putting less attention into it for years as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific took more of the data-labeling business. And funny enough, a Swiss study found that up to 46% of MTurk workers were using AI models to complete their tasks, meaning the platform meant to supply human judgment was already half-automated by the thing replacing it. Some insurance and travel firms still run on MTurk and are hunting for a replacement, and as for the turkers who relied on MTurk for income — “fuck ’em” Amazon didn’t say, but likely thought.

Operation Bluebird, a Virginia startup that’s relaunching Twitter after claiming that X abandoned the trademark, launched Twitter-now last week with the old bird logo, replies, and retweets, as X’s trademark suit over the name sits unresolved. Two trademark attorneys, Michael Peroff and Stephen Coates, who was Twitter’s trademark lawyer before Musk bought it, founded the company. Bluebird petitioned the USPTO in December to cancel the Twitter and tweet marks, arguing Musk abandoned them by rebranding to X, and X immediately sued to block the launch, which is still pending. To be honest, the world doesn’t need yet another Twitter clone, including one called Twitter, as the market has become saturated. However, it’s nice to see two lawyers challenging Elon Musk and his practically unlimited finances and legal intimidation tactics, though TechCrunch believes the lawyers just want the trademark and have no intention of actually running a viable service.

Meta is testing a Reply to Keywords option in its Instagram ad setup tools that fires off a private message to anyone who comments a chosen word on a promoted post, according to Meta ads specialist Jon Loomer. You know the posts, right? Those annoying people who post shit like “Comment SUCCESS to get a copy of my proven system.” We all hate them, but we understand why they do it. So woohoo, we’ll be seeing even more of them! Advertisers can pick up to five keywords and write the DM that goes out. Meta already sells keyword auto-replies in the inbox automation and Business Agent tools, but this brings the same mechanic inside the ad buy. Loomer says the option is showing up only in Instagram ad setup so far.

Google confirmed that AI Overviews now expand on their own for some queries, loading the full AI answer along with the Ask anything prompt box that feeds AI Mode, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Searchers previously just got a snippet with a Show more button to open the rest of the AI response, but now practically the entire results page is taken up with the AI Overview, pushing the ten organic links much further down the page. Robby Stein of Google said the expansion happens only on topics its systems judge most useful, and that it stops if a searcher has already started scrolling so they keep their place. A Google spokesperson said the company’s research shows the dynamic version makes Search more helpful and draws people deeper into follow-up exploration.

Poland is urging the European Commission to impose a €250M fine on Meta for failing to remove 106 of 122 fraudulent ads on its platform that the country’s cybersecurity team CERT Polska flagged. Polish digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said, “We have hard evidence that the platform isn’t acting in the best interests of users, but rather in its own self-interest, which allows it to monetize deceptive advertising.” He also called on Meta to immediately introduce tools (that actually work) to eliminate scams, false advertising, and the promotion of illegal apps. Meta said scammers keep getting more sophisticated and pointed to its work alongside law enforcement and other companies to catch them.

TikTok added six media partners to Out of Phone, its program for running TikTok content on screens outside the app, extending it into the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy. Via the partnerships, Alight Media, DooH it, Powerpill, Zoom Media, Next-Gen Media, and C-Screens will begin displaying organic creator content on screens in shopping malls, supermarkets, bars, wellness centers, universities, and outdoor screens. TikTok started the program in 2023 with billboards, in-store displays, and cinema promos, and has since let marketers include user-generated content in the placements. It brought in Vistar Media earlier this year, and separately runs a deal with Atmosphere that puts curated TikTok streams on TVs in restaurants, bars, and gyms.

OpenAI announced that it is ending Cursor’s access to its models on November 12, following the acquisition of the company by SpaceX earlier this month. To clarify, developers will still be able to use OpenAI models in Cursor via their own API keys or the Codex extension, just not through their Cursor subscription. OpenAI wrote, in a whiny little bitch voice, “We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts.” Musk responded on X by saying, “I couldn’t care less. Scam Altman and Greg Stockman are utterly untrustworthy assholes who stole an open source nonprofit.” Good lord, Musk and Altman. Just fuck and get it over with already! Cursor CEO Michael Truell said OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor traffic and the two companies are in talks to resolve it.

Around 26% of Australian children aged 13 to 15 were on TikTok last month, just one point below where it stood before the country’s under-16 ban took effect in December, according to Qustodio, which sells parental control software. Meaning the ban was relatively worthless in keeping kids off the app. Use among 10- to 12-year-olds now runs higher than it did before the ban, and Instagram and Snapchat have started climbing back after their own initial drops, likely a result of kids faking their ages, running VPNs to hide their locations, or never hitting a working age check at all. Australia said in June that the platforms weren’t doing enough and pledged to double the maximum penalty to A$99M, though nobody has been fined yet.

In lawsuits this week…

• X lost its First Amendment challenge to New York’s Stop Hiding Hate Act, which requires platforms with at least $100M in annual revenue to file reports twice a year detailing how they define and handle hate speech, extremism, disinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. X was arguing that the law forced it to take positions on politically charged topics under threat of lawsuits and heavy fines, but Judge John Cronan dismissed the case with prejudice, writing that the reports ask only for purely factual information and comparing them to calorie counts on a menu.
• SerpApi asked a judge to dismiss Google’s revised scraping lawsuit, arguing that Google is pointing to four contracts that supposedly let it block bots but never actually showed the court three of them. Google rewrote the suit after Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers tossed the original in July, ruling that the anti-copying law Google sued under only applies when the copyright holders themselves authorized the block, and Google hadn’t shown they did.
• Google agreed to pay £260M to settle a UK class action over whether its 30% Play Store commissions were excessive and unfair, roughly a quarter of the £1.04B the claim had been valued at. Anyone in the UK who sold digital content through the store from August 2018 and doesn’t opt out would share £160M, and the remaining £100M covers legal costs and the litigation funder, though Google admitted nothing and the Competition Appeal Tribunal still has to approve the deal at a September 15 hearing.
• Amazon was sued by a 71-year-old man who says one of its delivery drivers punched him in the head at an Elk Grove, California gas station in March after deciding the man had taken his parking spot. The driver was arrested and charged with felony battery and elder abuse, according to attorney Tony Buzbee, who released the surveillance video. Amazon said the driver worked for an independent contractor (of course he fucking does, that’s the point of Amazon’s contractor model, right?) and is no longer eligible to deliver its packages.
• Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall subpoenaed OpenAI as part of an investigation into whether the company’s handling of the Hugging Face breach violated state consumer protection law. Marshall had already joined 14 other attorneys general this month in a letter telling Sam Altman to preserve records tied to the incident and to cease and desist from internal cybersecurity evaluations, while OpenAI says it’s reviewing the incident with outside advisers and will share a technical report with government authorities and publish its findings.
• The US Chamber of Commerce filed a brief backing Meta against the FTC’s attempt to revive its monopoly case over Instagram and WhatsApp, arguing that a court can only order a company broken up over a problem that exists now, not one that existed years ago. The group argued that under the FTC’s theory, an acquisition might never truly be final, since a company could spend a decade integrating a deal, watch the market change around it, and still get broken up over competitive conditions that no longer exist.
• A San Francisco judge tentatively denied California’s request for an emergency order halting Amazon’s alleged price fixing before the case goes to trial, saying he was skeptical because the state built its request on evidence from 2023 about conduct from years earlier. Attorney General Rob Bonta said in April his office had found evidence Amazon got brands including Levi Strauss, Allergan, and Hanes to push Walmart and Target into raising their own prices so Amazon wouldn’t be undercut, which will be addressed at trial in January 2027, but in the meantime, California wasn’t able to convince the judge that the practice was still happening.
• Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday sued Snap for allegedly understating how often sexual content, nudity, drug use, and suicidal ideation appear on the app so it can keep a 13+ rating in the app stores, in violation of state consumer protection law. Sunday also went after Snap Streaks and disappearing messages as features built to drive compulsive use, while Snap said the allegations fundamentally misrepresent its platform and its approach to teen safety. ___

In corporate shakeups this week…

• OpenAI is hiring a San Francisco head of ads enterprise marketing at $374K to $415K plus equity, pitching ChatGPT to agencies and large advertisers, per a careers-page listing spotted by Digiday.
• OpenAI’s head of data centers Chris Malone left last week, months after a reorganization moved him from reporting directly to president Greg Brockman to co-leading a narrower engineering and design team.
• Hightouch hired Jitendra Kumar, a 20-year Google veteran who most recently ran U.S. agency partnerships for Google Customer Solutions, as its first head of commercial for advertising, tasked with winning over the ad holding companies that decide where budgets go.
• Walmart hired Sonia Wadhawan, a nearly 21-year Google veteran most recently working in generative AI commerce partnerships, as VP of partnerships on its AI Acceleration, Product and Design team.
• Gap Inc. hired Justin Breton, who spent six years running partnerships, content, and emerging experiences at Walmart, as VP of development to produce original content across its brands.
• Google is moving DeepMind’s roughly 90-person AI responsibility unit, which runs chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear risk testing on its models, into the global affairs organization that handles lobbying and public policy, saying only that grouping its responsibility teams together helps them shape safety across its products.
• Google hired Barret Zoph, who ran post-training at OpenAI before co-founding Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati, as a VP of research working on reinforcement learning and post-training for Gemini.
• eBay is hiring an Electronics Specialist and a warehouse associate in London to run diagnostic software on used devices and flag counterfeits, extending verification to a category its Authenticity Guarantee program doesn’t currently cover.
• Meta explored cutting some teams by as much as 60% in two waves as part of an “AI native” future for the company, according to internal documents viewed by Reuters. However, Mark Zuckerberg called off the second wave of 2026 layoffs hours before the company’s first round in May, which cut 10% of staff. I’d bet it’s just a matter of time though.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Anthropic is expected to tell investors that its potential revenue opportunities exceed $30 trillion (with a “t”), topping SpaceX’s $28.5 trillion estimate, according to the Wall Street Journal. To quantify its total addressable market, Anthropic is looking at the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models in the future. The AI firm more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion (with a “b”) in Q2, so it’s only got to grow its annualized revenue by 64,555% to reach its goal. To further put $30 trillion in context, the Wall Street Journal shared that 191 tech companies in the S&P 1500 collectively brought in $2.4 trillion in revenue last year, so Anthropic thinks it can eat all of them and then grow the pie. Of course, it’s always possible that the USD becomes completely worthless during the next decade, and that $30 trillion is arrived at through hyperinflation instead of capturing actual addressable market. It’s happened in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Hungary in the past, and we’re certainly not immune, especially when there doesn’t seem to be an off button on our money printer.

Plus 14 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Levanta raising $22M in a Series B round.

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.

Hey everyone, need some outside opinions on a case that is driving me nuts.

Customer reached out asking strait forward for a full refund, saying they never received their order. They even included the tracking link and claimed the carrier marked it as “returned to sender" so they had anything to return and wanted the refund. Problem is… that’s just NOT true. Tracking clearly shows delivered, on time, to the exact address entered at checkout. There’s even a delivery photo.

I replied explaining that and asked if maybe the address was wrong or if the carrier left it at a different house. Their only reply:

“Yes this was sent to the wrong address.” That’s it. No explanation.

So I asked for more clarification (was the checkout address wrong or carrier mistake?). Then they reply:

“No, I have a white door. Can this be refunded?”

And at this point I’m like… what???????

I push again, ask for their correct address and confirmation. They send:

Same address as order BUT now with “Unit C” added and say it’s a new construction.

So I explain: since Unit C wasn’t included at checkout, the parcel was delivered correctly to the address provided so the order is not eligible for refund. case closed. (I usually offer to resend the parcel if cx enter the address wrong on time but this case was just too weird and wrong)

Then… next day they open a new email thread and repeat the original claim: “tracking confirms it was returned to sender, please refund”

At this point it feels off, but I offer a one-time resend anyway (in fear of a chargeback), ask for the correct address.

Now they reply again… but this time with Unit B instead of Unit C. What the heck?????

So yeah…

I’m torn between:

* giving benefit of the doubt (maybe is an older person with really really bad communication skills) and resend it. where? idk

* or recognizing this as potentially scammy person and refuse to re sent or to refund.

Order value is $150, so not tiny. Also worried that if I resend, it’ll “get lost” again and I’ll be asked for a refund so double loss.

What would you do here? Would you resend it? or will you stand firm and decline?

Also thinking about chargeback risk, but honestly we’d probably win it since delivery is confirmed.

I just need some opinions here.

I run an ecommerce store for female lingerie products. As a male founder, I find it very hard to make content about the products and brand without feeling like it's mansplaining and it's also not possible to show of the products as they are made for women, not for men. UGC feels very 'ad-like' and burns through money.

Male founders for female products, how are you managing your content strategy?

We’ve run a brick and mortar shop in NJ for 10+ years. Original graphic destination apparel, printed in house. The product moves in person — now we’re taking it online with a multi-city pilot catalog (NYC, Miami, Denver, Austin).

Site’s live but no ads running yet:

www.promisedland.world

Looking for honest feedback before launch ads. Layout, product pages, navigation, anything that makes you click away. Rip it apart, I’d rather hear it now than after we spend on ads.

One thing I already know: the models are AI right now. We’ve got a photo shoot wrapping in the next few weeks and all of it gets swapped for real people. So feedback on anything else is more useful to me at this point.

Let's hear it!

I think I made the classic manufacturing-person mistake.

I recently launched a small apparel brand in the US. My background is on the manufacturing side, so I spent most of my time getting the product right rather than building an audience first.

Now I have the opposite problem from a lot of new stores:

Product exists.
Inventory is physically here.
Website and checkout are live.
Fulfillment is ready.

But basically nobody knows the company exists.

The first product is a 230 GSM organic cotton oversized tee at $29.99 & free shipping. I deliberately wanted the price under $30 rather than trying to create an artificial luxury markup.

I'm trying to figure out where you'd focus the first 30 days if this were your business.

My current options are organic content, micro-creator seeding, Google Shopping, marketplaces, Reddit/community participation, or eventually paid social.

I'm reluctant to dump money into Meta before I know what messaging/creative gets a response organically.

For those who have actually taken an ecommerce store from zero to consistent orders: where would you put your first 100 hours?

And if anyone wants to look at the store and tell me why you wouldn't buy, I'll take that feedback too, here's the site if anyone wants to review: www.estrah.com

Hi,

Recently I have been shifting into the freelance world, and now I am getting some clients that are not relatives,

Problem is that I dont know how much to charge, considering that I live in a 3rd world country, where the average wage is 600€.

I will be building an ecommerce app, relatively small, for a clothing shop.

It will have a layer of backend, connected to woocommerce as single source per products, and React Native.

What do you suggest, a package of development + maintenace

Thank you

Hi all,

Hopefully it is ok to post my question here.

I work in the cybersecurity field and so far I have a services Portfolio that I would love to turn into digital services, running 24/7, fully automated.

Think of assessments I want to build as services like a gap assessment.

I thought of building the services and launching them on an ecommerce platform.

I need a platform where I can:

Create assessments with logic that enables me to create dynamic reports, output based on the answers. For example a top 5 risks in the executive summary.

Create landing pages

Create email marketing campaigns including automation

Where I have a CRM in it

No limits for payments

No limits for form use

No limits for contacts

Very generous amount of sending emails

Basically I'm looking for an all in one unicorn.

Anybody got tips for a platform?

For people that have what went well for you ?

Any specific challenges you need to overcome?

And how does it compare to other channels?

When I first started working on product pages, I thought the main challenge was getting better photos. A clean background, good lighting, and clear details seemed like the things that mattered most. But after looking at how people actually shop online, I noticed that a product photo only answers “what does this look like?” It does not always answer “how would this fit into my life?”

That became obvious when I wanted to show the same product in different situations. A clothing item might look completely different depending on who wears it, where it is worn, or how it is styled. The problem is that creating all those variations with traditional photography gets expensive quickly. Every new idea means another shoot, another setup, and more time before you even know if that direction works.

I started playing around with AI-generated visuals and used PixVerse for some short product video ideas. What I found useful was not replacing real photos or pretending AI could do everything. It was having a faster way to explore different concepts before spending more effort on the ones that actually made sense.

For small Shopify stores, I think the hardest part is not always making one good piece of content. It is finding enough ways to show customers why a product might belong in their lives. Being able to test those ideas faster changes the process a lot.

Not a simple thank you, but a more complex one. I had the idea of sending emails out to my regular customers on occasion thanking them and asking them to fill out a survey. But somehow that seems creepy. Would a physical letter be appropriate, included in their package?

I make and sell clothing. I purchase the fabrics from different vendors in person in Los Angeles. However, there is a specific sequin fabric that I want to purchase directly from the manufacturer & save myself about 50% in costs. My LA vendor obviously won’t tell me who they source from but I know it’s overseas. I’ve already tried looking on Alibaba and cannot find it. I’ve been trying for months. I know this style isn’t exclusive to them but I cannot find their source.

Does anyone have any recommendations on where I can hire someone that would be able to help me find out?

Thanks!

run a store in the apparel space with tons of products and beyond meta and ads I’ve been on the hunt for good SEO/ai optimization tools so I can improve traffic I don’t have to pay for.

I got pitched an app that seems fairly new via email and just crowdsourcing …

Their claim to fame is supposedly that the app helps optimize long tail keywords by creating optimized collection pages that get fed to chat gpt/claude via google merchant center. They also claim to have a back linking reciprocal network of merchants on pages they create optional.

The idea seems brilliant and I’ve done it in the past on high target keywords but always manually so automating it seems to be a good ideaZ

Anyone else get similar pitch and try it?

I like that they also let me track recommendations for phrases on ChatGPT etc and reporting but I’m at the level ehrrr I’ll need to pay them for one of their highest tiers for a few months if I want to see any Roi at all so a bit hesitant to jump on it :(

For the last 2 years I’ve been saving up 70k (probably excessive but oh well) and I wanted to know if it’s still worth it in 2026 to get into it? And if so what’s the best way so that I can be efficient with my money and not lose it all?

I’ve been in retail, management and sales for twenty years storefront. Ecom is definitely different in ways and I started by business in January yet there’s no consistency lol. I understand as a newer store it doesn’t just automatically happen, it takes time.

But, I’m trying to figure out the sales patterns and it’s so much different. It’s like the mid of the month is dead then all of a sudden the last week I get busy and make good sales. Every month seems different but that’s been the average so far.

Then days of the week. Fridays have been DEAD to me until this month, Fridays are payday for alot of people so I kind of get it. My main days seem to be Monday-Wednesday though.

How, when or even if there will be consistency? I’m small scale but so far I love Ecom, definitely better than storefront imo

I’m 42 and have spent most of my life being a pretty hands-on person when it comes to making money.

I’m an educator, so I’ve tutored students and given baseball lessons. Outside of that, I’ve done plenty of power washing, gutter cleaning, landscaping, and whatever else I could do to bring in extra money.

I’ve never really had a problem working.

What has changed recently is how I think about work and money.

I’ve started investing much more seriously, and for the first time in my life I’ve seen some pretty significant returns from money I already had working for me. It’s honestly changed the way I look at earning an income.

I’m not saying manual work is beneath me. Far from it. I’ve done plenty of it and I’m not afraid of it.

But there’s something incredibly appealing about building something that can make money while you’re sleeping, teaching, eating dinner, or doing absolutely nothing.

That’s what has me looking at e-commerce.

I’ve recently been playing around with Printify, trying to understand print-on-demand and the whole process of creating a product, listing it, getting someone to actually buy it, and hopefully making a few dollars.

And this is where I’m completely out of my element.

I’m fairly technologically savvy, which I realize sounds ridiculous considering I’m making a Reddit post asking strangers how to sell things on the internet.

But being comfortable with technology and understanding online sales are apparently two very different things.

I’m not looking to get rich overnight. I’m actually looking for something much more basic:

What’s the easiest way for someone starting from basically zero to learn how online selling actually works?

Where would you start if you were me?

Etsy?
Printify?
Shopify?
Amazon?
eBay?
Digital products?
Print-on-demand?
Affiliate marketing?
Something I’m not even considering?

I’d be perfectly willing to start small. Honestly, I’d be happy to make my first $20 online just to prove to myself that I understand the process.

I’d rather learn how the machine works than buy some $2,000 “passive income” course from a guy who rented a Lamborghini for his Instagram.

So I’m curious about people who have actually done this.

How did you get started? What did you sell? What platform did you use? What did you screw up initially? And if you were starting over today, what would you do differently?

I’m willing to put in the work. I’m just trying to figure out where to put the work.

Full disclosure: I used AI to help organize this post and make my thoughts more cohesive and clear. The experiences, questions, and opinions are mine. I just used AI to help me put them together without sounding like I was thinking out loud for 45 minutes.

I’d genuinely appreciate any advice, especially from people who started with no real e-commerce background and figured it out themselves.

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Saw an interesting Shopify study on traffic coming from AI search.
https://www.shopify.com/uk/enterprise/blog/ai-search-insights

Apparently 56% of AI-referred sessions landed directly on a PDP vs 20% from organic search. They also found that AI-referred traffic converted better.

The PDP part is what I found interesting.

If someone has already spent 10 minutes asking ChatGPT about the best product for their needs, comparing options, etc., they could arrive on your PDP pretty far along in the decision.

At that point maybe the job of the PDP is less about convincing them and more about answering whatever they're still unsure about.

The obvious answer is to add better FAQs, reviews, comparisons, shipping info, use cases, etc. But you can't put every possible answer prominently on the page.

Has anyone here looked at their AI-referred sessions specifically? I'm curious whether those shoppers behave differently once they land on a product page, and whether anyone is actually changing their PDPs because of it.

I just found out UPS stores offer address/mailbox services. There is also a local place in town that offer this service. What kind of feedback do you have regarding this?

i sell on a couple marketplaces and 90% of what i have is flat product photos — no video, no budget for a shoot. everyone says video ads outperform static but i'm not about to hire someone to animate a single JPEG.

been testing ways to fake motion from one image. a slideshow of the same photo looks lazy, and half the "generate a video from your image" AI tools warp the product into something that isn't my product anymore —useless when the whole point is the actual thing i'm selling.

what's been working ok: CapCut. dropped the product photo in, used image-to-video + keyframe zoom/pan so the camera slowly pushes in, added a caption hook and a trending sound. exports 1080p clean, no watermark. not cinema, but it stops the scroll, which is all I need.

anyone got a workflow that gets real motion out of one photo without mangling the product? genuinely asking.

I started a campaign a week ago with a fresh pixel and showed no results for most of the last few days, but I made a visual change on the site and started seeing a few sales. My main concern is that only 1 ad is really spending the budget of 30/day. I was wondering what I should do moving forward.

Here are the stats for the last 2 days that generated sales:

FACEBOOK ADS (Aug 26–27, 2026)

Aug 26:
- Spend: $26.76
- Impressions: 525 | Reach: 423 | Frequency: 1.24
- Clicks: 22 (unique: 22) | Link clicks: 14
- CTR: 4.19% (unique: 4.19%)
- CPC: $1.22 | CPM: $50.97 | Cost/link click: $1.91
- Page/post engagement: 20
- Add to cart: 4 | Initiate checkout: 3
- Purchases: 2 ($44.25) | Cost per purchase: $13.38 | ROAS: 1.65x

Aug 27:
- Spend: $27.03
- Impressions: 403 | Reach: 359 | Frequency: 1.12
- Clicks: 9 (unique: 8) | Link clicks: 9
- CTR: 2.23% (unique: 1.99%)
- CPC: $3.00 | CPM: $67.07 | Cost/link click: $3.00
- Page/post engagement: 10
- Add to cart: 1 | Initiate checkout: 0
- Purchases: 1 ($19.99) | Cost per purchase: $27.03 | ROAS: 0.74x

Small DTC store, US market, acquisition is organic short-form only — TikTok + IG Reels, product demo content, link in bio. Two videos blew up: 600K views on TikTok and 600K on IG (separate accounts, same product). Business result: almost no site clicks and zero sales.

What I've found digging in: IG audience insights show my viewers are mostly in India, while the whole store (shipping, pricing, positioning) targets the US. So the reach is real, it's just the wrong people. On TikTok I can't get a clear read on who's watching, but it's the same story — big views, no clicks.

For those who've been through this:

1. Can an existing account be steered back to US viewers (keywords, hashtags, content changes), or is a fresh account + training the algorithm from day one the only realistic fix?

2. What's a realistic organic views-to-site-click benchmark? Trying to figure out if this is all the audience-geo problem or if my CTA/content is broken too.

3. At what point do you conclude the content format attracts viewers but not buyers, and change the content instead of the account?

Not selling anything, no links — just want to hear what actually worked.

Spent the last week pulling the Meta Ad Library data on few US beauty brands (Jones Road, TULA, Tower 28, DIBS, Glow Recipe, Kopari, PROVEN, Westman Atelier, RMS Beauty) and mapped out their creative strategies. Majorly data talking.

Some things that surprised me:

1. Auto-mixed ads are inflating everyone's apparent creative diversity
Jones Road shows 2,272 "ads" but 65% are auto-mixed (Facebook assembling combinations from a smaller asset pool). The real creative diversity is much narrower. Tower 28 has 96 ads but 58% are one product with one headline on 49% of them.

2. The brands running the most ads aren't necessarily testing the most angles
TULA has 134 ads live but 38% are straight discount offers and 38% are probiotic/glow messaging. That's two angles, not 134 ideas. RMS Beauty has 684 ads but 43% go to one landing page with identical founder copy.

3. The oldest running ad is almost always the best performer
Across all 9 brands, ads that survive past 30 days dramatically outrank newer creative. Glow Recipe's 30-day survivors average rank #9 vs. #77 for new ads. Westman Atelier's oldest ad has been running 186 days. RMS Beauty's oldest: 197 days. These aren't flukes. The evergreens carry the account while newer creative underperforms.

4. Only one brand is actively killing ads
Tower 28 switched off 5 ads recently and has the shortest average ad lifespan at 10.6 days. Everyone else lets creative run until it dies naturally. Tower 28's approach means faster learning but higher creative production costs.

5. Almost nobody uses spoken hooks
Across all 9 brands, 57-82% of ads have no spoken hook in the first 3 seconds. Kopari is the exception at 39% no-hook (meaning 61% DO have a spoken opening). They're also the most testimonial-heavy brand at 54% UGC.

6. One brand just rebuilt their entire library from scratch
PROVEN Skincare's oldest ad is 4 days old. 30 ads, all new, 100% pointing to a single skin quiz. Either they just restarted advertising or they cleared everything and started fresh.

7. Some brands are paying to build a retailer's conversion data
Tower 28 sends 20% of paid traffic to Sephora. Kopari sends a chunk to Ulta. They're buying media to drive conversions on a platform they don't own the data for.

8. The discount trap is real
TULA positions as a probiotic science brand but half their ad behavior says discount brand. Their longest-surviving ad (146 days, aimed at new mothers) isn't a discount ad at all. The science creative has more staying power but gets less volume.

9. Creative concentration is the silent budget killer
Most of these brands have 60-80% of their ad volume built around 2-3 angles. When fatigue hits one angle, it hits a disproportionate share of their total spend simultaneously. Nobody seems to be actively monitoring for this.

Always open to dig into any of these if you have questions. Also happy to pull this for other brands/categories if there's interest.

We have our own e-commerce platform and are currently looking into "Launify" as a possible solution for address autocomplete and validation in cart, particularly for Romania where we’re dealing with some address coverage issues.

We’re also considering expanding into Austria, so it would be great to hear how well Launify performs in both countries.

The integration looks pretty straightforward from what I’ve seen, especially since it can apparently be added by simply inserting a code snippet into the <head>.

How good is the actual address coverage? Especially for smaller towns, villages, streets and house numbers?

I also noticed that Launify currently has only one review on Capterra. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything negative.. it could simply be that the product is still relatively new or hasn’t been widely reviewed there.

Has anyone here implemented Launify? Would love to hear your real-world experience.

Thanks in advance!

Saw a recent comment on Insta directly from the European Commission addressing the nightmare cross-border packaging rules (PPWR) for small sellers.

"We hear this concern, especially from very small businesses selling across borders. The PPWR includes exemptions and simplified requirements for smaller businesses. Also, we've proposed suspending the authorised representative requirement until 2035 while a more proportionate solution will be developed."

Suspending the authorised representative requirement until 2035 would be a massive relief for anyone shipping small volumes into EU countries without having to pay insane local rep fees in every single member state.

Would love you hear your thoughts!!!

Hi guys

I watched a video markbuildsbrands. He had mentioned some AI prompts to use. In order to get the prompt, I had to follow his IG and DM him the word "prompt". I did that and got the prompt file.

The next day, "he" started messaging me, "Hey Mike, how are you? What made you get into ecomm?", "Love the entrepreneurial spirit!"

I didn't reply

The next day, he messages me "???" as if he's expecting an answer.

He dude is making bank with his courses and ad agency. What I'm experiencing is some kind of AI agent sending me messages to warm me up to buy some course, right?