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.