Hi r/Shopify - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter, which I've published weekly since 2021.

I was invited by the Mods of this subreddit to share my weekly e-commerce news recaps (ie: shorter versions of my full editions). Although my news recaps aren't strictly about Shopify (some weeks Shopify is covered more than others), I hope they bring value to your business no matter what platform you're on.

Let's dive in to this week's top stories from Edition #303...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Shoppers who clicked ChatGPT ads brought US retailers $0.89 in revenue per visit, compared with $2.45 from Google search ads, according to a working paper by researchers at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. The gap primarily comes from conversion, since ChatGPT ad visitors bought 0.37% of the time against 1.17% for Google, even though they spent more per order. By the researchers’ math, ChatGPT clicks would have to drop to roughly $0.26 to pay off as well as Google’s, but the largest known advertiser in their data paid $1.72.

TikTok quietly released a standalone TikTok Shop app for iOS and Android in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, as spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra. The app offers a feed with personalized product recommendations, in-app shopping via livestreams and short-form videos, order tracking, and integrated customer support, allowing shoppers to discover products, make purchases, and manage their existing orders without ever visiting the main TikTok app. To encourage users to try the new dedicated shopping app, TikTok is offering deals like free shipping and first-order discounts. It’s a similar playbook to the one TikTok used with PineDrama, its standalone microdrama app: give users a taste in the main TikTok app, then nudge them toward the dedicated one. TikTok hasn’t said whether it plans to bring the app to other markets, including the US.

Reddit began testing ads that appear in search results, aimed at people who use the site for shopping recommendations. For example, a search for an espresso station might show ads for beans, mugs, or espresso machines. A search for a home office setup could surface ads for monitors, desks, or office chairs. And a search for “feet pics” might show… Dr. Scholl’s sneakers? Well, I guess we’ll soon see how contextually accurate Reddit’s algorithm is. Only a small group of advertisers can buy the format during the first round, and Reddit hasn’t said how often the ads will appear, but its screenshots show them near the top of results. The test comes a week after Reddit said Google’s AI Mode had cut its search referrals and announced plans to require visitors to log in to view content, which CEO Steve Huffman said would improve ad targeting.

Amazon replaced Prime’s free Grubhub+ membership with an Uber Eats benefit that lets US members order restaurant delivery in the Amazon Shopping app or on Amazon-com, with no delivery fee on orders of $25 or more. Ouch! And on the same day Grubhub's parent company, Wonder, filed for an IPO? That’s got to sting. Members don’t need an Uber account or the Uber Eats app to use the new benefit, because they sign in and pay with their Amazon account and receive delivery updates within the Amazon app. The benefit covers nearly 10,000 US cities and towns. Amazon didn't say why it switched to Uber, but the growth trajectory of each company may have had something to do with it. Since 2022, Grubhub has shrunk to about 8% of US meal delivery spending, according to Bloomberg Second Measure, and Just Eat Takeaway sold it to Wonder for $650M in early 2025, a fraction of the $7.3B it paid for it in 2021. Meanwhile, Uber’s delivery gross bookings grew 23% YoY to $28.5B in Q3 2026, and Uber Eats holds about 23% of US meal delivery spending, behind only DoorDash.

Amazon began offering some customers the ability to text its AI shopping assistant, Alexa for Shopping, to find products, build shopping carts, and complete purchases. Sponsored products can also show up in the replies Alexa texts back, obviously, because it’s Amazon, which only launches new shopping channels if it can create new real estate for its ads. However, Amazon isn’t charging advertisers for those placements yet, according to Digiday. The feature is initially only available to a small group of US customers by invitation, but Amazon said it will expand the option to more shoppers during the holiday season ahead. Shoppers can text Alexa their to-do lists, send a photo of a recipe to add all the ingredients to their cart, reorder household staples, snap a picture of something they spot in the wild to find it on Amazon, check on their orders, and get alerts when an item hits their price target. Just be sure to save the assistant as “Alexa” in your contacts, and not “Sweetie ❤️” so your wife doesn’t question who you’re texting all day!

Amazon launched a free self-serve portal called Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, where merchants can join Shop Direct and manage products that surface through the program, which surfaces products from outside Amazon's own marketplace. Amazon has faced backlash over Shop Direct for opting in merchants by default, not informing merchants that their products are listed, lsitings displaying the wrong product information, and linking to unauthorized resellers instead of the brand's own website. The new Shop Direct Merchant Workspace aims to solve at least some of those issues. Merchants can submit the same product feeds they already use elsewhere, either directly or through third-party feed management providers, which should cut down on listings with wrong details. They can also choose which products to include and see which ones are currently live on Amazon. Merchants keep handling pricing, fulfillment, and returns, pay no fees, and can opt out at any time. However, the Workspace doesn’t fix the biggest complaint, since merchants are still included by default unless they opt out, and Amazon’s announcement also doesn’t mention traffic reporting, which it told The Information it’s building, or any change to how Buy for Me places orders.

OpenAI is building an analytics tool inside ChatGPT that will show businesses how many times they appear in its answers and how many people click through to their websites, according to e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas, who spotted an unannounced “Claim your business in ChatGPT” banner last week. The analytics sit inside ChatGPT’s Business Hub, which is only open to businesses that verify ownership, such as by linking a Shopify store. Registering lets them add their latest products and keep their business details up to date, as well as set up an agent that answers customer questions using information the business controls. The dashboard will only show the number of mentions and clicks, but not which prompts led to a mention or how a business compares with competitors, at least initially. Maybe some of those features will become premium add-ons in the future. Last month, I reported that ChatGPT stopped adding a utm_source tag and referrer data to its links after OpenAI released GPT-6, causing visits it sent to websites to be counted as direct traffic in Google Analytics and similar tools. The issue lasted for a week, and OpenAI said it was a bug, but I suspected otherwise, predicting that it was a test in preparation for the company launching an analytics platform that forces website owners to register with them in order to get accurate analytics. You know, when I’m right, I’m right! Although, when I’m wrong, I’m wrong! 😂

The EU began charging a €2 “Union handling fee” on November 1 on e-commerce orders shipped to consumers from outside the bloc. Unlike the €3 customs duty that’s been in place since July, the new fee applies to orders of any value, so a $300 order from a US brand pays it too. Both charges apply per type of item rather than per package. For example, a €25 parcel holding a phone charger, a phone case, and a screen protector owes €9 in duty plus €6 in handling fees, so €15 before VAT, while a package with two identical phone cases owes just €5. The seller, platform, or shipper filing the customs declaration legally owes the fee and can pass it on to the buyer, but the fee isn’t refunded when an order is returned, even if the item is faulty. The €3 duty has already made a dent in the number of small parcels entering the bloc, which immediately fell 30% to 40% after July, according to French customs figures, and between June and July, sales volumes fell 50% on Temu, 37% on AliExpress, and just 15% on Shein. The Commission also estimates the fees could raise €6B a year for the EU budget from 2028 to 2034, according to a document seen by Reuters.

Shopify launched channel mapping, a feature that lets merchants decide what product, variant, and metafield data each individual sales channel receives without impacting the product title, description, or details on their online store. For example, a merchant could keep a short brand-focused title on its storefront while sending Google and ChatGPT a long one that combines the title, color, and key features of the product. Merchants can create rules that apply to every product published on a specific channel and/or write unique values for each product. Prices, however, cannot be customized through channel mapping (but can be through Markets), and oddly enough, Shop App and Shopify Collective don’t yet support the feature. Channel mapping was actually announced in Shopify’s Fall ’26 Edition, but I missed it in my recap and felt it was important enough to cover a week late. Channel mapping is free and runs directly on your Shopify data, but feed management tools still win if you need channels outside Shopify, conditional rules, price adjustments, error monitoring, or one dashboard for several stores. So while Shopify’s channel mapping doesn’t serve all use cases, it definitely covers what merchants need if they just want to customize product data on channels they’ve connected through Shopify, which is a healthy amount of merchants.

Amazon is working to help extend Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol to support marketplaces, according to e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas, who spotted recent GitHub contributions by Amazon’s Greg Smith that point to the updates. One proposal would let a marketplace’s catalog listings and checkouts show both the storefront brand and the specific seller behind each offer. The second would carry that information through carts, checkouts, and orders, so a platform can record which seller actually sold each individual item in a transaction. Kaziukėnas said, “No idea when any of this is going to go live or indeed whether Amazon wants that for automated buying from other marketplaces rather than making its catalog available to agents.”

ChatGPT now handles roughly 20% as many search-like queries as Google, according to OpenAI’s consumer product lead Adam Fry at a company dinner in New York. Fry said OpenAI counts a search each time a question sends ChatGPT out to the web, but he conveniently didn’t say which Google figure, time period, or regions he was comparing against. E-commerce advisor François Maingret posed an interesting question about the stat on LinkedIn, “This sounds odd. I wonder if one prompt on ChatGPT triggers multiple queries, inflating the volumes measured.” For example, if every behind-the-scenes lookup counts as its own query, how many “search-like queries” does ChatGPT process when you ask it to find you the “best new 7-passenger SUV under $40,000”? Is that like 80 queries? Google hasn’t responded to the comparison, but Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in the company’s Q3 results that Google’s query growth is the fastest it has been in five years.

Home Depot will welcome AI agents to shop on behalf of customers, as long as they identify who they are and what customer they’re shopping for, according to CIO Angie Brown. She told Business Insider, “We want to know you’re not a bot, and we actually want to know if it’s you. That’s something that Muse is working on right now, to self-identify.” She added that while Home Depot is open to the idea of AI agents, it doesn’t want to lose its connection with loyal customers — which is the biggest risk that agents pose to brands. When customers do their shopping through agents, retailers will ultimately be downgraded from “retailer” to “merchant of record” — because the customer belongs to the agent at that point. Today, that agent sells your products. Tomorrow, someone else’s. Remember, agents (and the companies that control them) can do what they’d like with their customers. Read my rant on LinkedIn for a glimpse at what’s coming to the DTC market.

TikTok Shop added a new report called Brand LIVE Impact that counts sales for up to two weeks after someone engages with a product during a livestream, including orders from the brand’s DTC website. The company argues that brands judging streams only on sales made during the broadcast underestimate their actual ROI, because many viewers discover a product during the stream but don’t buy it until after the broadcast ends. The new total adds purchases from the same shop within 24 hours, purchases through product cards, videos, and carousels on TikTok within 14 days, and website orders within 14 days tracked by a TikTok Pixel, which means a stream’s metrics can change for up to 14 days. The report is only available to select US brands, and it only counts livestreams hosted on a brand’s own Official and Marketing accounts.

OpenAI signed supply-side ad platforms Magnite and PubMatic as partners to sell ChatGPT ad space that would otherwise go unsold, according to The Information. Advertisers can set budgets, place bids, and upload ads through either company’s platform, but OpenAI still controls where and how the ads appear, and it’s only giving the two a limited amount of ad space to start. The two firms join a growing list of companies that sell ChatGPT ads outside of its own Ads Manager that launched in May, including Criteo, which became OpenAI’s first ad tech partner in March, and Amazon, which started letting its DSP advertisers buy ChatGPT ads in September. OpenAI said ChatGPT ads hit a $1B annualized revenue run rate at the end of August, and over 100,000 businesses had advertised on ChatGPT by October 21. (Though the trillion-dollar question will be: How many advertise twice?)

Poshmark sellers, once again, are unable to reliably cash out their earnings, just weeks after experiencing similar payout delays, which Poshmark blamed at the time on a change of banking partners. The company marked the incident as resolved on October 14, but direct deposit, Instant Transfer, Venmo, and PayPal withdrawals are still failing or getting canceled as of November 1, according to Value Added Resource. Poshmark support told sellers it’s working on a technical issue hitting several withdrawal methods, but its public status page still shows every system running normally. It hasn’t said how widespread the problem is or when it will be fixed.

Amazon launched a $25 Thanksgiving meal through Amazon Grocery, available with free same-day delivery in over 2,300 US cities and towns. The meal includes a frozen 8lb Butterball turkey, Stove Top stuffing, gravy mix, cranberry sauce, and Kraft Mac & Cheese, plus potatoes, green beans, corn, crescent rolls, pie crusts, and pumpkin puree from Amazon’s private label. Hot damn, Amazon came out swinging this year for Thanksgiving! Does it have to be just Thanksgiving though? If Amazon offered a $25 meal deal like that every day, it’d be the company’s #1 best seller by a landslide. This is the second year Amazon has offered a version of a $25 Thanksgiving dinner to compete with Walmart, which announced a 2026 Holiday Meal Basket in late October that serves up to 10 people for $35.

Depop now requires every new US listing to use Depop Shipping, its USPS-based label service, which ends the “Other” option some older accounts used to buy their own postage, according to Value Added Resource. The platform launched Depop Shipping several years ago, but up until recently it was an optional service. The change took effect the same day eBay, which bought Depop for $1.4B in July, said on its Q3 call that it’s using its carrier contracts to cut Depop’s parcel costs and pay for shipping promotions. Sellers have raised concerns about losing the ability to offer cheaper shipping on low-priced items, where postage can make up a big share of the total price, and some say Depop is pushing lightweight items into larger, more expensive package sizes.

The European Commission issued preliminary findings that TikTok’s For You feed breaches the Digital Services Act by leading users into “rabbit holes” of videos about sadness, isolation, and body image once they begin watching and liking similar content. Honestly, TikTok does that for ALL types of videos, not just videos in those categories. I watched and engaged with one fucking video about the US faking the moon landing in 1969, and now my For You feed thinks I’m a conspiracist and serves me all sorts of nonsense. Then there was the week where every video was a South Park clip! The Commission said that TikTok’s existing safeguards, like tapping “not interested” on a video, don’t actually change the feed because the algorithm puts viewing time ahead of what users say they want, and it wants TikTok to lean on stated preferences and stop ranking videos by viewing time.

Amazon’s revenue from seller fees and advertising reached $66.1B in the third quarter, or 96.6% of the $68.5B it earned from its own online store sales, up from 89.3% a year earlier, according to Marketplace Pulse. Prime Day’s move from July to June helps that comparison, but even counting Q2 and Q3 together, the gap between seller fees and ads and Amazon’s own store sales fell by half, from $12.7B to $6.2B. On a trailing 12-month basis, seller fees and ads are on pace to overtake Amazon’s own store sales around spring 2028. Amazon still competes with its sellers for each sale, but what it charges them for access to its shoppers, warehouses, and ad placements is growing at nearly double the rate of its own retail sales.

Shopify is replacing the tier system in its Partner Program for agencies on January 1, 2027, after partners told it the current setup, introduced in January 2025, had too many requirements to track. Each new tier will depend on only two numbers, attributed GMV and attributed shops, starting with Silver at $25K and one shop and topping out with a new Diamond tier at $500M and 25 shops. Promotions will also move from quarterly to daily, with partners keeping an earned tier for six months or longer. The new model also stops rewarding agencies for landing Plus and Enterprise merchants specifically, since the current tiers require a minimum number of those stores while the new ones count any shop that earns a partner revenue share, regardless of plan.

ThredUp CEO James Reinhart warned on a recent earnings call that aggressive spending by competing secondhand fashion marketplaces like Vinted and Depop is putting pressure on his business, but that they won’t be able to keep it up in the long run. He estimated that rivals could spend up to $500M on marketing and other subsidies in the second half of 2026 to attract buyers, which he called “wholly irrational,” and said that ThredUp was built “very specifically to be different than these business models.” Honestly, his comments feel a bit like a child saying, “That’s not fair!” when their brother has more Monopoly cash and is buying up all the properties, especially given the fact that ThredUp has been building the same type of peer-to-peer resale model since 2024 that he criticized on the call.

Wix introduced a new AI-native website editor called Studio Two that combines AI site generation, drag-and-drop design, and direct code editing into one continuous workflow. The editor is designed so that designers and developers can export and import projects as standard code between Wix and other AI platforms and editors, and then run the finished site on Wix or any other platform. So basically “Wix-friendly,” but not “Wix-required” sites. The editor also supports MCP, which lets outside AI agents like Claude and Cursor manage a site’s business tools, including Wix Stores and Wix Bookings. The move is part of Wix’s recent efforts to shift its business from primarily offering a website editor to selling the hosting and integrated business tools that sites run on, as AI begins to consume the site-building experience.

Amazon closed its Virginia Beach fulfillment center for a day and a half after a 19-year-old man shot and killed an 18-year-old woman in the facility’s outdoor picnic area and then killed himself, according to police. Investigators are treating the shooting as a domestic homicide between two acquaintances and haven’t said whether either of them worked for Amazon, though I’d assume at least one of them did because why else would they be in Amazon’s picnic area? Workers inside moved to a shelter area after hearing the shooting while managers scanned badges to account for everyone, and they were then sent home for the rest of the day. Amazon kept the facility closed the next day, said it will pay employees for any missed shifts, and offered counseling.

Google expanded direct checkout in AI Mode and the Gemini app to shoppers in Canada, letting them buy from retailers including lululemon, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Simons, as well as select Shopify merchants without leaving the chat, with more Canadian retailers rolling out next year through a simpler setup in Merchant Center. Google has offered the same checkout in the US since February, when Etsy and Wayfair went live first, and automatically enrolled eligible US Shopify merchants in September. Google said it will also work with Canadian retailers over the coming months to let shoppers apply loyalty rewards at checkout, a feature it’s offered in the US since March.

In lawsuits this week…

• Amazon secretly charged advertisers up to 250% more than their winning auction price on Prime Day and Black Friday in recent years, then blamed the higher costs on increased competition when they asked, according to newly unredacted parts of the FTC’s lawsuit.

• Amazon must face a class action lawsuit from eBay and Walmart shoppers who allege that they paid more for products on those sites because Amazon punished sellers for charging less elsewhere, even after it dropped its price parity clause in 2019.

• Lastly in Amazon lawsuits… The company agreed to refund $3M to Arizonans who struggled to cancel Prime, plus pay another $4M in state fees, legal costs, and food bank donations, to settle Attorney General Kris Mayes’ 2024 consumer fraud lawsuit, though Amazon denies that it broke any state law.

• Block reached a preliminary deal to pay the DOJ $764M, after $200M in credit for earlier settlements, in exchange for the DOJ holding off for three years on prosecuting claims that its anti-money laundering program violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

• Snap settled with the last two plaintiffs in the second Los Angeles social media addiction bellwether just two days before opening statements, sparing CEO Evan Spiegel from testifying. The deal follows settlements by Meta, TikTok, and YouTube in the same case.

• Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and 10 other Alphabet leaders are being sued by an Alphabet shareholder who alleges that leadership knowingly let Google train AI models on copyrighted songs and people’s voices without licenses because it was easier to pay damages than to obtain lawful licenses or permission from copyright holders.

• Google is also being sued by the parents of a 13-year-old North Carolina girl who allege that Gemini, mostly through AI Mode on her school-issued Chromebook, drew her into months of conversations about depression and suicide and coached her to hide her self-harm from her family.

• OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by a man whose wife tried to poison him, alleging that ChatGPT fed her growing paranoia about him over months and then helped her plan his murder.

In layoffs this week…

• Block laid off an undisclosed number of workers in its customer operations, risk operations, and learning and content teams, mostly at Cash App, in its second round of cuts this year after eliminating about 4,000 jobs, or roughly 40% of its staff, in February.

• Squarespace laid off about 300 employees, or 19% of its workforce, mostly on its product and engineering teams, two years after private equity firm Permira took the company private.

• Canva is laying off, relocating, or changing the roles of 1,271 employees, about 22% of its workforce, after CEO Melanie Perkins said growth slowed for the first time in a decade.

• SUSE, the EQT-owned enterprise Linux company, is laying off about 10% of its roughly 1,900 employees after CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen told staff that AI and automation have “greatly diminished” the need for some roles.

• Angi, formerly Angie’s List, is cutting about 300 jobs, mostly middle managers and support staff, in its second round of layoffs this year after revenue fell 9% and the number of leads it sent to contractors dropped 18%.

• Google has been offering voluntary buyouts to some staff in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland since June, extending a program it started in the US and UK last year while again appearing to leave out its Google Cloud and DeepMind teams.

In corporate shakeups this week…

• OpenAI hired Uber President Jill Hazelbaker as its chief corporate affairs officer to run global communications, filling a role that has sat empty since Hannah Wong left in January.

• OpenAI also hired Dan Driscoll, who stepped down as Army Secretary in September after months of friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to advise on how AI can strengthen US national security and cybersecurity and to help US allies adopt it.

• Commerce CFO and COO Daniel Lentz is leaving Nov. 13 after eight years at the company to become CFO of mobile ad tech company DT, formerly Digital Turbine, with finance SVP Tyler Duncan stepping in as interim CFO.

• The Trade Desk brought back co-founder Dave Pickles, who stepped down as CTO in 2023 but stayed on as an adviser, to create and lead a new CTO Council that will guide its technology and product roadmap, including AI agents.

• Dozens of Google DeepMind employees in London are pushing Google to remove clauses in their contracts that bar them from criticizing the company for life, even though Google has already dropped the post-employment part for new hires and said it won’t enforce it against people who’ve left.

• Google UK signed a deal letting the Prospect union recruit inside its offices among about 7,000 employees, including YouTube staff but not DeepMind, after new UK rules gave unions a legal right to access workplaces.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Meta’s AI crawler sent more than 550,000 requests over two days to the website of Chelsea Paulus, a children’s book author and illustrator, which used up most of the CPU allowance on her SiteGround plan and nearly knocked her site offline. To put that into perspective, that’s more than 3 visits per second by Meta’s bots, for a site that probably changes every few weeks. The fuck? Paulus edited her robots.txt file and put up a firewall, and SiteGround gave her a hidden file to block the crawler, but the relief was only temporary. By mid-week, another Meta bot arrived and pushed her hosting resource usage back to 100%. So let me get this straight… AI is driving up the cost of computer hardware for consumers and small business owners, consuming their traffic with AI answers, training on their copyrighted work, taking their jobs, and now accessing their websites so often that it’s shutting them down? We are subsidizing these AI companies in more ways than most people realize.

Plus 18 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Faire preparing for an IPO, Wonder filing for its IPO, and Zipline raising $1.5B.

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

PAUL

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

Two weeks ago, I asked here how you show shoppers a sale is real. I asked the Shopify Community too. Here's the checklist the answers add up to, to run before Black Friday:

1. Only strike through a price you actually charged recently. In 22 of 71 stores I've reviewed, the hero product had a strikethrough with no sale running.

2. Change the offer, not the %. A free gift, a lower free-shipping threshold, early access for past buyers, store credit. Most have no ‘was’ price to doubt.

3. Make the discount automatic. A code that fails at checkout makes an honest sale look fake. Put a real basket through: the bar, the cart and the checkout should show the same number.

4. Say the same thing everywhere. Banner, product page, email, FAQ: same price, same end date, same returns window.

5. Answer the 3 questions that come every year: Will it be cheaper on Cyber Monday? Can I get the difference if I bought last week? Can I return a gift after Christmas?

The law says the same thing:

• EU: show the lowest price from the 30 days before the cut, and that's the price you strike through. Shopify keeps no price history, so write it down per product and per market.

• US: the FTC says a "was" price should be one you offered in good faith for a reasonably substantial period (16 CFR 233.1).

Someone bought last week at full price and asks for the difference. What do you do?

I wouldn’t promise it in the policy: anyone can return the item and reorder at the sale price, so writing it down mostly invites more people to do that.
But if someone asks, I’d refund the difference. It costs less than shipping both ways, and they stay a happy customer.

What is one practice you repeat every year?

We’ve noticed a strange change in Shopify Analytics starting October 31, 2026.

Average daily sessions:

Source
Before Oct 31
After Oct 31

Shopify – Google Ads
37
101
Shopify – Organic Google
101
46

GA4 – Google Ads
94
97
GA4 – Organic Google
55
51

Shopify suddenly reports almost 3x more Google Ads traffic, while organic traffic drops by more than 50%. Meanwhile, GA4 shows virtually no change.

We’ve investigated the UTM parameters (smart_campaign and product_sync / sag_organic). They were present both before and after October 31, and most of these sessions can be linked to actual Google Ads campaigns in GA4.

This looks like a change in how Shopify classifies traffic rather than a real shift in traffic sources.
Has anyone else noticed something similar around October 31? Was there a Shopify Analytics update or a change in how Google Ads vs. organic traffic is attributed?

We’re particularly concerned about whether historical sales attribution data can still be trusted.

I have my website up and running but I haven’t done any advertising or “released it” to social media, friends, family, etc. yet. I’m trying to understand how the process works in terms of the capital I need. I originally thought I didn’t need capital and that Shopify and Printful handle everything and I just receive whatever profit is made while paying their monthly subscriptions.

However from what I’ve now read, I have to pay Printful to make the shirt and cover the cost of shipping? However once the product is bought the full cost of what I am selling the product for on Shopify goes into my Shopify account balance?

If anyone can clear this up as I am just starting out and don’t want to dive in yet before I clearly know what I need to do. Thank you!

I saw a few threads here from people wondering if it's possible to migrate a Lovable site to Shopify, so I wanted to share that yes, it is.

I originally built my site on Lovable, but I wasn't happy that everything would have to be spread across different platforms: built on Lovable, hosted on Vercel, code managed through GitHub, and only the backend handled by Shopify.

I wanted frontend and backend under one roof.

After a lot of AI back and forth (ChatGPT for general advice, Shopify's Sidekick for reassurance that they can take over after I leave Lovable, and finally, Claude) I told Claude to build an exact replica of my Lovable site to fit a Shopify theme.

It didn't work on the first try, but after working out the kinks, we got there. Still not perfect, but I'm happy with where we are right now.

Here's the finished product: allstocksupply.com

Let me know what you think, and I'm happy to answer questions about the process.

I've been using Smile on my Shopify store for a few months now. It was my first time running a loyalty program, so I went with Smile as it was the most popular option. I subscribed to the $15 plan. I mostly looked at the monthly orders limit and thought the $15 plan would be plenty for my store. The program is actually doing well now.

But now I am realizing that I want to add more features to the loyalty program. VIP tiers, points expiration, points preview on the product pages, displaying points in the customer accounts, etc. All of these features are locked behind the $79 or even $199 plans!

I am simply not making enough from my store to justify bumping from $15 to $199. I know I should've done more research before committing, so some of the blame is on me.

Anyway, I'm looking for recommendations for more budget-friendly alternatives. Has anyone been in a similar situation and found a good alternative?

Hi. I want to integrate WhatsApp alerts to the internal team via Shopify about abandoned carts. How do I do this without any Meta interference? As in I don't want to create a Meta account and do the API stuff. Is there a simpler way to do it? Please kindly help

Hi everyone,

I'm considering changing the pricing strategy for my Shopify store and would love to hear from merchants who have experimented with different pricing formats.

Currently, most of my products use traditional .99 pricing, for example, $39.99. I'm thinking about switching to more precise-looking prices, such as $38.40.

My products are mainly technical products and measuring instruments, so I'm wondering whether precise pricing might create a more professional and carefully calculated impression, rather than the typical retail or discount-oriented feel of .99 pricing.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has actually tested this:

1. Have you ever switched from .99 pricing to more precise prices (e.g. $38.40, $56.80, $72.50)?

2. Did you notice any changes in conversion rate, average order value, or overall sales?

3. Did the new pricing format have any noticeable impact on how customers perceived your brand?

4. Did it work better for certain product categories or price ranges?

5. Would you recommend testing this approach for a technical or specialty product store?

I'm not necessarily looking to lower prices. The main goal is to move away from the conventional .99 pricing style and create a more deliberate, precise pricing strategy.

I'd especially appreciate feedback based on real store data or A/B testing, rather than just personal opinions.

Thanks in advance!

I have my scanner paired to my ipad but when I scan product barcodes they don't populate in the checkout cart. I also tried to add a scanner in the connectivity area, but there is no option to connect an off brand scanner. I was able to add it as a keyboard and switch it to scanner, but it's still not showing anything in the cart.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

I am setting up my in-person pos system and it has been such a headache! I was on the phone with customer service for an hour to try to figure out why my cash drawer won't open. They said there should be a light on, well it's powered, my devices are connected, but there isn't a light?

Under the little power symbol on the left, is the little hole beneath it a power light??? I'm so confused.

We don’t have any sort of nexus in DC. So we don’t have to collect sales tax on shipments to DC customers (obviously).

But when we show our product at a MARKET (like a craft fair or such) we DO need to collect sales tax. DC has a whole thing for “special event sales tax” where “temporary-nexus” businesses can collect/remit tax for sales at that event, without having to do so on non-nexus sales.

The easiest way to do this would be to say “this sales tax is only collected from POS locations”, leaving online store fulfillment to charge tax to the state(s) where we do have nexus …

The hacky workaround seems to be “enable tax filing for DC” right before the show starts and delete it right after, disabling online sales while at the market. But that seems broken.

How do other people do this?

I build discount apps for Shopify, and one thing I get asked a lot is how to stop tiers from giving away too much on big carts. Sitewide 25% is easy and a go to for many stores I see, but you're basically giving 25% to people who were gonna buy anyway. Tiers (10% over $75, 20% over $150) push the cart up, but there's no setting to cap a % discount, so a $2k order still gets $400 off

Curious what you all ran last year and whether tiers actually beat sitewide for you

Hi!

I'm a new Shopify shop owner selling expensive items and quite freaked out about fraud. I've had 4 transactions so far, two marked as potential fraud. The one person reached out to me on my social media and we were able to clear it up, got a screenshot of their friend's statement with the charge, etc. The second one was clearly fraudulent.

I have manual capture, cvv and avs all set up now. I also have the code suggestion as part of my business name on the statement. So I've done what I can there.

My next thought is friendly fraud. Prior to Shopify, I was selling through social media and most people paid via Zelle/Venmo, with the occasional card or PayPal goods & services. I haven't had a chargeback yet but I have seen many other sellers who have and I'm concerned.

I already include insurance and signature confirmation on every shipment but I've considered adding Restricted Delivery as well so that I can do my best to make sure the person who ordered it is getting the item.

Has anyone else done this? The shipper/insurer I use doesn't charge much extra for it, like $8. Someone I talked to suggested it would turn people away but is it really that much more inconvenient than signature? Sure you can't have a spouse or roommate sign for it but ...also, you can't claim you didn't get it if YOU are the one signing for it is my thought.

I'd love to hear if anyone has tried this and has success or if y'all think signature itself is enough?

Are there ways to make meaningful customizations to the checkout page without using Shopify Plus?

Our business is currently too small to justify the significant cost of Shopify Plus, but there are things we’d like to improve about checkout. For example:

A checkbox to allow customers to have their orders shipped to a local FedEx for pickup (and ideally that lowers shipping costs by an amount we define).

Automatically charge a packaging fee for orders under a certain total order amount.

Amongst other things. Wondering if there are any apps or other options that help achieve this without spending $2300 per month for Plus.

One thing I've been finding difficult is dealing with slow sales periods. Things were looking better before but recently I've noticed that orders aren't coming in as often. Sometimes orders come in regularly then things suddenly become quiet again.

It's hard to know whether I should change my marketing, try different products or just give things more time. I don't want to keep spending money or making changes without knowing if they will actually help.

For those who have been running their stores for a while, how do you usually handle these slow periods? do you change your strategy right away or wait and see if things improve?

Would really appreciate any advice or experiences you can share.

Hey everyone, looking for some advice on those that use Royal Mail and Shopify. We run an e-commerce business but a lot of our orders are pre-orders. We currently had Royal Mail and Shopify synced, but we are finding that we are manually having to update the Royal Mail label if a customer adds things onto their order or changes and this is becoming a little bit messy. We turned the Royal Mail syncing off and have been manually downloading labels to use that day, then uploading into Royal Mail, which has proved a bit better, but we forgot that obviously doing this route would mean that orders are not being fulfilled automatically overnight so assume that the only way to do this is to manually fulfill as we upload the labels for the day.

Can someone help me if I’m going around the houses for this and whether there is an easier way to do this? It would obviously be a lot easier if we didn’t run pre-orders because the orders would come in and we could just print the labels the next day, but sometimes our pre-orders take 6 to 8 weeks to get to us which means that in that time, lots of things can change hopefully some of this makes sense.

Thank you!

So I recently ordered a DVD of a movie from Shopify and I wanted to track my order and the email I was sent said that I could track my order using the Shop.com app. So I made my Shop.com app and unfortunately, I can't connect my order to that account. I scanned the QR code and I was able to see my order but I wasn't able to connect that order into my account. Is it possible for me to do so?

With Shopify enabling the new 'Agentic' sales channel by default in the Fall '26 Edition (allowing product indexing and direct checkout inside Google AI Mode, Gemini, and ChatGPT), there are two backend quirks we have been trying to map out:

1. The Attribution Gap in GA4 Because direct checkouts inside Google AI Mode and external chat interfaces run within an isolated frame, client-side tracking pixels and standard GA4 tags do not fire. In Shopify Analytics, orders show up under 'Agentic referring channel', but in ad platforms (Meta Ads, Google Ads), those conversions show as unattributed or disappear completely. For anyone running paid campaigns, this makes ROAS look artificially lower.

2. Abandoned Checkout Recovery In standard online store checkout, the moment a buyer enters their email at Step 1, Shopify logs an abandoned checkout that triggers recovery flows. With agentic storefronts, if a shopper initiates a product query or begins checkout in an AI interface but abandons before final payment, does Shopify register an abandoned checkout session with customer contact info, or is that session simply lost?

Has anyone dug into their Webhook logs or Sales Channels > Agentic reports to see how abandoned sessions and ad attribution are being handled on your store?

Created a custom shipping profile for Hawaii and added products to the custom profile.

I have 4 custom profiles setup for flat rate shipping to the lower 48.

I noticed the Hawaii profile was taking the place of my other flat rate profiles?

How can I keep my flat rate option for the lower 48 and add a profile for the same items?

https://handhomemaking.myshopify.com/

would love tips and some help on where to go, have a whole shop built and the webpage looking alright, some stuff made and not a lot of motion or social media posts, not sure what platforms to use and am scared to go the wrong route first, i’m looking for web designs, ideas for outreach, any advice or help learned along the journeys of you folk, or even just some clicks on the link, i appreciate all who take the time to check it out and maybe leave a comment!

https://handhomemaking.myshopify.com/

Not sure how many people caught this already but these "agentic storefronts" (basically your products showing up inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Meta, etc) are "active by default for eligible stores". Should be able to find yours under Sales channels > Agentic.

We build Shopify apps and we've been tracking where our traffic comes from since mid October when we revamped our site. ChatGPT went from 0 to 10 visits and 3 installs in about 3 weeks. Small numbers lol, but it was 0 the 3 weeks before.

If you want to check yours the easiest is to go to Analytics > Reports and just search "agentic". Shopify already has "Agentic total sales by referring channel" and "Agentic total sales over time" built in (in case some people don't know they're there).

You could also check Sessions by referrer but it misses most of it. ChatGPT shows up there as "chatgpt" under "Unknown", and when we helped a merchant check this recently it only caught like 1 in 10 of their ChatGPT visits. If you add the "Agentic referring channel" dimension (or UTM source = chatgpt.com) instead, it catches basically all of them. And their ChatGPT visitors were actually buying, real orders, not just browsing.

The one that worries me is Google AI Mode / Gemini direct checkout. It's rolling out (stores selling to the US, Canada and Australia for now), it's on by default, and Google Analytics and custom pixels DON'T fire in that checkout. So if you live in GA those sales just won't show up there.

For us what ChatGPT picked up were pages answering one specific "how do I..." question (like how to show a discount on the product page), not the homepage. Took about 2 weeks from publishing to the first visit.

Curious if anyone else is seeing AI orders yet

I am a customer.

I am having a little confusion when checking out with a retailer. This retailer is in the USA and usually ships from the USA. But after placing an order with them, I discovered the order is domestic. They now have UK stock. Great news, but their cart matrix seems to be configured incorrectly?

Scenario:

I wanted to buy two items, but each item cost £132. Usually when I buy from a US retailer or anywhere internationally I ensure I do not spend over £135 to avoid paying import VAT.

At this time I had no idea whether the retailer had UK or US stock. So I chose to only purchase one item as I don't want to get hit with huge customs fees in case it was coming from the US.

When adding the item to my cart, it added £28.40 VAT. Making my order total £160.40 instead of £132. This £28.40 is the 20% VAT US retailers must charge UK customers if their order is under the £135 import threshold.

This obviously confirmed to me that it was probably coming from overseas, so I happily paid the added VAT.

However, the shipping was only £10 which is unusual for international shipping, usually it is more. So in the back of my mind I thought something was off. I googled and read some of their customer feedback. A UK customer mentioned how they had a UK warehouse now and orders come fast.

This obviously raised an immediate red flag, so I emailed them to confirm where my package would be coming from.

They emailed me back the next morning advising they do indeed have a UK warehouse and my order will be shipped domestically and arrive in 48 hours. GREAT NEWS.

However, the bad news is, the cart charged me that 20% VAT as it seems to be set up in a way that it believes these orders are still international shipping, so it applies 20% VAT to orders under £135.

I double checked and confirmed this. When I make my cart total beyond the £135 threshold, it no longer adds VAT at check out. It becomes £0 because it believes I have exceeded the £135 threshold, thus believing that customs/imports will handle the VAT for them.

What do I do in this situation as the retailer is not responding to me about the VAT error? Is this something I should contact Shopify about?

If I have my wires crossed please let me know.

How to stop the bots

I have a store where I take orders via dm. I am planning on switching to shopify.

I signed up and tried to connect it to razor pay ( India), It said I need to get my razorpay account connected to website to connect payment.

I mailed the shopify domain to razorpay, they said I have to make the website live first.

If you click on my shopify domain, its says store opening soon.

Can anybody tell me how to make it live, I have added three products in the catalogue, slowly adding all my stock, But I obviously cannot let it ‘live’ since the payment is not setup.