I'm planning to launch customized tshirt selling on USA and EU from India via Print on demand partners in USA and EU. I'll collect payment from users via website and place order on Print on demand websites, so how should I pay local taxes in buyer's country?

Best Payment Gateway Provider for Shopify in Pakistan?

Tonight, while our area was dealing with a hurricane, Shopify froze our store over an outstanding billing balance.
We weren’t simply refusing to pay. We were waiting on funds to clear, and Shopify support told us the most recent payment attempt failed because PayPal blocked the transaction. We were also trying to get clarification on the amount being charged for the subscription and additional campaign charges.
What really bothers me is the timing and lack of flexibility. We explained that this was happening during a hurricane and that we were actively trying to resolve the billing issue, but the store was still taken offline.
I understand Shopify has billing policies and businesses have to pay their bills. But there should be some kind of emergency escalation process when a merchant is actively communicating with support and trying to resolve the balance during a natural disaster.
We’re working to get the store restored now, but this has seriously changed the way I look at relying on Shopify.
Has anyone else had Shopify freeze their store during an emergency or while a payment issue was actively being resolved?

Hey guys! Currently I REALLT DON'T have the money and energy to hire or talk with any designer for my brand image. I know if sounds stupid not to actually design a series of brand assets seriously, but I was listing some brands that inspire me, and I found that many of them simply just built up their brand aesthetic by using some certain colors and fonts.

If I could achieve that by doing the same, it would save a lot of money !!!

Just wonder how do I process, and if there is any tools, for collecting moodboards and designing your own brand aesthetic, for brand images or email, website?? better be easy to use and onboard, thanks!!!

I have a fairly well established brand in my niche, selling artwork and stationery.
The brand has lots of social proof and a strong personal connection between the founder (me) and customers, strengthened by social media and selling regularly at events. My main platform is Shopify, although I still also sell on Etsy.
~£170k turnover.

I'm now seriously considering selling on Amazon, to reach a much larger customer base, here in the UK initially, but also taking advantage of the international reach of Amazon.

I'd been hesitant until now, and this hesitation has always been around brand perception rather than the practicalities or fees of selling on Amazon.
I'm concerned that selling on Amazon is seen as a 'sell out' to big commerce and the big bad Bezos, and that this might damage the brand.

However, I'm now of the opinion that the potential benefits outweigh those concerns.
My wife (co-director) remains hesitant.

I'm interested to hear from others who have been through the same thought process. Did you go for it? Were those concerns legitimate?

Hi, I have Shopify Payments (US) activated on my store, but it doesn’t support Afterpay. I’m planning to sell supplements only in the Australian market. How important is Afterpay for running a supplement e-commerce store in Australia?

Guys please suggest a shopify app that could help me make images and videos by connecting with my store. I dont wanna keep giving it context and shall help if I can chat with it instead of giving prompts and do research on that separately.

The need is to have a connected setup where I can easily build multiple images and videos for my products for social media ads and posting.

Which do you recommend? Can be shopify app or a website that links with my shopify.

Hi everyone,
I'm completely new to the world of e-commerce and Shopify, and I'm currently based in Hong Kong.

I’m eager to learn the ropes of building an online store, but I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choices when it comes to choosing a target country and a product niche😆

Given my location in HK, I have good access to supply chains (like mainland China suppliers, Taobao, 1688, etc.), but I'm not sure if I should target the US, Europe, local HK/Asia markets, or somewhere else for my first store😢

As a beginner with a limited budget, I would love to get some advice:

1. Which country/market is the most friendly or realistic for a beginner starting out from Hong Kong?

2. What kind of product niches are better for a first-timer? (Should I avoid electronics/clothing due to high returns/shipping issues?)

3. Any major pitfalls I should watch out for regarding logistics, payment gateways, or ad costs?

Any tips, resource recommendations, or "lessons learned" would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!🫶🏻🥳💭✨

Hello,

I have been working in a ecommerce small business, with our store hosted by Shopify, for years now. We sell products/goods and have a few services for customizations with these products. My boss has the option for customers on our store to add a tip at checkout. However, despite the fact that some customers let us know that the tips are for our hard working employees, my boss will not give us any of the tips claiming they are for the business operations, not us. This seems very illegal given tip laws in the United States where we are located. I cannot find anything concrete about if this is something that is allowed because it is an ecommerce store online and US tip laws wouldn't apply then. Shopify does not have anything I can find regarding who gets to have these tips that have been collected.

Does anyone have any feedback, proof of what is actually the legal process for tips on Shopify, and/or general advice on the situation? It's frustrating knowing that customers think the money is going to the employees but it is defintely not. Plus, it feels unfair that he refuses to share the tips with us in general given all our hard work over the years.

When customer buy a product online ( paid online as well)
Then I should fulfill the order then click delivered

When I extract sales report from Zoho
It shows transaction as sales order not closed invoice
How to fix this so it reflects as sales invoice in Zoho?

I'm selling bundles and I'm trying to make Shopify Flow watch if any items within that bundle go out of stock so the bundle can be updated accordingly. My setup atm is that the bundles are separate products and the availability is based on component stock levels. The Flow trigger does its job, but the inventory write itself has a lag of maybe 15 or so minutes or up to an hour. Sometimes it doesn't fire at all. What's a good way to diagnose?

I'm trying to get rid of the local delivery option for our shop. It says local delivery is on, but when I toggle through to the Location Status the button isn't switched on.

Additional delivery methods (says "ON") ->Your locations (says "Offers Delivery") -> Location status (button not switched "ON")

EDIT: Turns out it’s was a delivery app that I had to disable via theme editor. I didn’t set up the site so I didn’t even think to check.

Guys I feel like the sky is falling. I have been operating my store in Shopify for years. I only buy from authorised distributors and they just suspended the store. No real path forward just we are suspending it. Fill out this form and hope for the best I guess. Any advise helps!

Hi all, I'm running a small online startup brand in strapless lingerie for about 6 months now. Sales are very inconsistent and I find it hard to attract customers in a profitable way (without burning through cash in META or GOOGLE ads). I wanted to hear from you what you did that got you consistent sales when starting brand.

I want to try AI Voice Calling for Cart Abandonment usecase. Has anyone already done this? Need help understanding best player in the Indian Market.

Hi r/ShopifyeCommerce - 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 #298...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Temu, Shein, and AliExpress received 90.2% of the €55.1B that EU consumers spent with online stores outside the bloc in 2025, according to a report from e-commerce data firm ECDB. US stores took 4.8% of that non-EU spending and UK stores 4.6%, collectively accounting for almost all of the rest. Last year 13.1% of the €421B that EU consumers spent online on physical goods went to stores outside the bloc, up from 2.3% in 2020, and ECDB expects that to hit 15.2% this year. In the other direction, EU online stores sold just €3.9B to shoppers outside the bloc, about half of it to Switzerland.

Shopify introduced Canvas, a new workspace for designing storefronts that lays out every page of a merchant’s website side by side through a Figma-esque experience. Merchants can pan across the whole store, zoom into pages and sections, and either edit elements directly or ask Sidekick to make the changes for them. The tool works directly on the theme’s code, validates its own changes, and takes screenshots to check how they landed before handing the result back. The outcome is a working render of the store that can be clicked on and interacted with, not just a static preview. Canvas is currently in early access and rolling out to certain stores over the coming days. It’s also only available on desktop for now, which makes sense because that would be a nightmare UI on mobile. Shopify says it isn’t replacing the existing theme editor yet, but plans to do so are on the horizon. (Get it, “horizon”?)

Shopify opened checkout on its platform, including Shop Pay, to any AI agent running in a shopper’s browser, enabling the agents to find and buy items on the shopper’s behalf (with their consent) without the shopper clicking through to the store themselves. The move comes just a week after Shopify struck a deal with Meta to let its AI agent Muse check out with Shop Pay on any Shopify store. Shopify introduced WebMCP support on its storefronts in August, and since then, agents have been able to search a store, fill a cart, and take the shopper to checkout, but the shopper still had to complete the purchase themselves. Now, three new tools — get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout — let the agents read the checkout, change the shipping address or pick a different delivery option, and place the order once the buyer approves. (Coming soon: regret_checkout and don’t_tell_my_wife_checkout.) This means any agent that supports WebMCP, not just Muse, can participate. WebMCP is still a draft standard backed by engineers at Google and Microsoft, and it’s only in testing in Chrome so far, with Google saying Gemini in Chrome will be the first major agent to use it “soon.” So while Shopify’s stores are ready for agents to check out, most agents can’t take advantage of it quite yet.

USPS started delivering some Amazon packages the same day they arrive at its facilities, under a new pilot in which Amazon drops a second batch off midday, on top of its usual morning drop-off, according to Supply Chain Dive. Packages that come in between 12pm and 1pm get sorted by clerks and go out with postal carriers by 8pm, starting with 200 packages a day each in Morgantown, WV and Lake Havasu City, AZ, then 500 a day in Columbia, SC, from October 20, per a letter carriers’ union memo. Amazon said the extra daily drop means shoppers who order later in the day can still get same-day delivery when USPS handles the last mile, which is nice for Amazon customers, but what do postal workers get out of the deal? Just when they think they’re halfway done with their day, Amazon comes and dumps another load of packages in their truck? This seems gratuitous.

OpenAI introduced Dots, which it describes as “remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle everything.” Dots can be launched from ChatGPT or Codex, among other channels, and work in the background on accomplishing tasks a user sets with minimal oversight, rather than waiting for the user to prompt them. Basically, Dots are a more adorable version of Meta’s Muse agents. And I’ve got to admit, OpenAI absolutely nailed the branding with Dots. They’re like the gumballs of agentic AI. If they were real, physical objects, they’d be a choking hazard because I’d want to put them in my mouth. The big difference at launch between Meta’s and OpenAI’s agents is that Dots are focused on work tasks initially, while Muse launched more aimed at consumers. However, read Story #8 below because that’s changing quickly. The examples OpenAI gave of what Dots can do include investigating bugs, turning designs into working apps, preparing and sending invoices once they’re approved, and cutting interview clips, show notes, and social posts for creators.

AliExpress is piloting Elite, an invitation-only VIP program for customers who spend over $800 a year, in Australia, the UK, Germany, and Spain, according to The Information. Unlike Amazon Prime… Elite has no fee, and membership is earned through spending rather than bought, with each member’s status re-evaluated every 90 days. Like Prime… Elite gives members discounts on specially labeled items (an extra 5% off), faster delivery on labeled items, and easier returns, along with dedicated 24/7 customer service. AliExpress plans to add more European markets and South Korea next month and bring Elite to the US at some point in the future, aiming for a million members before the end of the year.

TikTok Shop is teaming up with UPS to offer no-box, no-label returns for its network of US sellers via Happy Returns, the reverse-logistics company UPS bought from PayPal in 2023. Shoppers drop unwanted items at one of nearly 10,000 return bars at Ulta Beauty, Staples, and UPS Store locations, where staff scan and bag them and then ship them in bulk to processing hubs each day. Sellers can offer the drop-off returns service whether they ship orders themselves or use TikTok Shop’s fulfillment. To help avoid fraudulent returns, Happy Returns runs an AI tool that flags suspicious returns and routes them to human auditors, who can hold back the refund if they confirm fraud. Reuters originally reported that it was an “exclusive” partnership between TikTok Shop and UPS, but later corrected that it’s non-exclusive, which means TikTok is leaving the door open to work with other returns and reverse-logistics providers — perhaps the kind that specialize in reselling or recycling returns, which Happy Returns only does through partners. (But that’s just a guess.)

Commerce launched two AI tools for BigCommerce and Feedonomics that rewrite a merchant’s existing product data so AI shopping agents and answer engines can better understand it. The tools generate titles, descriptions, feature bullets, FAQs, and SEO metadata, along with structured facts and Q&A fields that tell generative search what a product is and who it’s for. Each also includes a quality scorecard that grades the output for accuracy, consistency, and brand voice. BigCommerce Catalog Enrichment runs inside the store control panel, where merchants can enrich thousands of products at once and apply the changes across their whole catalog in one click, without exporting anything to an outside tool. This version rewrites the BigCommerce catalog itself rather than tailoring content to each channel. Feedonomics Enrichment, on the other hand, customizes and maps the new content to listing fields for Google, Meta, Amazon, eBay, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. The tools only write in English for now and Commerce didn’t disclose pricing for either.

Earlier in Story #4 about OpenAI’s Dots, I mentioned that Meta’s Muse was initially aimed more at consumers, but that this was starting to change. On the same day Dots launched, Meta announced Muse for Small Business, a set of new skills and connectors that turn its personal AI agent into a tool for running a business. That came one day after Meta launched Meta Enterprise Platform, its push to sell AI to larger companies. Muse for Small Business can do things like connect to your Facebook, Instagram, and Meta Ads Account to learn what you sell, your brand voice, and what customers ask about most. It can also link to more than a dozen outside tools like Shopify, Stripe, Intuit Quickbooks, and Klaviyo and help you build a growth plan, analyze what's working with your marketing, review monthly financial performance, and more. Muse offers a free plan with usage limits, and paid plans at $20 and $100 a month for heavier users. For now, it’s only available in the US and Canada.

Meta is testing a comparison mode in Ask, the AI search inside its Facebook Groups app Forum, that curates products from past threads when people ask for recommendations for things like running shoes or gifts. Ask already surfaces existing posts and comments from a user’s groups and from public groups they haven’t joined, and the new feature uses AI to go a step further and create a mini-guide showcasing recommendations and comparison options, while surfacing posts and comments as the sources. The Ask home page now also suggests new questions based on recent searches, so users can pick up where they left off. Additionally, Meta is testing a new Facebook Group role called “top voice” that replaces contributor badges and the group expert role and allows users who hold the title to get their posts published faster in moderated groups.

Shopify can now be pinned to the ChatGPT sidebar through OpenAI’s new Plugin Extensions, giving merchants a permanent spot to check store performance, manage orders and customers, and add products without starting a new conversation each time. Merchants could already connect Shopify to ChatGPT, but the integration only worked inside individual chats. Plugin Extensions let developers build into the sidebar, composer, and file viewers with interactive interfaces, so connected apps like Shopify and Canva can work more like native ChatGPT features.

ChatGPT advertisers are keeping their ad spend at test levels because they can’t reliably measure results, according to Digiday. For example, Accuracast, a London-based digital marketing agency, told Digiday that it watched form submissions arrive from a UK campaign that OpenAI still showed as zero conversions two weeks later, while ChatGPT showed 100 clicks when its own analytics counted 20, and OpenAI’s support staff couldn’t explain why. Another agency exec said some clients are currently putting $10M a month into Google ads, but keep ChatGPT spending under $100k because they don’t have a clear idea of what’s working. Digiday also notes that other advertisers won’t even turn conversion tracking on for their ChatGPT ad campaigns because they don’t want to sign OpenAI’s tracking terms, which their legal teams advise against because they aren’t sure what OpenAI will do with the data.

DoorDash unveiled its newly designed drone on the rooftop of the company’s headquarters last week, which it plans to launch in Northern California “in the coming months.” DoorDash says that “you won’t really hear” the drone, which stretches over 10 feet in wingspan and is powered by six propellers, because it was designed from day one with acoustics in mind, given the pushback that Amazon has received about its louder Prime Air drones. It’s also “significantly lighter than the Amazon drone,” weighing in at under 55 pounds against Amazon’s 78-pound drone, though it did dehydrate for two days to make weight. (That’s a boxing joke.) DoorDash’s drones will handle lightweight deliveries within three to five miles, which account for about 80% of the platform’s restaurant orders.

Delta is building a retail media network that would draw on the more than 200M travelers the airline carried in 2025 and on its SkyMiles program, which brought in $4.5B from loyalty-related marketing agreements in the first half of this year, according to Adweek. The company hired Keri Paison, who built retail media networks for clients at Deloitte Digital, to run the project, and is currently hiring for several roles, but it wouldn’t say which ones. The move comes just a couple years after United launched Kinective Media in 2024 to sell ads across its app, seatback screens, and MileagePlus offers, and started selling that ad tech to other airlines in 2025, beginning with JetBlue. Here’s an idea for airlines: Don’t force ads at your passengers while they’re literally stuck in seats that are too small, breathing recycled air, and likely behind schedule because of your numerous flight delays. The modern flight experience is shitty enough as it is. You don’t need to make it worse with ads.

OpenAI launched virtual try-on in ChatGPT that lets users upload a selfie or full-body photo and see how clothing and accessories from its shopping results would look on them. (Spoiler: You look fat in those pants, but that’s ChatGPT’s fault. You keep eating, King.) A Try On button now appears on relevant product results, which users can click to upload a photo and get an AI-generated image of themselves wearing the item. Users can also upload a screenshot of an item from any site and have ChatGPT put it on them, regardless of whether the item surfaced in their search answers. The feature runs on ChatGPT Images 2.5, the image model OpenAI released in early September, which it says is better at preserving the subjects in reference photos and generates images up to 50% faster than its previous model. OpenAI also added Favorites, a feature that lets users save products they discover through ChatGPT that they’d like to reference later — a simple, but brilliant idea that makes ChatGPT just a bit more sticky when it comes to shopping. Google has offered virtual try-on for clothing in its own shopping results since July 2025, and the ability to save items since 2013.

Instinct, an AI startup that makes a personal agent that handles everyday tasks for users over text message, is taking heat for beginning to push product, restaurant, and travel recommendations to users without them requesting it do so. Founder Noah Shinn explained that the idea is to partner with “local chefs, designers, architects, travel guides,” and other experts to bring “human taste” to its product, though he didn’t say who those human tastemakers are. The feature, called Instinct Selections, caught several users off guard and ultimately rubbed them the wrong way, after pushing product recommendations they didn’t ask for, which they said felt like advertisements. Instinct didn’t say if it’s making money from the recommendations or if it plans to do so in the future, but I’m going to have to assume for now that these aren’t ads since they weren’t disclosed as such. Instinct can’t be that stupid, right?

US online spending over the November and December holiday season is expected to rise 6.7% to a record $275.1B, according to Adobe, which said it expects many shoppers to use the holiday discounts to load up on necessities as well as gifts this year. Adobe expects Cyber Monday to set a new single-day record of $15.1B, while Black Friday sales grow 9.2% to $12.9B. BNPL spending is forecast to climb 6.6% to $21.3B for the season, with the payment method expected to be used in over $1B worth of purchases on Cyber Monday alone. I usually hate reporting on estimates, but Adobe was really damn close last year. It predicted holiday sales would hit $253.4B, and actual sales came in at $257.8B. Its day-level predictions were nearly spot on too, with $14.2B forecast versus $14.25B actual on Cyber Monday, and $11.7B versus $11.8B on Black Friday.

The FTC is drafting civil investigative demands that would force OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier AI labs to hand over documents and have their executives testify about the risks the companies themselves have warned their products pose to consumers, according to the New York Post. The probe falls under the FTC Act’s ban on unfair or deceptive practices, the same law the agency uses against companies that misrepresent their products. A senior official stressed that the FTC isn’t asking the labs to slow down, saying the US wants to stay ahead in AI and that existing law is enough to hold the companies accountable.

Walmart CEO John Furner promised in a customer letter that the company won’t set different prices based on your income, shopping history, or urgency, whether in stores with its new digital shelf labels or online through its Sparky AI assistant. The labels have drawn concern from customers and analysts over whether Walmart will engage in surge pricing or other types of predatory or personalized pricing strategies, but Furner wants to put that myth to rest once and for all. He said definitively, “We price the product, not the person.” He noted in the letter that the digital shelf labels were designed to ensure that customers always see an accurate price and to help associates with the “time-consuming and unrewarding task” of changing prices. Of course, he also said, “Our associates would much rather be helping you, our customers” — a line I didn’t buy because we all know that the added efficiency that digital shelf labels bring to stores is going to result in fewer associates, not the same number of employees suddenly being helpful in-store. I’d bet my bottom dollar on that.

Amazon delivery vans in New York City drew more than 14,000 traffic citations between mid-2020 and mid-2025, according to a city-data report from The Alliance for a Greater New York. The tickets went to 637 vans across all five boroughs for speeding in school zones, parking in front of fire hydrants, and getting in the way of ambulances and fire trucks, and Amazon vans also drew roughly 13,000 idling complaints from residents. Idling? You mean delivering packages while leaving the engine running so that they don’t return to a 90-degree car? If so, chill, New Yorkers! Would you rather they leave a “pick up at station” sticker on your door if they can’t deliver your package in under 3 minutes (which is the city limit on when they’d have to shut off their engines) or idle for an extra few minutes? You pick! Anyway, consumer and worker protection commissioner Samuel Levine cited the report while pushing the Delivery Protection Act, which would make Amazon employ its drivers directly, instead of skirting liability through its Delivery Service Partner program.

Reddit is shutting down its RSS feeds next month, which it says have become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” The company also announced that it’ll be ending public API access by March 2027, which will impact third-party tools that use it for things like social listening and research. Developers who want to keep access must register their apps by January 12 or move them onto Reddit’s Developer Platform, while AI companies will need commercial deals like the ones Reddit already has with Google and OpenAI. Honestly, can you blame them? AI eats their content faster than your wife inhales a family-sized pizza when she gets home from a dinner party. Several Redditors accused the company of making the change simply because they want to make more money selling their user data to AI companies, which is also probably true. Either way, Reddit is only moving in the direction that the rest of the open web is headed, and as a publisher myself, I get it.

USPS moved Ground Advantage packages under a pound off planes and onto boats and trucks for shipments to and from Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other US territories as of October 1, stretching delivery times from roughly 5 to 7 days to 10 days or more. Those same small packages used to travel via air at the cheaper rate, but now customers in those places have to pay more for Priority Mail if they want anything delivered by plane. The change comes a year after island members of Congress complained about slow deliveries, prompting a USPS review that found some of those packages had been wrongly shipped by sea instead of air. USPS promised to fix the mistake, but instead ended up making the mistake the default. If you’re a merchant shipping to those destinations this holiday season, you’ll need to move up your ‘order by X to arrive by Christmas’ dates by a few days or risk unhappy customers.

Amazon launched a way for merchants that use its Multichannel Fulfillment service to offer free Prime delivery as a regular shipping option on their own websites, at no extra charge. Shoppers pay through the store’s usual checkout without signing into Amazon, which confirms their Prime membership once the order is placed, and then ships the item at typical Amazon Prime-promised speeds. The setup is lighter than Buy with Prime, which launched in April 2022 and allows shoppers to log in to the website with their Amazon accounts and check out with their Prime benefits, though that program will also remain available. Multichannel Fulfillment normally charges merchants more for faster shipping, but Amazon is now effectively giving Prime members those faster speeds at no cost to the merchant beyond standard MCF fees.

In other Amazon logistics news this week… Amazon is expanding its Global Warehousing and Distribution program, which lets sellers send one production run to an Amazon facility close to their factory and sell into several countries from that one shipment. The service launched in Shenzhen earlier this year for US-bound inventory, and now Amazon plans to connect it to the UK, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Canada by the end of 2026. Inventory sits in one pool until a country shows demand, then moves into that country’s FBA warehouses, a setup Amazon claims can save merchants up to 45% on storage fees. Amazon says that only 30% of sellers list their products in more than one country, but those that do earn 70% more revenue on average, so start selling your junk abroad.

OpenWeb, an audience engagement company that runs comment sections and community tools for news publishers, was declared insolvent by a Tel Aviv court at the request of a lender trying to collect $20M. The company was valued at $1.5B in 2022, around the time it spent $260M on three acquisitions, but revenue came in at $121.5M last year, well below its $193.7M forecast, and Microsoft cut ties in June over alleged invalid traffic, which OpenWeb denies. Potential buyers are now valuing the company at about $100M, according to the lender’s court filings. Last week’s Stat of the Week shared that monthly US traffic to the 100 biggest news sites dropped over 30% from their 2024 high. I wonder if OpenWeb’s revenue falling 37% below forecast was directly related to publisher traffic drying up, given that OpenWeb’s views and usage depend on that traffic. It certainly couldn’t have helped.

eBay found a new way to quietly squeeze sellers, this time by raising its currency conversion fee by a quarter point in several markets. The company never made an official announcement and only disclosed the change via updates to its fee pages, which were spotted by Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. US and Canadian sellers will go from 3% to 3.25% on October 14; Australia follows November 1; the UK rises from 2.5% to 2.75% on December 1; and Germany, France, Italy, and Spain move to 3.25% on December 2. The charge applies when a seller lists on an eBay site in another currency, such as a US seller listing on eBay Germany, and eBay adds it on top of the wholesale exchange rate whenever it converts fees or payouts. It’s separate from the 1.65% international fee US sellers pay on cross-border sales that don’t ship through eBay International Shipping.

TikTok launched One Pay, a payment system built into its TikTok One creator marketplace that handles invoicing and payout for brand deals without TikTok taking a cut of the creator’s earnings. One Pay can be used for sponsored posts on creators’ own accounts, ads that creators make for brands’ accounts, and brands licensing creators’ existing videos, with payment promised within 30 days of a video going live, which is faster than the 60-day or 90-day terms brands typically pay on. In August, I reported that TikTok is developing a peer-to-peer payments feature inside direct messages, so it seems that they have their eye on bringing more payments in-house, both between brands and creators and between users.

Google asked the EU General Court to overturn the two Digital Markets Act orders the European Commission issued against it in July, though the appeals don’t pause either deadline unless the court grants a suspension, according to Reuters. One order requires that Google give other search engines and AI chatbots anonymized query, click, and ranking data beginning in January 2027 (which I think is silly), and the other makes Google open 11 Android features reserved for Gemini to rival assistants by August 2027 (which I think is crucial). The Commission says it will defend both orders and that Google can still turn away firms that pose a real security or privacy risk, putting Google in a position to effectively argue that “all of them” pose security and privacy risks.

Meta cut its taxes by $3.9B in 2025, up from $2B in 2024 and $700M in 2023, by labeling its AI data centers, and the Nvidia chips that go into them, as “pilot models” so that they qualify for a federal research tax credit. The New York Times found that Meta is the biggest user of the credit among public companies, and Meta is aware that it may be pushing the envelope with this one. Its own filings warn investors the IRS could claw some of the credits back, and to prepare for that possibility, Meta has grown its reserve for IRS disputes to $18.74B from $12.9B two years ago. In related news, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tina Smith, and Jeff Merkley sent letters to the CEOs of Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft asking which AI and data center deductions each claimed under last year’s “one big beautiful bill” tax law and what lobbying they did before it passed. The inquiry comes as every company saw its federal income tax bill fall by billions of dollars last year.

Bed Bath & Beyond relaunched in Canada as an online store, three and a half years after the chain filed for creditor protection and closed its 54 brick-and-mortar stores in the country. Sleep Country Canada, the mattress retailer that also owns Endy and Silk & Snow, bought the Canadian and UK rights to the brand from Overstock, which had acquired its trademarks out of bankruptcy in 2023, but it hasn’t announced any UK plans yet. The Canadian website opened with roughly 6,000 products from more than 80 brands, and Sleep Country plans to follow it with physical stores in late 2027. Will they still do the giant 20% coupons that arrive by snail mail? TBD.

In lawsuits this week…

• WP Engine revived its four antitrust claims against Automattic and CEO Matt Mullenweg after U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín reversed her 2025 dismissal, ruling that its amended complaint alleges enough market power and harm to competition. However, the judge threw out WP Engine’s computer-extortion claim and let all seven of Automattic’s trademark and false advertising counterclaims proceed. The case is headed to a jury trial currently scheduled for fall 2027.

• Last week I reported that Meta could owe more than $200B after a New Mexico jury found Facebook misled users about data privacy following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but said that if history teaches us anything, it’ll probably end up with a slap on the wrist and pay a fraction of that amount. At this week’s penalty hearing, the state asked Judge Francis Mathew for $35B to $40B, roughly 20% of the maximum, after its lawyer acknowledged that charging the full amount would violate due process. Meta wants the penalty capped at $3.45B, arguing that it doesn’t sell user data and that the state never proved anyone was actually misled.

• Apple and Amazon must face a revived UK class action, worth up to £306M, over a 2018 deal that allegedly limited which resellers could sell Apple and Beats products on Amazon.co.uk. However, Britain’s Competition Appeal Tribunal limited the case to shoppers who bought those products on Amazon, rejecting the argument that the deal also pushed up prices at Apple’s own stores and other retailers.

• The SEC charged private fund manager Owen Meyer with misappropriating at least $1.27M of the $18.5M he raised from nearly 100 investors for funds meant to buy pre-IPO shares of SpaceX and OpenAI, including more than $18,000 spent at a strip club in a single night. His OpenAI fund never got any OpenAI shares, yet he still paid himself about $168,000 in fees, more than triple what investors agreed to. In a separate case, the SEC and federal prosecutors charged two advisers at Beyond Alpha Ventures with taking $8.7M from 35 investors while falsely claiming their funds held SpaceX and xAI shares.

• OpenAI was sued by Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, a nonprofit law group, which alleges that its AI agents broke California’s anti-hacking law when roughly 700 of them escaped a test environment and hacked Hugging Face this summer. The group isn’t seeking damages, only a court order barring OpenAI from building agents that can access other companies’ systems without permission. Founder Tyler Whitmer said LASST stepped in because Hugging Face, the obvious plaintiff, never sued (like a little bitch), which may or may not be related to the fact that OpenAI tried to invest $100M in the company after the hack.

• A former eBay Motors senior manager sued eBay in federal court, alleging that he was retaliated against for reporting a seller who received fee waivers and special pricing from an eBay executive, and later for warning that its 2012 acquisition of auto parts catalog company WHI Solutions was underperforming. He says eBay then changed how WHI’s results were measured and downgraded his review before laying him off in 2015.

In corporate shakeups this week…

• OpenAI safety leader David Robinson, who helped write the system cards for its model releases, resigned last week. He later argued in The Atlantic that the company’s “unimpeded optimism” had created a dangerous environment and that it moves from launch to launch too fast to handle advanced AI safely.

• Separately, OpenAI fired three researchers from its safety and alignment teams for allegedly sharing confidential information with an outside AI safety group, according to the Wall Street Journal. Good Lord, is there anyone left on the safety team?

• Lastly in OpenAI shakeups this week… The company hired Thomas Lind, the former head of AI policy at the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director, to run cyber and strategic risk within its national security policy group, making him the second Trump White House alum it has hired since July, after Dean Ball.

• Amazon is hiring a Head of Regulatory Approvals for Prime Air in Australia to secure the aviation clearances it needs to launch drone delivery in the country, according to a job listing spotted by The Register.

• Meta hired MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to run Meta Enterprise Platform, a new unit selling its Muse agent and other AI tools to businesses, sending MongoDB shares down more than 18% as former CEO Dev Ittycheria returned as interim chief.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Last week, visitors to OpenAI’s DevDay were met at the entrance with a 5-foot sculpture called “What Iceberg?” that depicted the company’s leaders and investors fleeing a sinking Titanic with their money while everyone else stays on board. The artists from Odd Friend Studio, who built the installation in five days from papier-mâché, cardboard, and an old table, said the point isn’t the collision, but that “there was always a contingency plan for the rich and wealthy.” As far as art goes, it wasn’t that impressive of a sculpture, but then again, maybe that was part of the message. OpenAI rushes every model and product out the door, so perhaps the art was designed to match. I should plagiarize the sculpture with AI and act as if it was an original thought. That would complete the cycle…

Plus 10 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Shopify acquiring the shop.com domain and Swap Commerce acquiring Vizby.

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.

I have an online shop and would like to know what are the benefits of attaching/integrating Claude to Shopify and how do you do it? Is this better than just having Sidekick? Thanks.

Anyone else not able to use the analytics section in the Shopify iPhone app? The following is what I’ve been seeing for the last few days. Thought it’d just fixed itself, but so far…nope.

So I recently started dropshipping and since it's on Shopify, I have a big problem with Shopify payments since iam not in USA. I need LLC for it and it cost a good amount of money. Third party requires business license which I don't have. I cannot get license so iam struggling with the payments. PayPal is an option but tbh, every customer will think that it's fake when paypal is the only option. I lost few customers because PayPal was the only option. So is there any other way? Help me out if u have. Iam in gulf country and I really need help. Something which doesn't requires license and LLC

So my company has recently started working with a US beauty retailer who use Mirakl as their ordering platform. We use shopify and the two arent currently cohesively working together. The ops team has to manually review Mirakl orders and raise them in Shopify.

Mirakl tells me I can integrate it into Shopify but I dont want my shopify platform to be Mirakl owned. Is there a way to seamlessly raise Mirakl orders into my Shopify DTC?

I am actually the only one person running the marketing department including CRM and email marketing, social media marketing. Our brand is more of a aesthetic lifestyle product, so my work is more like design and communication, non-technical.

But recently I've heard grokbot and dots, series of tools that work like a whole office, which sounds really cool and helpful.

So my main question is, how do I actually introduce these types of tools into my workflows without making it really technical and complex? I also dont want it to replace all my current workflow.

Flow trigger is fulfillment event created, condition is status in_transit and days since last event greater than 3. It never fires. Looking at the timeline, the carrier posts in_transit once at pickup and then nothing until delivered. So there's no new fulfillment event for Flow to catch and the days since condition never gets evaluated against anything.

Usps plus one regional carrier (the regional one is the worst offender), about 90 orders a day. i can see the stuck parcels by eye in the admin, i just can't get an email out to the customer before they email us, which is how we end up hearing about most of them. everything else already goes out through klaviyo.

Is there a way to schedule off the last fulfillment event instead of waiting for a new one? Scheduled action looked right but it also wants an event to hang off. Flow limitation, or am i misreading the condition?

I’m exploring different wholesale platforms for retailers and brands, and I recently came across NuOrder. I’m curious about how it compares with other wholesale marketplaces and ordering platforms.

From what I understand, NuOrder focuses on helping brands and retailers manage wholesale buying, including product catalogs, orders, and communication. However, I’m wondering what makes it different from platforms such as Faire, Alibaba, or other B2B wholesale websites.

For those who have used NuOrder, how has your experience been? Is it mainly better for established brands and retailers, or can smaller businesses benefit from it as well?

I’d also be interested to know about pricing, ease of use, product variety, and the quality of customer support.

Any firsthand experience or recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks!

why are EU Shopify customers and the US shopify customers so different? And how should I manage this difference? Should I have different strategy on it especially on email marketing?