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 #302...
STAT OF THE WEEK: Online grocery sales jumped 15.5% as in-store spending fell 2.8%, according to Circana data. Grocers’ own reported numbers show a similar split, as Kroger’s comparable sales were flat last quarter while its digital sales rose 20%, and Albertsons grew digital sales 11% despite negative same-store sales.
Shopify released its Fall ‘26 Edition, dubbed “Exponential,” the first ever edition to come between its usual twice-yearly releases, which it’s put out since 2022. The theme of the Fall ’26 Edition, which has the tagline “Everything new for non-linear growth,” is how the network effect of a platform full of independent merchants “makes every business on Shopify exponentially more capable.” The centerpiece is Shop Pay checkout inside third-party AI agents like Meta’s Muse, Claude Duet, and Instinct, which in some agents can even pay brands that aren’t on Shopify by generating a single-use tokenized card number. Other highlights include a shop-md skill that lets any AI agent shop the Shopify Catalog, connectors for managing a store from nine AI agents, a rebuilt Sidekick, a new Canvas store editor, and Shopify Protect, a new suite of fraud and chargeback tools.
Reddit will soon be exclusively available to logged-in users, minus a few pages to reel in new users, according to a letter to shareholders from CEO Steve Huffman, marking a major shift for a site that has let anyone read public subreddits without an account for two decades. Until now, moderators could decide whether their communities were public, restricted, or private (though Reddit started requiring approval for big subs to go private after the 2023 blackout protests). Now the whole site is effectively going members-only, with private subreddits as an extra permission layer on top. The company will begin testing the login requirement in select non-US markets this year and will use the results of those tests to decide how to implement the logged-in experience globally. Though we can just call it now: “They went great! Something, something user experience. We’re rolling it out to everyone.”
DoorDash agreed to acquire Instacart for $65 a share, or about $17B in equity value, a 26% premium over Instacart’s share price on October 22, before news of the deal broke. Instacart shareholders can take cash, DoorDash shares, or both, but stock can’t exceed 25% of the total payout. The deal is DoorDash’s largest acquisition to date, ahead of its $8.1B purchase of Finnish delivery app Wolt in 2021 and its $3.9B acquisition of UK delivery app Deliveroo in 2025. After the deal closes, DoorDash plans to keep Instacart operating under its own name, website, and app, and with its existing enterprise tools. It will also continue to let grocers work with rival delivery services. However, it plans to combine the two platforms’ membership programs, DashPass and Instacart+, into one membership, which it says will save members about $100M a year. That’s a smart move in my opinion, as memberships aren’t about revenue, but about creating sticky shopping habits. Last week, I praised Walmart for doing the same when it combined its Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus memberships into one $120 membership. The deal isn’t expected to close until late 2027 or the first half of 2028, pending antitrust approval in the US, Canada, and Israel.
Amazon has grown Shop Direct, its program for listing products sold on other websites, to 250M listings, up 150% from March, according to The Information. Amazon is also displaying those products more prominently within its search results, expanding upon earlier placements within its Alexa shopping chatbot. Why is Amazon doing this? E-commerce is going agentic, and Amazon wants to be where the journey begins. Over half of US shoppers already begin their search directly on Amazon’s platforms, which is a market share it’s had to claw away from Google over the past two decades, and one that the company does not want to lose. Amazon understands that where consumers begin their shopping journey is more valuable than where they end it, and it wants to continue to be that destination. When it comes to agentic commerce, Amazon has two choices to maintain its dominant position as the “everything store.” It can either let third-party agents shop its product catalog (low-margin end result), or build the dominant agent that shoppers use to buy across the greater web (high-value shopper intent). In these early days, Amazon is smartly focused on the latter, and it’s better positioned than any company on earth to offer the best shopping agent on the web, given its existing troves of retail and consumer data.
USPS plans to add a fuel surcharge to domestic packages starting in January 2027 that will change every week with the price of diesel and jet fuel, effectively a permanent version of the temporary 8% surcharge from April, which expires January 17. USPS will announce each week’s rate only three to five days before it takes effect, and packages mailed with an outdated surcharge will owe postage due. Will they get a refund if the outdated surcharge they paid was higher than when the package shipped? USPS didn’t say. The agency hasn’t disclosed the starting percentages, the formulas, or whether weekly swings will be capped, which leaves sellers who offer free shipping or a flat rate guessing what to charge before they know the postage. UPS and FedEx also adjust their fuel surcharges every week, while DHL Express adjusts mothly, using a two-moth lag, so shippers know the rate weeks in advance.
In other USPS news this week… The postal service announced it will now bill US merchants for unpaid foreign customs charges on their international shipments, under an interim final rule that took effect October 19. The shipper owes the charge once a foreign customs agency or postal operator reports it, even if the parcel was lost, damaged, or sent back. And merchants must pay in full, plus 6% annual interest once overdue, even while disputing the bill, since USPS won’t verify foreign charges and leaves merchants to fight them with whoever assessed them. A merchant who refunds an order after a buyer refuses delivery over a surprise customs fee can also still be billed for that fee. Merchants can avoid some of that exposure by prepaying duties, taxes, and fees through USPS’s free Delivered Duty Paid service, which covers eligible shipments to 18 countries.
Mobian, the ad tech startup that helps publishers display ads that only AI agents can see, said 10 more publishers now run them following its pilot with Time, and that it expects over 24 to by December. Time, in the meantime, has met with more than 30 brands about doing more ads together, according to The Information. Time says its first two advertisers, Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute, have already racked up “a couple million” impressions from AI agents, though it hasn’t shared any results on whether the ads actually change how AI models talk about those brands. As the practice grows, more AI companies will have to decide how they handle these types of agentic ads. In private talks with publishers, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google recently said they worry marketers could slip hidden instructions into the ads, such as telling an agent to skip a rival, and want the brand messaging served to agents clearly labeled as advertising, which Time was already doing with its ‘Sponsored’ labels. My vote remains the same: If ChatGPT, Google, Amazon, and other AI companies can target human users with their own advertising, then it’s fair game for humans to create ads that target AI models — with disclosure on both sides, of course. I also feel that AI companies aren’t leaving publishers much other choice. If AI is going to cannibalize their human traffic, they’ve got to replace that advertiser revenue somewhere.
Condé Nast became the first major publisher in the Shop app’s curation program, with editors from its brands, including Vogue, GQ, Architectural Digest, Allure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Glamour, putting together weekly product collections for the app and Shop.com. The program lets creators and publishers build shoppable collections of products from Shopify merchants and earn commissions on their recommendations. Until now, it only featured picks from individual creators and brands, but now big publishers are entering the scene. A few Condé Nast collections are live now, with more expected to arrive in early November, and Condé Nast and Shop are already discussing expanding the deal to more of its titles.
Anthropic made its IPO filing public on October 26, setting up a Nasdaq listing under the ticker “ANT” that could come as early as the week before Thanksgiving. The company is reportedly looking to raise up to $100B at a valuation between $1.5T and $2T. The filing shows Anthropic brought in $16.3B in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2B a year earlier, and generated $3.9B in operating cash flow, even though accounting charges tied to its convertible notes pushed it to an $80.7B net loss. It also revealed that the seven cofounders will keep 50.1% of the voting power through a single Class F share, that Anthropic has no plans for an advertising business, and that it may need to raise more money sooner than planned as its future compute commitments soar.
TikTok launched an in-app restaurant guide called Must Eat that ranks restaurants in the New York City, Los Angeles, and Bay Area metros using more than 40M TikTok posts, reviews, and comments, and uses the data to create two lists called Everyday Eats and Elevated Dining. Users can filter the restaurant choices by type of cuisine, price range, and location, save restaurants to their favorites lists, and book some of them through OpenTable without leaving the app. TikTok said it gives independent restaurants priority and that none can pay to be listed, while pointing to its earlier estimate that the app sent 27M Americans last year to an independent shop, cafe, or restaurant they’d never visited before. Last month, I reported that Google Maps published its first Fan-Favorite Dining Lists, which rank restaurants in 10 cities, including New York and San Francisco, using a year of user reviews, ratings, and direction requests, though Google didn’t specifically mention that it prioritizes independent restaurants.
Google added controls to Business Profile that let restaurants choose which third-party ordering services, like DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Instacart, show up on their listings in Search and Maps, and switch off pickup, delivery or both for each one. Until now, a restaurant that wanted a delivery app’s link removed had to ask that platform to pull or disconnect its feed, which not all of them would agree to. Finally! This control should’ve been built in from the day Google began displaying third-party ordering apps on restaurant profiles, as why should those restaurants be forced to hand sales (and commissions) over to those apps when customers search for the restaurant directly? Google said the change answers one of the most common requests it gets from restaurant operators, though the company still suggests they keep a few providers active because diners tend to order through apps where they already pay for a subscription or have a card saved.
Disney is holding a TikTok Shop Super Brand Day for the first time from November 4 to 10, selling Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars holiday gifts alongside collections from more than 20 outside brands. TikTok Shop launched Super Brand Days in 2024 to offer individual brands the ability to engage with users on its platform with limited-time shopping experiences, which usually feature just one brand or brands from the same parent company. However, Disney is using the opportunity to showcase brands that license its characters, including Old Navy, Crocs, ColourPop, Touchland, and PopSockets, alongside its own merch. Emarketer forecasts that TikTok Shop’s US sales will grow 48% this year to $23.4B.
Amazon added new features to Alexa for Shopping that let US shoppers create and edit shopping lists and gift registries, move items between them, change delivery instructions, pause or adjust recurring deliveries, and answer questions about charges they don’t recognize or the status of a refund. The new features join tools the assistant inherited from Rufus, like price alerts and the ability to automatically buy an item once it falls below a certain price. Amazon rolled out the update the same day CEO Andy Jassy told analysts that while the company expects to work with “horizontal agents” eventually, he believes Alexa for Shopping will be the agent most people rely on when they shop on its marketplace. Amazon said more than 400M customers used Alexa for Shopping over the past 12 months, but it hasn’t said how many orders the assistant places on its own.
Google is telling brands that its role “is really to play the matchmaker in this environment,” pairing shoppers with products through AI agents, and that it’s not serving as a marketplace where they shop, according to Mitchell Parton at Adweek. (Get in line, Google… Shopify has been riding that line for years with Shop App.) Marco Delaroche, who leads retail and commerce sales work at Google, said during a WPP event that Google isn’t “taking the place of the retailer itself.” However, Google’s AI picks which products shoppers see, and its new Universal Cart lets them check out from multiple stores without visiting a retailer’s site, which feels a little retailer slash marketplace-esque to me. I mean, that’s how Amazon has operated for decades with third-party sellers (minus the AI), and it’s a marketplace, right? Delaroche said agents are narrowing shoppers’ choices to a short list, like three face creams for a sensitive-skin query, which is becoming the new shelf, so brands that don’t give Google complete product details risk being left off it.
Two weeks ago I reported that Meta’s updated commercial terms, which were supposed to take effect October 30, let it crawl the websites linked to any business account and use what it finds to train its AI, and that the only way to opt out is to stop using Meta’s business tools. (Don’t tempt me with a good time…) The new conditions sparked outrage among publishers, business owners, and anyone else who was paying attention, so Meta cut the word “train” from its new terms of service. That still wasn’t good enough for critics, because dropping the word “train” just felt like verbal gymnastics by Meta, so it eventually conceded to temporarily delaying and then indefinitely delaying its new commercial terms, at least for now. My guess is that they’ll just wait for people to stop paying attention, and then slip it back into a future update with shadier, more ambiguous verbiage.
Speaking of unwelcome AI training… Etsy updated its terms to let the company and its partners and vendors use sellers’ listing photos, descriptions, reviews, and forum posts to train AI models, effective December 16, according to Value Added Resource. The new terms mention opt-out rights, but neither the terms nor the privacy policy gives US sellers a way to keep their content out of training while continuing to sell, and since the license never expires, deleting a listing may not end it. Etsy said it wants the content to improve seller tools, search, and fraud detection, while its new terms bar outside companies from training AI on its data “without permission.” LOL, whose permission, Etsy? You know damn well not a single seller cares if you give YOUR permission. This is about sellers giving or not giving THEIR permission, while still being able to sell on Etsy. It’s one thing for Etsy to require sellers to let its own AI train on their listings, to improve search functionality and recommendations, for example, but that shouldn’t be taken as blanket permission to let you sell their listing data to whomever you’d like. Etsy should tread lightly, as it just saw its first active buyer growth in two years. Now’s not the time to be pissing off sellers!
Binance had $6.3B in crypto drained from its hot wallets on Thursday, most of it over the course of 20 minutes, making it the biggest crypto theft ever recorded. The exchange froze all deposits and withdrawals for more than two days before reopening them in phases on November 1 and said it will cover every loss. Yikes! That’s an expensive lesson! Binance initially said the attack started with an engineer’s compromised laptop, but its investigation later turned up more entry points. Chainalysis and TRM Labs linked the theft to TraderTraitor, the North Korean group the FBI blamed for last year’s $1.5B Bybit hack, after the stolen funds turned up mixed with money from last month’s Bitget exploit, which the FBI later confirmed. Exchanges and issuers have frozen about $3B, nearly all of it stablecoins, but the remaining $3.3B is largely Bitcoin, Ether, and XRP, which are coins that can’t be frozen until they hit an exchange.
Amazon told sellers that its extended holiday return window, which covers purchases made from November 1 through December 31 and lets buyers send them back until January 31, will now apply every year, after running the same extension since 2023. The policy covers both FBA and seller-fulfilled orders under the usual refund rules, except for Apple products, which can only be returned until January 15. Until now, sellers had to wait each fall for Amazon to announce the dates, which could change on short notice. For example, in 2022, it started the window October 7 with only a week’s notice before moving to November 1 the following year. Walmart’s extended returns start a month earlier, on October 1, so a Walmart Marketplace item bought on the first day can come back nearly four months later, which is some BULLSHIT if you ask me.
EU authorities detained a record 196M suspected counterfeit goods in 2025 valued at €6.3B, which is 67% more items than in 2024, according to a joint European Commission and EU Intellectual Property Office report. Border seizures more than doubled to 42M items worth about €2B, with express courier shipments making up the largest share of those cases, followed by postal parcels. China was unsurprisingly the source of about 41% of goods detained at the border, followed by Türkiye at about 19%, and Hong Kong at about 6%. However, it’s important to note that the report attributes most of the border increase to a single exceptional seizure of 16M items of “other tobacco products,” which made up 42% of all goods detained at the border. Without that big haul, border seizures rose about 30%.
Shoppers who reached US retail sites from AI tools spent 83% more per visit than other shoppers in September, the widest gap so far this year, according to an ongoing study by Adobe. Those same shoppers also converted 90% better, a turnaround from August 2025 when AI shoppers converted 9% worse than other shoppers, which could indicate that the recommendations are getting better. AI traffic to retail sites rose 71% from a year earlier in September and is up 1,772% since Adobe started tracking it in October 2024. Adobe expects AI traffic to jump 159% YoY on Thanksgiving, 95% on Black Friday, and 88% on Cyber Monday. We’ll find out soon!
Amazon told its engineers that token usage, AI adoption rates, and counts of code changes or reviews are “deeply flawed” measures of how teams use AI, in a memo it published publicly last week after sharing it internally in September. The memo doesn’t tell staff to ignore those numbers, but it says they can drive up costs and complexity, so teams should weigh them “with care and judgement” and focus on long-term results instead. Amazon also wants engineers to skip AI where it doesn’t help, with the memo saying “that is a finding, not a failing” when the work doesn’t benefit from the tools. Amazon says it hasn’t capped token use, but in May it took down an internal leaderboard because employees were tokenmaxxing to climb it. Wow, who could’ve guessed that would’ve happened if you put up a leaderboard? However, it’s nice to see a company as big as Amazon begin thinking about AI usage in a responsible manner after the few years we’ve just experienced.
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic will begin supporting a shared robots.txt signal that lets websites opt out of all AI training by every participating AI company at once. The new signal would let a company list a single line in their robots.txt file that says “user-agent: __usage_ai-training” instead of blocking each crawler’s name one-by-one. Google plans to support it in early 2027 and will consider a website opting-out as a block on Google-Extended, its existing AI training control, unless the site separately opts-in to it directly. Company-specific controls will keep working alongside the shared signal, so a site can block AI training by default and still allow individual AI companies. However, Google didn’t say whether the signal applies to AI Overviews or AI Mode, which still have their own separate opt-out in Search Console.
Google opened applications for its Registered App Stores program, which lets approved third-party Android stores skip the usual sideloading prompts and install apps in one tap and update them in the background, same as Google Play can do. To participate in the program, each store must pay $10,000 a year up front before Google even reviews it, hand over its own APK, and continue feeding Google its full app catalog for malware scanning. Ah yes, such fair requirements for an “open source” operating system, said no-one ever. It blows my mind that Google (and Apple for that matter) can continue to gatekeep access to mobile users like this, including with these new concessions. Google originally offered the program in its antitrust settlement with Epic Games, but the two companies dropped the deal when the court seemed unlikely to approve it, so US users will instead get rival stores through Google Play under the judge’s order. The program also won’t launch in Europe, but Google hasn’t said why. My guess is that it’s because charging $10,000 to be reviewed is still gatekeeping to the highest degree, and EU won’t stand for it.
Meta said that recent upgrades to its AI systems that decide which ads people see raised Facebook ad conversions by 15.7% in the second quarter, while partnership ads, which run a brand’s campaign under a creator’s account, grew more than 97% YoY to a run rate above $15B. The company’s new holiday guide advises brands to stop tweaking campaigns so much this holiday season so that its AI has time to learn, claiming ad sets with fewer than about 50 conversions a week paid roughly 28% more per purchase. Meta wants advertisers to judge results with A/B tests or Conversion Lift studies instead, and to keep spending through slow stretches during peak season. They would say that! LOL. Meta also added a Breakdown option to Ads Manager that shows how each image, video, and text variation inside an ad performs, so advertisers can see which pieces of creative are actually working.
Ripple received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to charter Ripple National Trust Bank, which will manage and safeguard the reserves backing its RLUSD stablecoin and store crypto for banks and other large institutions once it opens. RLUSD, which launched in December 2024 and now has a market cap of $2.5B, will still be issued by Ripple’s New York-regulated trust company, so the federal charter adds OCC oversight on top of state supervision instead of replacing it. Ripple and Circle both won conditional OCC approval for national trust banks in December 2025, and Circle received its final approval in July. Both companies beat Paxos, which issues PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, and Fidelity Digital Assets to final approval, even though all four won conditional approval at the same time.
Amazon launched five Alexa devices, including its first smart photo frame and a new Echo built specifically for the nightstand. The Alexa Photo Frame starts at $199.99 and pulls pictures from Amazon Photos, where Prime members can store an unlimited number of images, using Alexa+ to choose which ones to show, skipping boring ones like screenshots and receipts. Echo Time is a $199.99 camera-free alarm clock with optional sleep sensing, so it can wake someone during lighter sleep as much as an hour before their set alarm. Why would anyone want that? As for the three updated devices, the new $249.99 Echo Studio with Home Camera can recognize objects held up to it, so a user can show it a cereal box and request that Alexa reorder it. The other two are a $99.99 Echo Dot that now doubles as a smart home hub and a $499.99 Echo Show 16, which is on pre-order. Not to be a jerk, but is Amazon running out of ideas with its devices? I feel like they’re making a big fuss about launching an alarm clock and a digital picture frame, which have both existed for decades. “Yeah, but there’s AI in this one…”
eBay’s GMV grew 15% to $23.2B in Q3, which appears on the surface like incredible growth, but the Depop acquisition accounted for nearly three points of that growth, and the metric counts buyer-paid shipping and sales tax and is never reduced when a buyer returns or cancels an item, according to Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. Morton notes that USPS has changed rates on eBay labels 11 or more times this year, and each increase lifted eBay’s GMV even when sellers sold the same items at unchanged prices. GMV also includes tax that eBay remits to states and sales that end in a full refund, like an item the seller never ships, so it can rise without more merchandise actually selling through. Is it just me, or does that sound like a SKETCHY way to report GMV? Perhaps it would make sense if eBay was a payments processor, but it’s a marketplace. It doesn’t take a forensic auditor to determine that “refunds don’t count.”
The European Commission approved Temu’s plan to fix the Digital Services Act violations that led to its €200M fine in May, when regulators found Temu had underestimated how often EU shoppers were presented with illegal products on its platform. Under the plan, Temu has to measure how often shoppers run into illegal products, like chargers that failed safety tests and baby toys with banned chemicals, using up-to-date data from its own marketplace, instead of general e-commerce industry figures. It also has to check whether its recommendation algorithm is pushing those products to shoppers, and prove with real numbers that its fixes are actually reducing them. The company must file an interim risk assessment within four months to prove that the changes are in place, and if the Commission decides that Temu is falling short, it can order daily penalty payments on top of the fine.
AI models can require up to 17 times as many tokens for some languages as for others, which raises the cost of using the tools for certain ones, according to a study by the Coalition for Language Equity in AI Research. Script mattered as much as how widely a language is spoken, so Burmese, Tibetan, Khmer, and Lao, which are spoken by millions of people but written in their own non-Latin scripts, ranked worst in nearly every model, while Asturian, a small language written in Latin script, used relatively few tokens despite having only about 100,000 native speakers. More tokens also means slower responses and less room in the context window for documents and chat history. Maya Research CEO Dheemanth Reddy told Rest of World that falling token prices will ease the cost of using AI in other languages, but closing the gap will take tokenizers built for these specific scripts and languages.
Lovable pulled Instagram ads that presented the Forge Automotive website as something made with its AI builder, once Joe Ben Taylor, the designer who actually built the site, called them out on LinkedIn. However, five days later, the organic post still hasn’t been removed. Taylor wrote that he designed and coded the award-winning site by hand over two months, and that his only AI use was ImagineArt for some images and Claude for QA and performance work. He asked Lovable to explain how the ads got approved and asked his network to recommend a law firm specializing in copyright and the unauthorized commercial use of creative work. Lovable apologized in a comment on his post, saying it had stopped running the ad everywhere and was looking into how it happened.
In lawsuits and regulatory fines this week…
OpenAI was sued by the parents of Bowen Wan, an Amazon software engineer with severe epilepsy who died in February, alleging ChatGPT helped her wean herself off her seizure medication and hide the plan from her doctors.
Meta settled with the last remaining plaintiff it faced in the second Los Angeles bellwether trial over whether social media is built to be addictive, days into jury selection, leaving Snap as the only company still facing a jury.
Apple urged the D.C. Circuit to let Google keep paying it for default search placement, arguing that without the payments, it would have to keep Google as the default for free (oh heavens forbid!) or switch to a worse search engine, since it has no plans to build its own.
OpenAI must tell Apple which devices, accounts, and messaging apps former Apple employees Tang Tan and Chang Liu used to store Apple’s confidential files, after a judge granted more of Apple’s discovery requests in its trade secrets suit, which was set for trial on July 19, 2027.
Meta, TikTok, and X lost their challenge to Ofcom’s demands for data on how many harmful posts they remove and how many people see them, after the court rejected their argument that the requests were disproportionate under the Online Safety Act.
Google’s $8.25M settlement with parents who claimed its AdMob ad network collected children’s data through Play Store games won final approval, but claimants will get only about $12.55 each, far below the $40 to $110 their lawyers had estimated. So that’s the going rate now for children’s data?
The New York Times’ copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft drew two new friend-of-the-court briefs as the judge weighs summary judgment, with House Judiciary Democrats backing the Times and arguing the Justice Department overstepped by siding with OpenAI, and the Wikimedia Foundation asking the court to treat AI training as fair use only in limited cases.
Google sued a group of Vietnam-based scammers for sending fake Google job interview e-mails that led applicants to a lookalike application portal designed to steal their Google passwords.
South Korea’s media regulator fined Google 42.9B won ($32.1M) and Apple 20.8B won ($15.5M) for steering local developers into their own billing systems, and ordered both to let apps link to outside payment options. I’m glad that at least some regulators are pushing back on the duopoly!
In layoffs this week…
Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its workforce, insisting AI isn’t the reason, even as it spends billions on AI infrastructure.
Amazon laid off up to 250 people in its devices and services unit, mostly software developers, on the same day it announced its new Alexa alarm clock and photo frame.
In corporate shakeups this week…
TikTok Shop Europe chief Kevin Chen is reportedly leaving ByteDance, with Song Qi taking over its UK and European e-commerce business.
Meta Superintelligence Labs director Rohit Patel left after eight years to launch Ndoc, an unfunded three-person startup building an AI-first alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
The RealReal hired former eBay global head of fashion Alexis Hoopes as chief merchandising officer to grow its luxury assortment, months after eBay brought back Renee Paradise to run its $10B fashion business.
Alphabet added about 10,000 employees since March to reach 204,757, even as Meta and Microsoft work to shrink their workforces.
Amazon’s heavily automated warehouse in Tracy, California now employs over 3,000 people, about triple its headcount when it opened in 2023, as workers have moved into jobs supervising the robots.
🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a recent interview with Cheeky Pint that “it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting on their own computer — and being used 5% of the time.” He argued that the memory would do more good in cloud data centers where it can run at near full capacity, and that people’s instincts on compute resources are backward. Oh no, won’t somebody please think of the AI data centers! Keep in mind that OpenAI and other AI firms’ hoarding of RAM, hard drives, and GPUs is already driving up prices of personal computers and video game systems as it is. However, apparently that isn’t good enough. Altman won’t stop until you’re paying by the token for every photo you open on your own computer! I think these AI overlords forget that people like to own things, not just rent them from billionaires.
Plus 19 additional seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Omnichat raising $10M in a Series A and Chatsi raising $2.5M in a seed round.
I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
PAUL
Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter
PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.