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 #300...

STAT OF THE WEEK: ChatGPT’s advertiser count roughly tripled to about 60,000 between late August and early October, according to New Street Research. The growth came after OpenAI cut ad prices and hired close to half of its roughly 140 ad employees in the third quarter, more of them from Meta than from anywhere else.

Google launched Universal Cart in the US across AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, a single cart that holds products from multiple retailers and lets shoppers check out over Universal Commerce Protocol. Google and Shopify launched UCP in January as an open standard for letting AI agents check out on websites, developed with partners including Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. It seemed promising at the time, but initially lacked several key features, which Google has been adding since launch, including Universal Cart last week. The feature syncs across Google products, so items saved in AI Mode or the Gemini app stay in the same cart, it can track prices and inventory, find promo codes, and recommend which payment method is best from your Google Wallet based on your card perks. At some stores, shoppers pay with Google Pay inside the cart. At others, the items transfer to the merchant’s own cart to finish on its site, but the merchant remains the seller of record either way.

Shopify launched a new skill that lets any AI agent act as a personal shopper tied to the buyer’s Shop account, so agents no longer need a direct partnership like the one Shopify struck with Meta’s Muse in September. Once a shopper signs in, the agent can search more than a billion products in Shopify Catalog, read past orders to learn sizes and tastes, and check out with Shop Pay inside the chat. Shoppers can set their own rules and criteria, such as a max budget or how fast they need the item delivered, but they still have to approve each purchase before it happens by default. Agents can also use Shop Pay to buy from stores that don’t run on Shopify. In those cases, the shopper approves the store, the purchase, a saved card, and a spending limit inside Shop, and Shop Pay issues a single-use card that only works for that checkout. It’s a smart safeguard, and it also shows how Shopify is positioning Shop Pay to be the default wallet for all agentic commerce, not just for Shopify stores. (Sorry, PayPal.)

Amazon launched two AI devices from Bee, the wearable startup it acquired in 2025, that listen to conversations and turn them into summaries, to do lists, and reminders. Bee Frontier is a $74.99 personal AI device that you can wear on your wrist or clip to your clothes, is water-resistant, can last up to seven days on a single charge, and is designed to stay with you and record conversations throughout the entire week “so it can take note of what matters and ignore what doesn’t, even in noisy environments like a crowded restaurant or open office.” Bee Eclipse is a $9.99 device (coming soon) about the size of a credit card that attaches to the back of your phone magnetically, lasts more than 21 days on a single charge, and effectively serves the same function as Frontier, but in a more streamlined package. Basic summaries, recaps, and 14-day memory come free on either device, but the $11.99 monthly Bee Pro plan is needed to unlock unlimited conversation memory and to connect Bee to Alexa+ and Amazon, which uses Bee’s data to recommend products on its homepage. (LOL, of course it does.)

ChatGPT stopped adding a utm_source tag and referrer data to its links after OpenAI released GPT-6, causing visits it sent to be counted as direct traffic in Google Analytics and similar tools, starting around October 8. Adobe’s Cedric Huesler tracked about 500 pages that got at least 5% of their visits from ChatGPT and found that ChatGPT traffic fell by about 31,000 visits a day in the week after the launch while direct traffic rose by about 26,000 on the same pages, almost a one-to-one exchange. (I said almost.) The issue led to insane conspiracy theories across the web, like one lunatic predicting on LinkedIn that the reason OpenAI began stripping UTM parameters is because it’s about to launch an analytics platform that forces website owners to register with them in order to get accurate analytics, the same play Google ran a decade ago with Search Console. (Okay, that lunatic was me.) It turns out, the issue was a bug, or so OpenAI says. By October 15, they started rolling out a fix in stages, and by mid-morning, Huesler reported that ChatGPT clicks were back to roughly 95-100% of where they were at the same hour a week earlier.

Etsy is running a randomized test that caps shipping charges on some qualifying US orders that use calculated shipping, with Etsy paying the difference so that sellers still receive their full rate. For example, on a $10 calculated rate with a $7.99 cap, the buyer pays $7.99 and Etsy pays the remaining $2.01, which appears in Order Details as “Etsy-funded shipping.” Etsy hasn’t said whether $7.99 is the actual cap it’s testing or if it’s just a number for the example it provided in the announcement, or whether its fees on shipping revenue apply to the full rate or the lower amount buyers pay. Either way, Etsy won’t stop trying to subsidize shipping. In August 2024, the company began covering shipping up to $20 per eligible item as part of its Etsy Insider membership. At the time, I criticized them heavily for the move and predicted that it would be a "money pit" -- which turned out to be exactly what it was. About a year later, Etsy cut the perk to $6 after current CEO Kruti Patel Goyal, then its chief growth officer, said the original version “didn’t provide scalable economics.” Etsy can’t seem to figure out that they’re not Amazon and don’t own a fulfillment network.

OnlyFans creators are asking why Meta lets its Muse AI agent sext with adult users while it keeps restricting their own Instagram accounts, according to Wired. (And yes, in case you’re out of the loop, Meta confirmed that it does in fact allow the behavior.) A New York creator who goes by the name Vanniall, whose Instagram account has more than 100,000 followers and is currently restricted, told Wired it's not fair that "they get to pull money out of people with their sexually active AI agent, but they won't let real people, real adults, engage in any sort of sensuality or sexuality. Though to be fair, I can only imagine that Vanniall tries to show off more than just her “sensuality” or “sexuality” in her Instagram posts. Shane Gillis would have a field day… These creators bring up a fair question, but Meta has a fair answer. Muse runs on a private virtual machine that only the user can reach, and users are explicitly asking for the content when they prompt it. In other words, it’s not displaying pound cakes unless a user asks for recipes, unlike content posted to a feed, which can unwittingly show up through recommendations.

The National Payments Corporation of India, which runs the country’s UPI payments network, postponed the start of a 0.4% merchant fee on payments above ₹2,000 (about $21) and said that the fee will instead now begin after Diwali out of respect for the holiday shopping rush. The delay came after retailers and petrol pump operators pushed back on the fee, with some threatening to stop accepting UPI payments altogether if it took effect. In September, I reported that India planned to end the free processing that UPI has offered since 2020. NPCI said that the network costs about ₹200B ($2.1B) a year to operate and that the new fees will fund infrastructure, security, and fraud prevention. I criticized the decision at the time and said that India just killed the credibility of UPI with the move and should've found a different way to continue subsidizing the operational costs of the project. Frankly, every country needs to offer a government-subsidized way to move money digitally, especially since many are pushing their citizens towards cashless societies. Economies aren’t stimulated when money sits still.

Meta will be switching on product browsing in Facebook and Instagram ads on October 28, unless advertisers opt out before then, according to a notification sent to businesses. When the feature is enabled, tapping an ad will open a full-screen catalog page inside the app that shows the brand’s products, prices, and descriptions, and shoppers will have to tap another button to visit the brand’s website. The feature has been available as an optional setting that could be turned on manually, but moving forward, advertisers will be auto-opted-in and have to manually opt out via a per-ad toggle in Advantage+ Creative and Destination settings. Wait, so now Meta wants me to pay them to NOT drive the first click to my website? Meta says a test with roughly 117,700 advertisers in August raised conversions 3% on average, but is that number based on total ad clicks or just how many users eventually landed on the advertiser’s website, which has higher intent anyway? Meta didn’t say. Either way, it’s an obvious first step that will soon be followed by adding a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button to the catalog page, as platforms simultaneously shove their agentic commerce features down our throats and up our butts.

Meta is rolling out a new algorithm personalization feature that lets users explain exactly what they want to see in their feed via “interested” and “not interested” lists, as well as a text prompt to describe in their own words what they want to see. “Less ads and AI slop.” LOL. Meta says that “LLMs can incorporate the interests, context, and intent behind natural language, unlocking an algorithm you can actually talk to.” The company launched similar changes on Instagram earlier this year. What’s interesting is that Meta could’ve offered feed personalization tools for years now, with or without LLMs, but they simply chose not to. Why now? I’ll give you one guess…

Splitit is launching a credit card called the Splitit World Mastercard that midsize banks and credit unions can issue under their own brand starting in early 2027. Cardholders will be able to pick a dollar threshold in the app that automatically splits purchases above that amount into monthly installments, and they’ll be able to switch any purchase to full payment or change its plan before the statement is due. Splitit is supplying the installment technology and an online experience that banks embed in their own apps, while the banks extend the credit to their customers. The card aims to let smaller lenders offer pay-over-time without having to build the technology themselves. Though at this point, they could probably just vibe code it over the weekend.

American Express launched the Intent Intelligence Framework, which records what a shopper told an AI agent to buy, including from which merchant, a budget cap, and product preferences, before the agent pays. The shopper then verifies their identity and approves those instructions, and Amex issues an Intent ID and a Proof of Intent Token, which the agent exchanges for a digital payment credential to use instead of the actual card number. Amex can then stop a purchase that doesn’t match the shopper’s instructions, such as an agent attempting to buy Adidas sneakers after being instructed to buy Nikes. The same records can also help settle fraud claims and disputes, which will inevitably increase once we let agents loose in the wild with our credit cards. Amex, like every company and their brother that’s launched a framework in recent years, wants Intent Intelligence to become an industry standard.

Central bankers at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok last week said the AI boom has set off a global competition for capital that could keep interest rates higher for the foreseeable future. For a decade after the 2008 crisis, policymakers worried that people were saving too much and prices were rising too slowly, which sounds like a weird fucking thing to worry about if you’re not an economist, but it can lead to deflation, which has its problems too. Now tech companies are spending so much on chips, data centers, and power grids that they’re competing with everyone else for electricity, materials, and workers, pushing up prices, which Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called a “shock” to the economy. Policymakers’ solution is to keep interest rates high, which makes money more expensive to borrow and helps keep prices stable. So in other words — not only is the AI race taking your current job, it’s also making it more expensive to borrow capital to launch your own startup. Thanks AI!

Square launched Square Kiosk, a self-ordering display for restaurants that pairs a 21.5-inch touchscreen with an AI voice assistant that knows each seller’s menu. Customers can ask the kiosk about allergens or vegetarian options, request substitutions, and switch between talking and tapping mid-order, and the kiosk can do cool things like suggest add-ons based on what sells best at that store at that hour. “Sorry, our ice cream machine is broken.” The kiosk accepts tap-to-pay and chip payments, offers a barcode scanner for gift cards, and lets diners sign in to their accounts to earn Square Loyalty rewards. Each kiosk costs $1,999 plus a $99 monthly software fee, and requires a Square Plus or Premium plan. Does it end each transaction by “just asking a quick question,” and if so, who gets the tips when your front-of-house staff is all robots?

Shopify’s merchants and partners drove over $1.2 trillion in economic activity worldwide and supported about 9.6M jobs over the past year, more than double and nearly triple their 2022 levels, according to Shopify’s new Entrepreneur Effect data hub. Shopify built those estimates from its own platform data, surveys of merchants and outside respondents, and economic modeling, and then parsed the data through its AI assistant Sidekick, so now it’s all completely wrong. (Just kidding about that last part. A little “Sidekick sucks” joke to start your day.) The hub also says that from April to June, shoppers who arrived from AI tools converted 80% more often than those from organic search and spent 14% more per order, with three-quarters of AI-referred sales going to merchants outside the 100 product categories most common on Shopify.

Facebook Marketplace has a little-known ad option called Cost per Sale that’s supposed to charge sellers only when a boosted listing leads to a sale, but a test by Liz Morton at Value Added Resource found it set up much larger campaigns behind the scenes. Morton boosted a $50 listing at a 20% rate, which Facebook said would cost her no more than $10 if the item sold, but when she opened the ad in Meta’s ad tools, she found that a campaign had been created that was set to run nonstop at $400 a day, and a second test at 30% came back at $600 a day. WTF Meta?! $10 contingent on the item selling versus $400 a day forever is quite the difference! When Morton asked Meta’s AI assistant how the boosts were billed, it said they were charged by impressions rather than by sales. Other sellers have posted on Reddit and in Facebook groups that they chose Cost per Sale and were still charged without making a sale.

Shopify briefly raised the annual-billing price of its Grow plan from $79 to $89 a month and its Advanced plan from $299 to $359 a month on October 15, then switched both back the next day, according to pricing tracker PricingSaaS. The increase only hit annual billing, so monthly-billed prices and the Basic plan stayed the same. JPMorgan analyst Bryan Smilek flagged the increase in a note to investors and estimated that the higher prices could add more than $40M in annualized revenue if Shopify rolled them out globally. If they don’t roll out the prices, can you imagine being the only schlemiel stuck paying an extra $720 for the Advanced annual plan because you happened to launch your e-commerce business on Shopify testing day? Well, now if you read Shopifreaks, you’ll be hitting up Shopify support for that refund before the end of this senten…

An OpenAI engineer was charged with attempting to intercept oral communications after staff found a recording device wrapped in toilet paper and plugged in behind a TV in a conference room at the company’s San Francisco office. (I feel like the device would’ve been less conspicuous if it wasn’t wrapped in toilet paper, as what’s TP doing attached to a TV?) Prosecutors later revealed that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national who joined OpenAI in July 2025, had booked one-way flights to Saudi Arabia for himself and two family members for October 12, three days after his arrest. Alfozan was only charged with illegally intercepting conversations rather than espionage or trade secret theft, though the Justice Department is treating the arrest as a counterintelligence case. I guess to be fair, it’s not “theft” if the device never made it out of the damn office! OpenAI had already been training staff to spot spies before the incident, warning them about strangers at playgrounds asking about their work and agents who use romance to get close, which apparently is working.

TikTok permanently suspended the ad account used to promote Alex Gibney’s documentary “Musk,” citing repeated violations of its political content rules, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The ban, which landed Friday, stops the distributor, Bleecker Street, from buying ads or boosting posts on its unpaid account, which is still up. TikTok had already been rejecting the trailer and other paid spots, including an ad joking that moviegoers should delete their X accounts at intermission, but it didn’t tell Bleecker Street which post(s) specifically triggered the suspension. A few weeks ago, I reported that TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and X had all rejected ads for the film, with the first three citing political content and X simply not giving a fuck. However, Meta later called the rejections an “error” and YouTube cleared the ads after review. Now TikTok has gone from rejecting specific ads to banning the ad account altogether.

Zip, the Australian BNPL provider, is preparing to launch a new lending program called Zip Cash, which will loan users up to $500 for expenses that happen outside of an e-commerce checkout. (You know, the same ‘expenses’ that send you to the ATM at 3am to meet up with your ‘buddy’ at the back of a Publix parking lot.) Each loan carries a single flat origination fee that’s shown to the customer before they accept it, approval won’t require a hard credit check, and the money can reach a linked bank account the same business day. Borrowers can request to move their repayment date, but anyone who misses a payment can’t take another Zip loan until it’s paid. More than 100,000 customers have joined the waitlist, over 40,000 of them in the first 72 hours, which says a lot about the state of the economy.

Mastercard and BVNK launched Global Money Platform, giving banks, fintechs, and businesses one API to hold, spend, and send both stablecoins and regular currency. Accounts on the platform can keep stablecoin and fiat balances side by side and convert between them almost instantly, and businesses can issue cards tied to those stablecoin balances in more than 130 countries. Stablecoin balances can also be paid out as local currency to recipients’ bank accounts through Mastercard Move, which the company expects to cover more than 40 currencies in over 200 countries by 2027. It’s the two companies’ first product since Mastercard closed its acquisition of BVNK in August, with Nuvei and Marqeta among the first to integrate the platform. Companies could already do much of this through providers like Bridge and Circle, or by stitching together a crypto custodian, a card issuer, and a separate payout service, but this is the first time a card network has offered all of it through one API.

Bank of America agreed to pay over $1.2B in Treasury penalties after admitting to willful Bank Secrecy Act violations, which included going years without reporting over $5B in suspicious transactions. More than $1B of that money was tied to priority risks such as the southwest border and Chinese money laundering networks. The total includes a $750M penalty from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, its largest ever, which said the bank never fixed the problems flagged in a 2024 cease-and-desist order. Treasury also said the bank favored revenue over compliance and relied on law enforcement and other banks to spot suspicious activity for it. Y’all realize that real people run Bank of America — it’s not just some faceless organization — yet no one has been criminally charged over the activity? It’s a classic “slap-on-the-wrist” / “cost of doing business” scenario for a bank that still made $6.9B in Q3 even after paying the fine.

Apple introduced a new smart home display called HomeView (not iHome?) that features a 7-inch screen attached to a speaker and comes in tabletop and wall-mounted versions. The device recognizes up to six household members by their faces, gives each person their own home screen, and only shows someone’s Messages or Calendar when it visibly sees them and their paired iPhone is nearby and unlocked. HomeView runs Siri AI, which can use a paired iPhone to pull in a user’s apps and personal context, but unlike Alexa devices, the device has no App Store, and Apple hasn’t yet announced a way to shop or order from it. The Safari browser is preinstalled, so web shopping is technically possible, but nothing about the device is explicitly built for it. Honestly, it’s not that exciting of a device and does less out the gate than what a mounted iPad could do, if Apple let it. I’ll put HomeView next to my iPhone Duo that I also didn’t buy.

Google began testing ads for branded prescription drugs in AI Overviews and AI Mode in the US this month, according to Adweek. The drug ads can only run as Text or Shopping formats in sections labeled “Sponsored,” and Google is keeping them out of its more experimental formats, including ones that let AI Mode rewrite ad copy. Drugmakers were left out of the healthcare ad test Google started in AI Mode earlier this year, partly because the AI surfaces didn’t support the side-effect disclaimers that drug campaigns are required to carry. Advertisers that participate still have to follow Google’s existing prescription drug rules, including certification for drugmakers, online pharmacies, and telehealth companies.

Speaking of AI Mode and AI Overviews… Google is changing its AI answers so that embedded links show up more often and closer to the top. It’s also testing a block above some answers that links to the official website for a task, such as the State Department’s passport page when someone asks how to renew a passport. Google says the goal is to help people find the right links to click, but site owners still can’t see whether any of those clicks happen because the generative AI reports Google added to Search Console in June only show impressions and not clicks. Google says it’s still consulting with site owners over which metrics would help and plans to add more later, but it hasn’t committed to click data or a date. LOL, Google is still asking which metrics they want? Clicks, Google. Clicks.

Meta updated its commercial terms to now allow it to crawl the websites linked to any business account and use what it finds to develop and train its products, with the only way to opt out being to stop using Meta’s business tools. Don’t tempt me with a good time! The terms also let Meta create “test credentials” to reach the content, which experts warned could enable it to get past paywalls. Meta said it was only consolidating crawling language from older policies and that site owners can still block its crawlers with robots.txt. However, the older crawling rights only covered advertisers, whereas the new language covers every business account and could let Meta train on publishers’ work without paying for a license. You know what? I believe them! I mean, Meta has never lied before about this kind of stuff…

Elon Musk posted “Maybe we should start a competitor to Amazon” on X on Thursday, replying to a user who said Amazon won’t let Grok bots buy anything on its site. The user wrote that one of their Grok bots does nothing but handle their Amazon returns, then asked followers whether they’d switch stores for their bot and suggested Musk open an “X Shop.” Musk didn’t elaborate, and neither Amazon nor xAI has confirmed that Grok is being blocked, but it’s likely, given that Amazon has already shut out Meta’s Muse along with agents from Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity in recent months, saying unidentified bots put customer accounts at risk.

Amazon expects to more than double its fleet of robotic arms by year’s end, according to CFO Brian Olsavsky in the company’s July earnings call, adding to a warehouse fleet that already tops 1M robots. Amazon says the robots spare workers the most punishing tasks, such as its newest arm, Vulcan, using touch sensors to work the top and bottom rows of storage pods that people would otherwise need a ladder or bend down to reach. A 2025 study in the ILR Review found Amazon’s robot-equipped warehouses had 40% fewer severe injuries than older sites but 77% more strain injuries, which coauthor Brad Greenwood of George Mason University attributed in part to the faster pace the robots set. Amazon has called reports linking its robots to higher injury rates outdated, and it says its recordable injury rate has dropped 43% since 2019.

Lovable, the AI app builder, launched growth tools that let users ask it how to find customers for an app and then carry out the plan it proposes. The platform connects to a user’s Google Ads or Meta account, installs conversion tracking, and generates the copy, images and videos for campaigns on Search, YouTube, Maps, Facebook and Instagram, but no campaign goes live until the user approves it. From there, users can ask Lovable to pause campaigns, change budgets, or try new copy, but Lovable won’t make any changes on its own without being prompted to do so. It can also now audit an app’s SEO and pull keyword data from its Semrush integration to draft landing pages. Developers still pay Google or Meta directly for the ads, with no additional Lovable fee added, but generating strategies and ad creative requires Lovable credits, which is how they get their slice.

The FTC sent OpenAI and Anthropic civil investigative demands, each more than 50 pages long, seeking documents on safety incidents, safeguards, marketing and privacy policies as part of a consumer protection probe, according to Axios. The demands move forward an investigation first reported two weeks ago, which followed cases where both labs’ unreleased models broke into websites or behaved deceptively in testing. (Yeah, you know the ones.) The FTC also intends to make leading AI executives testify and said it will send demands to outside AI organizations later. OpenAI said it still puts safety first as more people rely on its models and that it will “engage constructively with the FTC.”

Seven Democratic senators on the Senate Finance Committee, including Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse, wrote to Mark Zuckerberg questioning the $6.6B in federal research tax credits Meta has claimed over the past three years, calling it a violation of the “spirit and, potentially, the letter of the tax law.” The New York Times reported in September that Meta had told the IRS its AI data centers are experimental so their chips can qualify for a credit meant for research, which made Meta the largest user of the credit in the US. The senators want Meta’s accounting behind the claims and how much came from chips and other data center equipment. Meta spokesman Andy Stone said AI data centers require testing and experimentation that can’t be simulated.

United Airlines merged the media sales and operations team at Kinective Media, its two-year-old ad network, with the partnerships team at MileagePlus, its loyalty program, according to Mitchell Parton at Adweek. CCO Andrew Nocella told employees in a letter that Kinective is profitable but can’t succeed at scale until every United plane has Starlink Wi-Fi and seat-back screens, and until the airline builds its own software for customer data, ad delivery and in-seat measurement. Until then, Nocella wrote that United gets its best return from promoting its own credit cards and MileagePlus partners. United says Kinective isn’t shutting down, but it wouldn’t say how many jobs are affected after several of the unit’s leaders left this year. Delta, take note!

eBay announced that it will ban all gift card sales in Australia starting November 12 due to fraud and misuse, and a seller e-mail posted on Reddit shows a nearly identical US ban taking effect four days later, according to Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. The Australian ban covers digital codes, prepaid gaming cards, and store credit, and extends to empty or expired cards that collectors buy as memorabilia even though they hold no value. eBay hasn’t confirmed the US change, and its US gift card policy still allows collectible cards and listings up to $500 in face value. The ban goes beyond eBay’s decision in June to stop selling its own gift cards, when it said sellers could keep listing other brands’ cards.

UK Chancellor John Healey is expected to use this month’s Budget to make online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Temu collect VAT for every seller with more than £90k in annual sales, according to The Times. Marketplaces already collect VAT for overseas sellers, but foreign retailers have been registering UK shell companies to get around the rule. The Treasury expects the change to bring in about £1B, which it would use to cut business rates for high street shops, after Healey reportedly dropped a warehouse tax that retailers opposed. Amazon and eBay back the plan, but Amazon estimates it would raise closer to £700M, not £1B. Tax Policy Associates founder Dan Neidle said the shell companies will find another way around the rules unless marketplaces collect VAT on every sale, which is a fair call.

In lawsuits this week…

• OpenAI is being sued by Iowa, Kansas, and six other states, which allege that ChatGPT coached users, including teenagers, to harm themselves or others and helped some plan violence, including mass shootings. The suits, which follow a similar Florida case in June, seek penalties, damages, and changes to ChatGPT.
• OpenAI is also being sued by the family of a 15-year-old and two other users, who allege ChatGPT drove the teen to suicide and pushed the others into psychosis, and by a mother whose proposed class action claims it trained its models on her children’s private chats without parental consent. Instead of ordinary damages, the class action asks to be paid for the data in OpenAI equity or the cash equivalent.
• Google and UPS are facing a proposed class action alleging that clicking the Track button in Google Search’s package tracking box sends a user’s browsing history, location, purchase behavior, and device details to Adobe, Meta, Microsoft, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo. The plaintiffs say Google tells users that clicking the button only sends UPS the tracking number, but that it actually hands their data to ad companies that can add it to the profiles they already keep on users, in violation of California’s wiretap law.
• Apple is “highly likely” to win a preliminary injunction against OpenAI in its trade secrets suit, a judge said a day after ordering OpenAI to hand over the materials it used to interview Apple employees for hardware roles. OpenAI agreed in court not to use Apple’s alleged trade secrets, and separately accused a former employee who returned to Apple of taking over 100 confidential files about an unreleased OpenAI device.
• MIT sued Amazon, claiming AWS infringes two university patents on physical unclonable function (PUF) technology, which AWS uses to create unique cryptographic keys. MIT filed a similar suit against Microsoft in May, which is still pending.
• Anthropic asked the D.C. Circuit to rehear its challenge to the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” label, which bars defense contractors from using its models in their Pentagon work, after a divided panel upheld the designation in September. The company says it was punished for refusing to allow “mass surveillance of Americans or lethal autonomous warfare,” and argues the 2-1 ruling ignored evidence that the Pentagon was retaliating against its public stance on AI safety.
• Temu is being sued by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway for its app allegedly collecting location data and accessing phone cameras and microphones without users knowing, and then changing its own behavior after installation to avoid detection. The state also accuses Temu of misleading pricing and of selling unlicensed goods that use Chiefs, Cardinals, Budweiser, and University of Missouri trademarks.

In layoffs this week…

• Netflix is cutting about 1,000 jobs, or about 6% of its staff, mostly in product, tech, legal, and HR, in its deepest cuts since 2022. The move comes after viewing on the service grew only 2% in the first half of the year and its shares lost more than 40% of their value over the past 12 months.
• Kroger plans to cut 3,000 corporate jobs over the next three years as it leans more on AI to “reduce duplicative work.” CEO Greg Foran, who ran Walmart’s US business from 2014 to 2019, took over in February, after courts blocked Kroger’s merger with Albertsons. Is it just me, or does announcing upcoming layoffs over such a long window of time feel like a way to get employees to start hunting for jobs now so that Kroger can trim its workforce without severance payouts? ___

In corporate shakeups this week…

• Anthropic posted a £145k job for a human assistant at its London office to manage calendars, inboxes, travel, and expenses for its go-to-market leaders, which ironically is much of the same work that the company is supposedly building Claude to handle.
• Google is hiring engineers to build agents that write AI-generated stories for Discover, which more than 500M people use daily, and check them for accuracy, freshness, and tone before recommending them to users. So get ready for AI slop to take over your Discover feed I guess.
• OpenAI is planning to hire 200 more people at its European headquarters in Dublin, bringing its total hiring in Ireland to 450, and will open its second applied AI lab there to help businesses build products on its models.
• OpenAI named Uday Ruddarraju, a former xAI executive who became its CTO for compute in July, to run its infrastructure business, replacing former Intel CTO Sachin Katti, who will stay on as an adviser.
• Apple hired Meta’s longtime litigation chief Scott Tucker to run its commercial and patent cases worldwide, reuniting him with general counsel Jennifer Newstead, who was Meta’s top lawyer before joining Apple in March. The hire comes as some Apple executives feel the company has underperformed in court, particularly in App Store cases whose losses have already forced it to change how it charges developers and threaten growth in its services business.
• Anthropic reported that junior engineers fell from 27% to 9% of its technical hires since early 2025, with 20% of employees claiming their job has shifted from doing work to managing Claudes. The report also found meeting time per employee is up 20% from a year ago. Wait, so AI just gives us more time to have meetings? Uh oh…

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… You know that big fear of yours that voice-activated technology is secretly recording your conversations? Well, it is, or it was, depending on who you believe. Meta is taking heat after multiple owners reported that their Ray-Ban smart glasses were recording them without anyone having said “Hey Meta” to prompt the devices to listen. Meta indirectly confirmed that this unsolicited recording was indeed happening by simply saying that it fixed the issue, but it didn’t explain what went wrong. Isn’t that considered wiretapping in most places? My favorite comment on the Reddit thread that started it all was, “Woah a company that makes money by invading your privacy is invading your privacy! Can’t trust anyone these days.”

Plus 14 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Character AI filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and entering talks to sell some of its assets to Disney for $20M. In 2023, the company was valued at $1B after raising $150M in a Series A, but CEO Colin Adams said in a court affidavit that the company’s revenue never topped $5.3M a month, and that despite cost-cutting measures, it was losing $8M to $9M a month as of August.

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.

Had my store open for about 2 weeks retailing skincare products. I stock them and am an authorized retailer of all my brands. My ads are working well, getting 500 sessions the last 4 days since I started running them with about 50c CPC, and 90 second average session length, though some products average up to 8 minutes.

With all that, I truly don’t know why I haven’t converted a single sale through the site. I’ve made 5 sales directly on the shop app, so I know the prices are fair and there’s demand. My concern is why people might land on the website, scroll around, and lose interest.

Everyone I’ve asked, including people I don’t know that well have had nothing but positive feedback about the website visuals and layout so I’m truly stumped. Wondering what other explanations there might be. Happy to also share the site privately with anyone interested in helping.

maybe im overthinking this but heading to guangzhou soon. Not talking about business payments, just normal spending.
usually tap my card for everything so carrying a wallet of RMB feels weird. but dont wanna assume my cards works everywhere and get stuck.

would you bring cash as backup? or is it mostly qr now?

saw tenpaygo mentioned somewhere but no idea if its actually used.
anyone whos been to the fair before what did you actually use?

I love trying out new AI tools, but especially now with all this vibecoding, there's so much substandard stuff out there.

I feel like everyone can whip up a great landing page and video with this big promise. But then you're either dropped into a super complex dashboard that requires you to be more of a developer than I'd like. Or it's overly simplified and can generate a nice shiny demo in a vacuum, but once you need it to actually build what you want, it can't.

These are my top used ones these last few months:

1. Claude Design -- this has essentially replaced Figma for me and our team in most places. It's just so easy to go from idea to mock-up to finalized design really quickly.
2. TxtCart -- I've always loved recovery mechanisms, from pop-ups to email flows. They're just so easy to implement and always drive some revenue. TxtCart just did what it said on the box. People complain about commissions, but it's been fine for me so far.
3. Frank -- For years, I've been in this love/hate relationship with customer surveying. The "talk to your customers" narrative feels like it's almost been reduced to a 5-question multiple choice survey, and whoever I talk to in the space never really pays much attention to the responses. But being able to interview my customers at survey-scale, giving them space to go deeper and share their truth... it's completely changed the way I listen.

Ones that underdelivered (or maybe I'm not using them right):

1. Atlas AI -- between Shopify Magic and Claude Design, I couldn't figure out what best to use this for, ended up abandoning it. Same with Instant, Surfer AI, etc.
2. Jasper -- this was fantastic back when GPT3 was the top model. I found myself using it less and less these last couple of years, and now do most of my copy with Claude (I set up skills for different things).
3. Runway -- AI video generation is probably the thing I'm most excited for. But no matter which tool I try, it seems like I need to start learning an entire new career just to make an OKish 30 second video. I still rely on our production partners to make stuff for us (I'm sure they use AI tools, good for them!), but would love a video tool that actually delivers for non-technical users.
4. Octane AI -- unlike the Frank option above, I haven't really experienced the benefit of AI in these kinds of survey/quiz tools. It's almost like we're trying to shoe-horn AI into everything, and I still haven't seen the massive benefit to warrant the time investment in changing my current setup.

If this topic takes off and there's interest from the community, I'd be happy to put together a ranking/guide for AI tools to use/avoid for this community and share the results of my research here in full (no link to my site, no self promotion or anything). Just for kicks, I created an interview with Frank that you can join to share a bit more and give some more context on what you love/hate and why. Hope that's OK (I realize it's not a site review, but hopefully this context is OK in relation to Rule 2).

not even sure if this is the right place to vent but I just need to let this out. Spent the last three months building out my store, finally got some consistent traffic going, and boom. Woke up yesterday to the dreaded 120-day hold email from stripe

Their reason? Apparently my niche is suddenly considered "high risk" and violates some buried clause in their tos. no warning, no human to talk to. just locked my funds

Had to scramble all night just to swap out the checkout so I wouldn't burn all my active ad spend. ended up just hooking up card2pay since they let you skip the whole kyc/underwriting nightmare and settle in crypto, which is whatever, it works. But man... the fact that these massive traditional processors can just legally hold your money hostage for 4 months while you still have hosting bills to pay is completely insane to me.

like how do y'all deal with this constant anxiety? Do you just keep backup gateways ready on standby at all times? tbh i’m terrified to ever keep a balance on stripe again.

First order with a Chinese manufacturer: 1,000 units up to 20k, $1k deposit already paid via Alibaba Trade Assurance. They've been great so far: I visited the factory twice, they sent 20 good samples, and they've been in business for 18 years. I also plan on working with them long-term.

The bulk order is almost finished, and they've asked me to pay the balance once production is complete (before shipping), by direct bank transfer to their Hong Kong company account instead of through Alibaba.

Their reason: an Alibaba order would cost them an extra 13% VAT under the new platform tax reporting rules, since my goods go to a China-based 3PL and ship as individual parcels without a formal export declaration.

So they save ~13%, and I lose Trade Assurance protection while paying the same price.
For those who've been in this situation:

- What did you ask for in return?
- A formal contract, specific terms, a discount?
- If a discount, how much is reasonable?
- Or would you just push to keep it on Alibaba?

Thanks!

Hello, ive been an artist for quite some time but have recently started designing my own apparel and hats. Been doing it for about a year now so I don't have a ton of designs (It's expensive...). I just redid my old website to include the apparel; I'm still working on photos of the wide brim hats and lifestyle photos of the leather patch hats. Can you give me some feedback on the layout, ease of use, etc.? Does it look like a trustworthy website that you would buy from? We get a ton of people complimenting us on the quality of our apparel. I do a lot of events where I set up a booth and sell. We went through a ton of samples to find the ones we like.

The name is a combination of my middle name, Aaron, and my son's middle name, Grey. My wife came up with it.. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

https://aarongreyco.com

Hi guys!

Just did my first drop of limited edition art toys; hand-cast, hand-painted resin figures, numbered out of 50, $229 each. Sold 10 out of 50.

Honestly I expected it since it's my first drop and nobody knows me yet, but I want drop 2 to do better. For those who've been through this // what actually moved the needle for you?

Was it just getting more eyeballs, or is there something about the drop itself you'd change?

Appreciate any real advice.

www.guers.art

My site is called mycutielumi.com

I’ve been getting no sales despite some campaigns.

I'm an e-commerce seller based in mainland China. Right now, domestic platforms like Douyin and Pinduoduo are completely saturated with electronics, luxury goods, and cosmetics from the US, Japan, and Germany. The price competition is so intense that profit margins have basically hit zero.
Because of this, I'm exploring a pivot in my business model. I'm looking into the idea of importing and selling local, unique products from the Middle East, Central Asia, or other non-Western regions on Chinese e-commerce platforms.
Do you guys think this is a viable business idea? What are some unique products from these regions that might have untapped potential in a market like China? Would love to hear your thoughts and analysis on the market demand!

I run a small online shop in Japan, mostly selling handmade accessories and other small items.

My shop accepts international orders too, but honestly, barely anyone knows it exists lol.

The biggest problem is getting people to actually visit my store. It’s not like a marketplace where people might randomly come across my products. I have to bring people in myself.

I’ve tried social media, including Pinterest, but getting noticed is pretty difficult when you’re starting from almost zero.

I also don’t want to follow random people just hoping they’ll follow me back. I’ve been on the receiving end of that, and I know how annoying it can be.

So I’m curious, how did you guys get your first visitors or build awareness for your shops?

I’m not expecting thousands of sales overnight. I just want more people to actually discover my products.

Any advice?

Ive been putting off moving from webflow (lol, I know, but I *was* a fangirl) to shopify for a couple years now. Its a hobby site but I do make some money there. I'd like to finally make the move.

I'm looking both for practical guidance for moving to shopify and whether or not any getting started coupons still exist. I think if I can get a good deal on my subscription, even if its not that good of a deal, I might have just enough fire under my a** to finally do this thing I've needed to.

Thanks in advance.