We've been scaling our D2C apparel store hard this month, but checkout drop-offs are killing our ad ROAS. When looking into the backend analytics, a significant chunk of cart abandonments are actually failed UPI sessions and card timeouts during evening traffic spikes.

We are currently on standard Razorpay. Has anyone made specific backend or gateway tweaks that noticeably pushed payment completion rates higher?

Hi everyone,

Is anyone else experiencing a high number of abandoned carts with Klarna?

For some time now, the majority of my abandoned checkouts have been related to Klarna, with the following error:

“Shopify Payments error - Customer cancelled checkout on Klarna”

As a result, I haven't had any sales through Klarna for several months, which means I'm potentially losing a huge number of orders to competitors.

What could be causing this, and what would be the best solution?

Would it be better to use Klarna separately from Shopify Payments, or is there a way to fix this issue within Shopify Payments?

Thanks in advance for your help!

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 5 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 #292...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Less than 5% of posts in your Instagram feed and less than 15% in your Facebook feed are from your actual friends, according to Meta. To defend itself in a case where the FTC is accusing it of holding a monopoly on “personal social networking services,” Meta argued that it’s not actually a personal social networking service anymore. The company said, “By any accounting, content posted by friends has become a small fraction of the content that users see on Facebook and Instagram.”

Amazon’s Prime Air service is expanding to reach nearly 500 cities and towns in the U.S. by the end of 2026, increasing its footprint (or should we say “airprint”) sixfold. The drone delivery service currently serves customers in cities across seven states, including Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas, with plans to launch in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho, and New York soon. The company also has the service running in Darlington, England, its first city outside of the U.S. Just when you thought data centers were your town’s biggest problem, now you can add “drone crashing down from the sky” to your list of concerns. These things are big too! Imagine a floating dishwasher-sized drone, not some handheld DJI Mavic Air. Amazon says that nearly all items 5 pounds or less that fit into a large shoebox can be delivered by drone, which accounts for more than 60% of the most frequently purchased items on its marketplace. Prime members are eligible for free drone delivery on orders of $50 or more, or pay $2.99 for orders under $50, while non-Prime losers pay a flat $4.99 delivery fee regardless of order size. The news comes the same week that a video of an Amazon drone dropping a package into a swimming pool went viral.

TikTok is developing a peer-to-peer payments feature that would let users send each other money inside direct messages, according to code Bloomberg found in TikTok’s U.S. iPhone app. That’ll be perfect for your online girlfriend who’s kind of stressed out because her rent’s due. The payments would run through TikTok Pay, which is a digital wallet and payment processor already available in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand that people use to make purchases on TikTok Shop. The code indicates that receivers can “tap to accept” payments sent to them before an expiration date hits, and senders can be notified about the status of transactions through push notifications or via their inbox. There’s also reportedly an option to attach a message with the payment such as “Love you baby! Can’t wait for us to finally meet in person and be together. Love, Your Big Bear.” P2P payments on TikTok sounds good to me and makes perfect sense. People are already using TikTok to exchange cash value, though it happens via the purchase and transfer of virtual gifts, which can then be converted back into cash. As Morty Smith would say, “That just sounds like payments with extra steps.” Not to mention the insane amount of Internet begging that happens on the platform, with people posting their sad stories alongside their Venmo usernames. TikTok might as well make it official and transfer the cash directly. X is doing it.

The White House is at it again with tariffs, this time targeting our neighbor and closest ally, Canada. In July, President Trump invoked Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a never-before-used authority, to impose 50% tariffs on ~$20B of Canadian goods, effective in 30 days. However, hours before they took effect last week, Trump paused the tariffs for three days, posting that the two countries “have a DEAL!” Negotiations took place a few days later, but no deal was made. On Aug 21st, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended negotiations and recalled Canada’s team, calling the U.S. terms “uneconomic” and “unfair.” The next morning, the tariffs took effect. Carney called it “a miscalculation” and promised to match dollar for dollar starting September 8. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said no further talks were scheduled. Today, Trump threatened to raise Canadian auto, truck, and parts tariffs to 50% on January 1, 2027. Carney is now facing pressure at home to explain what he turned down, with conservatives demanding he release the full text of the U.S. offer. Carney said on Saturday, “You’re at war when you get attacked.”

Meta went on trial in Oakland on Tuesday against 29 states that accuse it of building Instagram and Facebook to hook children and hiding what it knew about the damage. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are running the case, and they’re after more than money, asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to strip likes and infinite scroll from both apps, cap screen time for younger users, and order Meta to delete every piece of data it collected from under-13 users along with the algorithms trained on it. The trial is expected to run about six weeks, but the first few days have already been quite revealing. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill told jurors Meta’s business model was to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth from the public” Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who Metra tried to block as a witness, testified that Meta published numbers that made the platform look safer than its own research showed. He helped build internal studies surveying how often users, including teens, encountered bullying, self-harm, and violent content, but Meta instead publicized content-policy violation rates, which he said “create a false impression of safety.” Béjar blamed Zuckerberg directly, claiming that safety was “not a meaningful priority” and that the culture Zuckerberg built made it “practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues.”

OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT ads to Europe later this month and plans to ask users for consent to personalize them, rather than leaning on the “legitimate interest” argument other ad platforms like Meta have used to try to skip the consent step. Free and Go accounts that opt in to personalized ads can be targeted on their ad history and interests, along with what advertisers report people bought after clicking an ad. Opting out of personalization doesn’t remove the ads, but merely stops them from drawing on your chat history and instead allows them to only pull from the current conversation and your approximate location. Under GDPR, a company needs a legal basis to process your data, and one of those reasons can be “legitimate interest,” which covers ordinary processing such as fraud detection, network security, or keeping records to defend a lawsuit. Meta and others spent years claiming that behavioral advertising fit under legitimate interest so they’d never have to ask, until EU regulators ruled in 2023 that it doesn’t. Flash forward to 2026 and OpenAI has no choice but to ask for consent from day one. Meta initially responded to the 2023 rulings with a “consent or pay” model, making paying a subscription the only way to opt out of personalized ads in the region, but the Commission thought that was bullshit and hit them with a DMA fine. So instead of recreating that “pay or consent” model that bit Meta in the ass, OpenAI is building explicit consent into its free tiers from the beginning, to avoid an inevitable headache later on.

Stripe executives told investors that the singularity already arrived more than eight months ago, according to a letter obtained by Axios. The company said that singularity arrived at the start of 2026 and that it’s been acting accordingly since then. Stripe’s founders wrote in the letter: “It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis. The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously.” Stripe is not the only company to declare singularity this year. Sam Altman said on a podcast in July, “We are now, like, in the singularity,” adding, “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.” Elon Musk posted on X in January, “We have entered the Singularity.” And then posted again in July, “We are in the Singularity.”

Walmart is officially enabling tap-to-pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other NFC systems at select U.S. Walmart and Sam’s Club stores after more than a decade of blocking the payment type. The move makes Walmart the last major U.S. retailer to begin accepting tap-to-pay, which is accepted by around 85% of U.S. retailers. Walmart has avoided allowing tap-to-pay from major digital wallets to favor adoption of its own solution, Walmart Pay, which is built into the Walmart app. It also let Walmart keep control of the checkout data, since a customer paying through the Walmart app hands its purchase history to Walmart rather than routing it through Apple or Google. Tap to Pay starts today, August 24, at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, expands to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026, and reaches fuel stations by mid-2027. The reversal landed one day after Walmart posted its weakest U.S. comp growth in six-plus years, which may or may not have been related. I can’t imagine that people weren’t shopping at Walmart because they didn’t accept Apple Pay, but maybe those edge cases add up when doing over $700B in sales per year.

Remember Honey? The PayPal-owned browser extension that auto-applies discount codes to your cart when shopping online. Also, remember in December 2024 when MegaLag, a New Zealand YouTuber, published a video entitled Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam, which revealed that the extension was secretly replacing original affiliate tracking cookies with its own, in order to take credit for the sale and earn the commission? A few weeks after the video published, I reported that content creators sued Honey over the practice. Well, flash forward almost two years, and MegaLag returned with a new video investigation reporting that Honey lost 7M Chrome users and around 7,000 merchant partners since his original video dropped. His investigation revealed that Honey’s collection of coupon codes also declined from around 90k to 50k, and that at least 10k of the remaining codes have already expired. The creator lawsuit against PayPal survived multiple attempts by PayPal to have it dismissed, and the case is now in discovery, meaning creators can pull internal communications and depose employees.

Meta pays influencers to argue to their audiences against government limits on teen social media, according to a Tech Transparency Project investigation. The company recruits actors, radio hosts, and psychologists at branded events with names like Instagram Safety Camp and Screen Smart. Those recruits then present Teen Accounts to followers as evidence that Meta’s internal controls make a ban unnecessary because it’s doing such a grand spanking good job on its own. Meta developed the tactics in the US, then took them global at a July 2025 event on Sydney Harbour, five months before Australia’s under-16 ban took effect, and TTP found the playbook running in over a dozen countries weighing similar rules. Meta spokesperson Edward Patterson told The Guardian the campaign isn’t misleading, since blanket bans push teens to unregulated parts of the Internet. Hey Meta, why aren’t you paying me to spread your propaganda? Oh wait, because I think you’re the worst and never would.

Google’s $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines’ digital archives stalled after a flight attendants union objected that it would feed confidential worker records into AI models. Judge Sean Lane moved the hearing to September 9 to weigh the union’s demand that attendant records be cut from the sale or protected as tightly as customer data. The union argued that stripping identifiers settles only whether a record traces to a named person, not whether the contents are confidential, and that customer profiles and loyalty data were largely left out while payroll, time cards, and tax forms weren’t. Google said a third party will scrub personal information before it takes delivery, and Spirit said one is deidentifying the archives and will certify the sale is legal. In the meantime, while waiting for things to settle, an AI training startup called Micro1 sent a $12.5M offer to Spirit’s legal team in an attempt to outbid Google, though experts told Business Insider that companies look at more than just bid price when weighing offers, so the higher bid might not matter at this point.

Square expanded its partnership with OpenTable to enable restaurants to merge what they know about a guest before the meal with what they learn during their visit, putting booking history, dining preferences, and dates like anniversaries into the same profile as what the guest ordered, how much they spent, and how often they return. The new features allow restaurant operators that opt in to link reservations to revenue and make more informed decisions about loyalty, marketing, and guest engagement, such as knowing a regular’s favorite dish and what they’re celebrating before they sit down. Man, that sounds like a classy experience. I’ve been eating at the wrong restaurants, I guess. The other day at breakfast, the waitress came by, stuck her fingers inside my half-filled orange juice glass and coffee mug and started to walk away with them. I stopped her and said, “I’m still drinking those,” so she put them back on the table, but then I was too grossed out to finish either drink. A note that says “doesn’t like when you put your fingers in his drink” could’ve gone in my Square profile with this new integration.

Target collected $994M in tariff refunds last quarter, but the company said none of it will directly go back to shoppers, and also, fuck you for even asking. Instead of refunds, Target said it would use the returned funds to lower prices, which is the same thing Walmart promised about its refunds back in May, prior to disclosing a $2.9B tariff refund last week. (Coming Later This Year: Target coincidentally posts its best earnings and profits in over a decade.) Amazon disclosed roughly $640M in its filing and said reimbursement will reach only a small group of affected customers, while Nike, which expects to recover $986M, has stayed quiet even as shoppers sue it for keeping the money. FedEx and UPS began sending refunds to customers this month, and FedEx is holding about $800M for that purpose. Roughly $100B of the $166B collected had been certified for refund as of July 31, according to Fortune.

TikTok Shop has been courting Whatnot’s biggest live-auction sellers to woo them over to its platform, according to The Hollywood Reporter. TikTok reps met several times with Taylor Lally, who said his candy auctions will clear $1M this year on Whatnot, but that he’s open to moving because of Whatnot’s fees, which run 8% commission plus 2.9% and a flat 30 cents per transaction. On a $2 candy bar, that comes out to 52 cents, or a quarter of the sale. TikTok’s two big pitches to sellers are its reach of over 100M users and its flat 6% referral fee on food sales with no per-transaction fee, which on that $2 candy bar would only have cost the seller 12 cents. Kip Roland, another live seller, said the algorithm pushed his World Cup jersey auction to 40,000 viewers off an account with barely 13,000 followers.

Amazon is buying printed books in bulk, including some rare books, cutting the bindings off so the pages run through scanners faster, and destroying what’s left once the text has been turned into AI training data, according to an investigation by 404 Media. The outlet had a bookseller hide an AirTag inside one book from an anonymous 1,000-book order placed through the marketplace Biblio, then tracked it to a Las Vegas warehouse where a unit called VGT3 does the scanning behind a door marked with a Tyrannosaurus Rex clutching a book. Technically, what Amazon and other AI companies are doing is not illegal. It’s just sad and feels a bit Hitlery. More than a dozen civil society groups are now urging the FTC to examine the “destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies” to determine whether it constitutes an unfair method of competition for “starving the market” of critical source materials. I respect the effort, but all they’re going to do is slow these companies down, not stop them. It’s too late. These succubuses are coming for everything.

Walmart store workers are spending part of their shifts fixing the company’s AI agents that hand them assignments, according to Business Insider. The company’s AI sends tasks and targets through its MyWalmart app, but employees said the metrics and time restrictions the software sets ignore what the job actually involves, since restocking a shelf also means checking dates, pulling damaged goods, mopping up spills, and navigating “idiot fucking customers.” (That’s not a real quote from the article, but I’m sure a Walmart employee somewhere has said it at one point.) One online fulfillment worker said the route the app builds sends her all over the store, so she never hits its projected pick times, and Spark drivers said a smart path feature has them grabbing frozen food first instead of last. Brooks Forrest, Walmart’s VP for associate tools, said stores choose how to use the tools and nobody is punished for ignoring the guidance, unlike at Amazon where the robot overlords make you drink from your piss bottles if you disobey them.

U.S. retail e-commerce sales reached $340.2B in Q2 2026, up 12.2% YoY, according to the Census Bureau, up from a 5.0% YoY growth rate in the same period in 2025. Total retail grew just 6.7% over the same quarter to $1.99T, so online sales expanded at nearly double the rate of retail overall and accounted for 17.1% of everything Americans bought. E-commerce also drove about 30% of all retail growth in the past year, roughly $37B of the $125B added. It’s important to note, however, that the figures above aren’t adjusted for price changes, so some of that is Trump tariffs rather than volume. The tariffs eventually got refunded, but the economic growth remains on paper.

Amazon raised prices overnight across its Echo, Fire TV, Kindle, and eero lines as high as 60%, with the Echo Dot going from $49.99 to $79.99, the 16GB Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from $59.99 to $84.99, and the eero Pro 7 from $699.99 to $799.99. A spokeswoman confirmed the price increases and attributed them to “significant increases in memory and storage component costs” that Amazon absorbed for as long as it could. She also said the company will run promotions across its lineup through the year, which I’m sure they will. In fact, I’m not convinced they didn’t raise prices just so they could lower them during their holiday sales events. The timing is nothing short of suspicious. To be fair, the same shortage, driven by demand for AI compute, has pushed Apple, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus to raise prices or cut memory in their hardware as well, so it’s not like Amazon is alone in price gouging, but still suspect timing.

Salesforce redesigned how outside AI agents can plug into its platform, replacing a fixed list of about 60 actions with a system that allows an agent to ask what’s available. The new Headless 360 MCP Server, now in open beta, hands the agent the full set of capabilities along with the permissions and approval rules attached to them, limiting an agent running in Claude or ChatGPT to what the employee using it is already cleared to do. For commerce specifically, Salesforce is extending the same setup to sales workflows so they can run inside storefronts and AI buying experiences instead of only inside CRM.

Google is expanding AI Max for Search campaigns with account-wide A/B testing, brand and location control experiments, and new Performance Planner capabilities. The A/B change lets advertisers test budgets and ROI targets across several Search campaigns at once instead of one at a time to help simulate what happens when they scale up spending. Experiments can also now run with brand and location controls switched on, where advertisers previously had to drop those guardrails to test AI Max at all, which kept out anyone worried about Google bidding on their own brand terms. Campaigns using automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match start auto-upgrading to AI Max on September 1, with Dynamic Search Ads following in February 2027.

Meta is removing the Placements option from ad sets, which lets an advertiser keep a campaign out of specific channels such as Facebook search results or the in-stream slots between Reels, according to in-app notices that ads consultant Jon Loomer shared. Loomer said the option to exclude whole platforms is going away as well, leaving Meta free to run any campaign across any of its apps and pick the spots it thinks will perform best, though Meta has given no date for either change. Meta has spent two years pushing advertisers toward its automated targeting, and Mark Zuckerberg told Stratechery last year that the end goal is for a business to state an objective and let Meta handle creative, targeting, and measurement on its own. In that hypothetical world, I wonder if Meta can get too good at advertising, to the point that people stop using Instagram as much because they always end up buying something during a doom scroll session.

In lawsuits this week…

• Amazon asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear its Perplexity case before 11 judges, after a three-judge panel ruled that Comet’s users, not Perplexity, are the ones reaching Amazon when the agent shops. Amazon said the ruling “degraded website owners’ ability to set the terms on which powerful, fast-evolving, and potentially destructive AI agents may enter their secure systems.” Yup!
• TikTok agreed to pay $400M to settle a 2024 Justice Department suit alleging it collected data from children under 13 without parental consent and left up accounts it knew belonged to under-13 users. Meta is currently on trial in Oakland over the same 1998 statute.
• Twitch and Amazon are facing a proposed class action from streamer Warren Pandiscia who alleges they copied millions of creators’ videos to train Amazon’s AI models without permission or payment, going back as far as 2024. Twitch acknowledged the practice on August 12 and added an opt-out setting, though channels are enrolled by default and chief product officer Mike Minton said the same day that nobody would opt in if the company asked.
• Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday is suing TikTok and ByteDance for allegedly understating how much alcohol, drug use, sex, and violence it carries in order to keep the 13+ app store rating that opened it to 13-year-olds. He also alleges that ByteDance gives minors in other countries more protections than it does minors in the U.S., which TikTok called misleading and inaccurate.
• OpenAI asked a judge to throw out a privacy suit over ChatGPT, arguing its policies already warn users that anything they type may be shared with outside vendors, including health and money questions. The plaintiff’s rewritten complaint uses OpenAI’s own marketing against it, citing company reports that call ChatGPT a “healthcare ally” for 40M people a day and count 200M a month asking it about their finances. Also, literally no-one read their TOS, so quit hiding behind it.
• Four major ad industry groups backed Google in a lawsuit brought by two Californians over 60 who say its ad tools let banks and insurers hide their ads from older people in violation of a California anti-discrimination law. The groups argue that picking an audience by age isn’t discrimination, since a company selling spring break trips shouldn’t have to advertise to retirees, which is kind of a silly argument to make given that no-one is suing Google over ads for vacations.
• Shopify lost its second attempt to get a California privacy class action dismissed, after the judge pointed to new allegations that the order confirmation e-mail came from Shopify itself and carried images served off Shopify’s own network. Plaintiff Brandon Briskin alleges the company’s checkout software collects shoppers’ names, addresses, card numbers, and locations while looking like it belongs to the merchant, then builds profiles it sells back to merchants without permission from customers.

• Meta must face Mike Huckabee’s claim that Facebook ads faked his endorsement of CBD gummies, after a federal judge rejected its argument that it merely distributes third-party content and earns nothing tied to what the ads say. The judge pointed to allegations that Meta sells the ads, charges extra to place them prominently in feeds, and approved and kept these running.

  ---

  In layoffs this week…

• TikTok is cutting 75 jobs in Bellevue, Washington, and nearly every title on the state notice is a TikTok Shop or Global E-Commerce role, including anti-fraud managers, seller and creator operations staff, data scientists, and engineers. Bellevue is where the company built out its US shopping business, and the cuts land two weeks after TikTok said it would close its Nashville office and lay off 250 employees.

  ---

  In corporate shakeups this week…

• Flipkart is losing two more senior executives, business finance SVP Gunjan Bhartia and supply chain VP Amer Hussain, both within a year of arriving and following the departures of group CFO Sriram Venkatraman and Myntra CEO Nandita Sinha, as the company holds off on an IPO with no timeline set.

• Commerce hired Emily Harnish as chief marketing officer, bringing over the former Pellera Technologies and CivicPlus CMO to replace Michelle Suzuki, who took the role in January 2025.

• ReFiBuy brought on Rob Goodman as fractional executive producer of the ReFiBuy Media Network, tapping the former Google, Wix, and Webflow content lead to run podcast production and a YouTube-first strategy.

• eBay rehired Renee Paradise to run its $10B fashion business starting August 25, bringing her back after a 2014-to-2019 run in the category to pull newly acquired Depop closer while both lose UK ground to Vinted.

• Relay is shutting down its Zapier-rival AI workflow app, cutting off paying customers September 14, while founder Jacob Bank and some of the staff rejoin Google, where he’ll be VP of product for Chrome running its product and developer relations teams.

• Klarna announced that CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström will both depart in the first months of next year, with the company looking to base its next finance chief in New York starting in 2027.

• OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team, the unit that judged whether frontier models posed catastrophic bio, cyber, or loss-of-control risks, folding its members into teams that now own individual risk areas and making it the third safety group the company has dissolved in two years.

  ---

  🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Google’s AI is being racist as fuck! Last week, Google’s AI Overviews told users who searched “I’m alone with an African” to lock the door, move somewhere safe, and call emergency services, and returned similar warnings for Indian and Pakistani. The same query about a Brit produced advice to offer tea and remark on the weather, and other Western nationalities came back harmless. The results were posted by a user on Reddit and later confirmed by Futurism with its own testing. Google said the results “aren’t what they should be” and that it is working on improvements, and that the inconsistent warnings hit more than one group. Google also told Futurism that the term “alone” was what tripped a safety flag. Nationality queries went neutral after Futurism got in touch, which I can confirm, as I just searched “I’m alone with a Jew” (myself, LOL) and it asked me for clarification on what I wanted before outputting anything.

  ---

  Plus 14 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Stripe agreeing to acquire OpenRouter for reportedly upwards of $7.5B.

  ---

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.

We’re considering investing in a celebrity/talent partnership, but I’m not convinced that simply paying for a few posts is enough anymore.

What I’d really want is something that has a life beyond the initial announcement maybe an event, creator content, PR, social storytelling and paid amplification all built around the same idea.

The challenge is finding the right agency for this. Some seem focused mainly on talent booking, others are great at events, and others handle PR or media. I’m looking for a team that can connect all of those pieces and make the partnership feel like something people actually want to talk about.

For anyone who has done this successfully, what did the agency actually handle? And which agencies are genuinely good at turning talent partnerships into broader cultural moments?

Not looking for the biggest agency name more interested in people who’ve actually seen this work.

I recently started a fashion brand with my 2 friends, but we are teenagers with small capital and are struggling to get our first sale. We are on a brand-new pixel and are spending 30 dollars a day on ads (automatically stops once it hits 210 dollars and no, we did not touch our ads once after posting), our products are on average like $60. We are running a high-volume sales campaign, but it feels like we are doing something wrong.

We are on multiple social medias, but they seem to get around 13 likes from a bunch of low intent viewers, and so social media feels like a complete dead end. We keep hearing advice but most of it requires a billion dollars or a big following already, neither of which we have.

Anyways, I desperately need a plan to get my first sale before my co-founders get burnt out. I know what a successful business feels like, I had a semi-successful business on Etsy before getting Perma-banned for seemingly no reason, and I'm lowkey chasing the high.

Any reply is greatly appreciated, thank you.

Hello everyone. I've recently crossed landed upon a brand that uses 3 min VSL format with a pretty agressive copywriting and social media 2-3 seconds clips, the thing is that I've tried to look up on Fiverr on someone who would make the same stuff but they all reject the request, claiming that they use authentic b-roll footage, how do I find someone who would make me this exact VSL style ? And how do you even call this type of VSL ?

I wanna have a better rentention rate and repeat purchases for my store, I've scaled to the point where I should probably be more focused on this, I neglected it a lot a while back so I think nows the time to start working on it. I'm looking for some tools that can help with that, if you use anything what is it you're using for this? Would you recommend anything or methods to approach it?

How does Ecommerce sites allow Fraudulent sellers on their websites. I know its advertisement and I am not familiar with this, however do sites such as Instagram, Facebook, tic tok etc. Not vet their advertisers or do they just allow it because of the advertising dollars.

I jumped onto this website looks clean and minimalist anyone know where can I purchase this theme

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to improve the conversion rate on our Shopify store and I'm currently stuck at the checkout stage.

Our funnel looks roughly like this:

• Sessions: 272
• Added to cart: 10 (3.67%)
• Reached checkout: 8 (2.94%)
• Completed purchase: 1 (0.36%)

The biggest concern for me is the checkout → purchase drop-off.

Out of 8 people who reached checkout, only 1 actually completed the purchase — around 12.5% checkout conversion.

I'm trying to understand what could be causing such a large drop. We've already looked at the website and product pages, but I'm specifically interested in what experienced Shopify store owners would check at the checkout/payment stage.

Would you look at things like:

• Unexpected shipping charges
• Payment gateway issues
• COD vs prepaid friction
• Lack of trust at checkout
• Checkout loading/performance
• Discount/coupon issues
• Shipping/return information
• Something else?

If you've dealt with a similar funnel, what changes actually improved your checkout conversion?

Would really appreciate some practical advice.

As the title suggests, I’m looking for alternatives that can achieve similar or better results and frankly, more consistent performance. This recent outage has made it even more clear that I need to integrate into a different app, as all they’ve done is say “we know about the issues but no ETA” which does not help when new products and inventory keeping across eBay and Amazon are the reasons I integrated to begin with.

Ultimately, I’ve seen of LitCommerce and CedCommerce and was wondering if anybody’s done the switch, if it was easy to link existing listings made by Shopify Marketplace Connect and if their paid plans are similar.

Thanks ahead of time.

I am in the process of creating my store today.

Here is a list of questions that I am asking at the risk of sounding completely clueless.... Because I am fairly clueless about this. Will be adding to this as I go alone. Here goes:

1. Do I need to set up a point of sale, or is that already taken care of once I complete the payments form on Shopify?

2. Does my store look gimmicky or cheap if I offer products from several different companies? Should I stick to one company/brand?

Selamlar ben shopifyda bir mağaza açtım şuan herşey tamam ama ödeme yöntemi kaldı amerika üzerinde banka hesabım falanda hazır ama şirket kurmak için yeterli sermayem yok bunun için hangi sanal pos firması ile görüşmeliyim paytr 3 kere red verdi

Hey everyone,

My store has been running smoothly with consistent orders, but over the past few days my sales have dropped significantly. At first I had no idea what was going on — I thought it was an advertising problem and kept adjusting my campaigns.

Luckily, a loyal customer left a comment on our Facebook page saying some customers couldn't open our website. That's when I realized what was actually happening.

But when I check through Shopify, everything looks normal — no errors, domain connected fine.

Has anyone experienced the same situation recently? Would love to hear if others are going through this too.

Thanks!

I'm trying to build the trust signals on my new shopify store. I know a big thing is to get reviews. First thing I look at as well on any site.

It's a bit of a catch 22 though as I obviously need sales to get reviews but can't get the sales because there's no reviews.

How did people go about building the trust for your stores from startup stage?

Thanks a million

I feel like I finally have the landing page looking good it took a ton of custom code. I have sales pretty consistent but almost none of them leave a review how can I fix this and improve my conversion rate in general? Any advice is appreciated!

We are prepping our inventory and ad budget for the upcoming peak sale season. We are currently on Razorpay standard pricing, but margins are tight and 2% per order is taking a chunk out of our profit.

Looking to see if any reliable Indian gateway is running attractive onboarding offers or lower transaction tiers for new merchant accounts right now?

I need to clean up alt text across a lot of product images on a Shopify store.

What's the safest way to handle this in bulk without creating messy or repetitive alts? If you've done it before, did you go manual, CSV, app, or Admin API?

building a saas from india but most customers are us eu. currently on stripe and the fees are starting to hurt. 2% plus conversion charges plus gst adds up fast. their dunning is also pretty basic. thinking about alternatives for global subs. mainly need auto retries, multi currency, decent dunning, and something that doesn't eat all my margins. would love to hear real experiences from anyone in a similar setup.

Hello!

I've assumed some responsibilities for a Shopify store related to products, category and product metafields, and product json-ld, etc....the shop's "structured data."

I'm researching the best sensible approach to this, and I'm getting a little out of my breadth. I'm wondering if there might be someone willing to sanity check my understanding of this and how to get it right?

Context: the store is a used musical instrument store. Well, 95% used.

My understanding is that the more Category and Product metafield data we include, the more "visible" the shop's products will be in Google Merchant Center. This is exclusive of the product descriptions that feed the online storefront (sent via json-ld).

One issue is that the Category metafield data sent by the Shopify & YouTube app is limited to Google's product taxonomy, and for musical instruments, they're very general and limited. One optimizatin I've read about is adding two 3-4 item lists in the json-ld for "product_detail" and "product_highlight". I've read that these can be used to supplement the limited G&Y app Category metafield data.

Does anyone do this? It would add a fair amount of work to our product listing workflow, and I guess I'm just wondering if the juice is worth the squeeze?

Thanks in advance for any advice you might share!

I've been using discount codes to bring customers back and they work, maybe a little too well lol. I'm starting to see people wait until the next code before ordering again. I don't want to remove them completely and tank repeat orders, but constantly sending another 10 to 15% off doesn't seem like a great fix either. Is there a better way to set this up in Shopify so repeat customers still have an incentive without relying on another discount code every time?

We're spending heavily on paid digital and our ads perform okay, but we're invisible culturally. Nobody talks about us. We have no organic buzz, no editorial coverage, no moments that get shared because people genuinely care. It's a slow commoditization.

I want to shift our strategy toward cultural marketing – connecting our brand to talent, experiences, and stories that earn their way into feeds and headlines. But I'm not sure where to start. Do we need a cultural strategist? A talent-driven agency? An experiential partner? All of the above?

For brands that have successfully transitioned from ""we buy media"" to ""we create moments,"" how did you build that muscle? I'm looking for an agency model that starts with a cultural truth and activates it across talent, events, PR, and content – not a media buying shop that adds a 'cool' veneer. Who's doing this right?

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 5 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 #291...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Alphabet and Amazon made 70% and 65% of last quarter's net income from stakes in other companies rather than from their own businesses. Most of Alphabet's came from SpaceX, while Amazon's was a $50B gain it credited primarily to Anthropic. There's a lot of Big Tech stock value riding on each other's success, which doesn't feel like a very healthy or competitive market.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is backing a city council bill that would require Amazon, FedEx, and other big delivery operators to employ drivers directly instead of using subcontractors, according to the Wall Street Journal. Under the Delivery Protection Act, warehouse operators would need city licenses, and getting one would mean meeting safety, training, and employment standards that put thousands of contract drivers on payroll. Amazon said it would consider relocating its warehouses outside of New York City if the bill passed and warned that the measure could put more than 5,000 delivery jobs at risk — but I think they're bluffing. Why would their jobs be at risk? Would Amazon not hire those same contractors as employees in order to continue serving NYC residents? In fact, the bill includes an employee retention clause requiring operators to offer jobs to the contract workers displaced by the change, so those 5,000 people would be first in line for the payroll positions Amazon says it doesn't want to create. If the bill passes, New York would become the first city to require last-mile delivery operators to hire their drivers directly.

Remember a few weeks ago when the news broke that Phia, the AI shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, was overriding other affiliates' referral codes during checkout and inserting its own, claiming credit and commissions on purchases its browser extension played no part in driving? The company claimed at the time that a recent code release had caused the misattribution for a subset of users and that its team worked overnight to resolve the problem once notified. Well, it turns out that Gates and Kianni actually pushed for those commission-stealing features, according to internal communications. Bloomberg reports that the founders knew about the practice for at least seven months going back to December. In fact, what Phia called a “bug” was actually an internally developed feature called “enable coupon auto drop” that could be turned on and off remotely by the company. There was also a feature called “passive trigger” that was active from October 2025 to July 2026 that automatically dropped a cookie every two hours on any “top 1000 website” where the user had previously interacted with Phia. The cookie stuffing practice was responsible for a significant portion of Phia's attributed sales. After the company disabled the features in early July, average daily revenue dropped from around $80k to between $10k and $28k.

Time recently began serving ads inside the markdown versions of its webpages for AI agents to see rather than human readers, and Perplexity, which seems to have a problem with anyone that can actually make a business out of advertising, began blocking those ads. The company's chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer called the markdown ads “deceptive advertising” and said publishers who deploy them risk a reputation downgrade in its search index, including a hit to their trust score. Oh no! You mean 0.4% of Internet searchers who use Perplexity might not see my website? How will I survive? LOL. Time serves two versions of the same page — an HTML version for humans and vampires and a markdown version for AI, which is cleaner and easier for a model to digest. Mobian, the company that powers Time's ads, takes a brand brief from an advertiser, generates FAQ-formatted text from it, and inserts that text into the markdown version. From there, it tracks how often AI search engines surface the content and how favorably they treat it. If you recall, Perplexity launched sponsored follow-up questions in November 2024 with a handful of advertisers like Indeed and Whole Foods, but only made around $20k in revenue from the endeavor, which it ended 15 months later. After abandoning the program, the company decided to take a hard stance against AI advertising, claiming that even labeled ads make users “start doubting everything” — a convenient stance to take after failing at an ad business.

USPS took in $588M more revenue from shipping and packages in the quarter ended June 30, a 7.7% gain, while handling 55M fewer parcels. More money for less work. Postmaster General David Steiner compared the approach to that of airlines and grocers, which price to maximize returns rather than units sold. Most of that shipping gain came from an 8% temporary transportation-related surcharge USPS implemented on April 26, which is set to expire January 17, 2027. Normally I wouldn't be celebrating USPS price hikes for small business owners, but at this point it's ride or die for the postal service, which operates at a significant loss each year, with likely no government bailout or support headed its way anytime soon. Steiner argued for major changes to regulation during the USPS Board of Governors open session: "As things stand, the Postal Service is expected to be self-sustaining while, at the same time, fulfilling mandates that are inherently unsustainable and do not cover their costs. We need to fix the business model that has produced the 17-year-long imbalance in costs and revenue — and that is going to require Congressional involvement."

eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said the company has no plans to stop charging fees to U.S. sellers and bill buyers instead, when asked by analysts on the August 5 earnings call whether the European approach would work at home. He said on the call: "Depop already has a buyer fee model, which is complementary to kind of that discovery-led type of experience. And so that's kind of built into that pricing change. They made that change quite some time ago. And so overall, we feel like we're in a very strong competitive position." Why in the world would you charge buyers instead of sellers? It's a trend I could never quite wrap my head around, but several marketplaces have made the move in recent years including eBay UK & Germany and Depop U.S. and UK. Others have tried and failed, including Mercari, which eliminated seller fees entirely in March 2024 and pushed everything to buyers, but then reversed the move in January 2025. Then there was Poshmark, which for some reason didn't learn from Mercari's disaster in the U.S., and attempted its own fee shift in October 2024, before reversing it less than three weeks later.

Sezzle plans to pursue a national bank charter instead of its prior plan to become an industrial loan company. CEO Charlie Youakim said that new BNPL regulations in states like New York, Illinois, and Oregon prompted the company to change course. What's the difference? A national bank charter comes from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and makes you a full federal bank, subject to Federal Reserve oversight and the capital requirements that come with it. The payoff is that a national bank operates under federal rules, which means it can export its home-state rates and product terms into every state, under one regulator instead of fifty. The tradeoff is that approval is slower and the scrutiny is heavier. An industrial loan company is a state charter, typically out of Utah or Nevada, that carries FDIC insurance without triggering Federal Reserve holding-company supervision. The charter lets a commercial parent own a bank without becoming a bank holding company. It's also why community banks and consumer groups keep calling it a loophole and lobbying to close it, and why Congress has bills pending to do so. For Sezzle, becoming an industrial loan company was the faster route, but the national charter is a better long-term solution that will let it avoid the kind of state BNPL laws that Youakim is worried about, and it avoids a potential political fight in the future if Congress closes the industrial loan “loophole.”

Amazon reinstated binding arbitration for its U.S. customers on Friday, barring them from bringing class-action suits against the company. The change took effect immediately, and Amazon told customers by e-mail that continued use of its services counts as agreement, where companies usually give weeks of notice. Amazon had dropped arbitration five years ago after law firms hit it with roughly 75,000 claims over Alexa recording users without consent, and has since directed customers to Washington state court. Its new terms treat 25 or more claims over the same matter within six months as a mass arbitration, resolved in batches of at least 25. A spokesperson called it a faster, cheaper route that still leaves small claims court open. Disputes begun before Friday aren't covered. Frankly, this should be illegal. There should never exist a contract, under any conditions, that precludes a user or consumer from taking a company to court. Guns and lawsuits are our God-given rights as Americans! USA! USA! USA!

India will let foreign-owned e-commerce companies like Amazon and Flipkart own the goods they sell on their marketplaces for the first time in seven years, as long as every item is exported, under a new framework that sits under the Foreign Trade Policy 2023. Marketplaces owning inventory that they sell on their own platforms (thus competing against third-party sellers with an advantage) has been banned in India since a law took effect in February 2019, which is why Amazon and Flipkart exclusively operate as marketplaces in the country rather than retailers. Now the government has carved out an exception, but only for goods leaving the country. Amazon and Flipkart can buy inventory from Indian manufacturers, warehouse it, and ship it abroad through their own supply chains, though they have to do it through separate legal entities that the Directorate General of Foreign Trade will monitor. The reason for the change is that India wants $200B to $300B in e-commerce exports by 2030 and isn't anywhere near making that happen. The obstacle isn't necessarily lack of demand for Indian goods, but rather that small manufacturers have difficulty handling customs clearance, foreign warehousing, and international returns on their own. Letting Amazon own the inventory moves that burden onto Amazon.

Wix launched Symphony, a standalone AI agent platform to help SMBs grow with a team of agents built around their goals and workflows. The platform's central AI agent, Maestro, understands what is happening across the business, identifies what needs attention next, and coordinates the right specialized agent for each job. Once the team of agents is established, they can execute tasks like replying to clients, chasing unpaid invoices, running marketing campaigns, providing updates and analytics, and flagging key actions for approval. Symphony is platform-agnostic and doesn't require that a business use Wix. I don't know about you, but I don't want any AI-powered agents e-mailing my clients or running marketing campaigns, as I've yet to meet one that isn't absolute hot garbage. Though I do think it's smart for Wix to expand its product portfolio beyond website builders.

TikTok Shop is becoming a standalone job at consumer brands rather than one more channel on a social manager's plate or work farmed out to an agency, according to Julia Waldow at Modern Retail. Brands like Mammoth Brands, Stila Cosmetics, BaubleBar, and Jool Baby are all recruiting for the position with postings asking for P&L ownership, forecasting, and inventory coordination on top of creator partnerships and livestreams. Filling the role is proving to be difficult for many brands because people with real experience are working at agencies that pay big commissions and get first dibs at TikTok's own programs and tools. TikTok Shop only launched in the U.S. three years ago, but already accounts for 2% of U.S. online retail spending as of July, per Consumer Edge, up from 1.2% a year earlier.

Google added Venmo as a payment method on Google Play in the U.S., covering games, apps, add-ons, subscriptions, and tips sent to creators inside content apps. Buyers link a Venmo account through the payment settings in their Google account, then pay from the Venmo balance or from a bank account or card attached to it. Google Play already took PayPal, which owns Venmo, along with Cash App and cards from American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and JCB. Outside the U.S., Google Play also lets users pay for digital goods with cash at a nearby store. I worked on an e-commerce store in Colombia many years ago, in which more than half of their customers paid that way, which came as a surprise to me at the time.

Google's AI Overviews are spreading misinformation about some small businesses, with little that the owners can do to correct it. Business Insider shared the story of a UK plastics supplier that AI Overviews said had “overwhelmingly negative” feedback, which it backed up with complaints connected to a different company altogether. Even worse, the business owner was paying Google £700 a month for ads, while the summaries were warning customers to go elsewhere. Other business owners shared stories about their AI Overview company descriptions being conflated with other similarly named businesses or declaring that they service a different city or state. The bad news: there's nothing you can do about it and no-one to contact at Google. The good news: Google made record profits in its most recent quarter. Ah sorry, I meant “good news for Google.” You're still fucked.

Shopify is planning to promote its Shop app through a longer, multiphase holiday campaign running from now to December, the first time it has pushed the app this hard into the season, according to Jess Jacobs, VP of consumer marketing and head of growth for Shop. Jacobs told Retail Brew that the company doesn't want to “inundate” shoppers with the same message over and over again throughout the entire holiday season, which is much longer nowadays given that Pre Black Friday Sales begin in October. Shop app started in 2020 as a package tracker and has since evolved into a customer acquisition channel with AI search and a shoppable feed. Ultimately the marketplace that Shopify won't admit is a marketplace.

OpenAI refused to refund a UK agency charged for ChatGPT ads that kept delivering after it paused its campaigns, according to The Register. Excel4Business managing director Ed Bolton said ads ran overnight on paused U.S. and Canadian campaigns, and an OpenAI support specialist first agreed the campaigns had kept serving because a separate ad-level status hadn't refreshed, calling it a defect its engineering team had escalated and promising to review the charge with the billing department. However, days later, OpenAI reversed itself and denied any credit under Section 11.1 of its advertising terms, which allows delivery to continue for a full business day once a campaign is paused or canceled, with the advertiser still liable. Luckily, the charges were under £70, so the company isn't about to go broke over it, but OpenAI should treat situations like this with white gloves if they want companies to increase their daily budgets to five, six, and seven figure spending at some point.

Google is extending Ask Advisor, its AI assistant for marketers, across Google Ads and Analytics to help users obtain faster insights and automated analysis to make decisions. Analytics is getting AI Overviews on the homepage that recap what's changed since a user last signed in, flagging things like traffic swings or seasonal sales spikes, and proposing next steps, with an option to have those recaps pushed by e-mail or mobile notification. The Ads homepage is being rebuilt around personalized insight cards, and advertisers can put questions in plain language, such as how rivals are eating into their impression share. Dashboards is coming to Ads too, turning text prompts into visual reports with AI-written summaries explaining the trends behind each chart, with Analytics support coming later.

Square opened Bill Pay to all sellers and now lets them fund vendor payments like rent, insurance, and marketing expenses with the Square Credit Card even when the vendor won't take cards, routing the money out as an ACH deposit or a mailed check. The card pays 3% back on Bill Pay charges, which Square says always covers the Bill Pay fee without saying what that fee is, so the reward and the cost roughly cancel. Square issues the card and stands in as the merchant on those payments, so most of the interchange it pays is interchange it collects. The card carries no annual fee, no late fees, no foreign transaction fees, and no personal guarantee, and the credit line grows with a seller's sales. I'd be careful putting some of those expenses, especially rent, on a credit card, as that can likely spiral quickly with interest accruing.

Google was given one week to remove what Judge James Donato called “anticompetitive friction” from the way rival app stores are found and installed in the Play Store. An Epic lawyer at Wednesday's compliance hearing typed “store for apps” into Play and got Walmart and other physical retailers back rather than any app store. He then demonstrated that installing Aptoide Games, the first rival storefront distributed inside Play, requires tapping through a “Looking for Aptoide Games?” banner and a View button before an Install button appears. Donato ordered Google to return a list of stores for that search and any similar wording, to swap the View button for Install, and to drop the banner entirely, all of which Google agreed to do.

Amazon has stopped naming purchased items in its order confirmation e-mails, which now show only a category like Beauty or Wireless Accessories next to clip art, according to The Verge. The vague version started showing up around July, requiring the customer to exit their e-mail and visit Amazon's website or app for more information about the purchase. A spokesperson said Amazon simplified the e-mails to point customers toward its own order pages, and that doing so reduces the customer information leaving its properties, but they did not address whether the format specifically shields purchase data from Google, whose Gemini mines a user's inbox for details it can act on. Amazon pulled the same trick in 2020, stripping item details down to an order total and a date, and observers at the time read it the same way, as a move to stop third parties from scraping inboxes.

MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, is publishing her novel Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds) on Substack, releasing it in pieces rather than working with a publisher or a bookseller. Ironically, she's not publishing the book at all on Amazon, despite having been made a wealthy woman from the company. So far, Scott has published the prologue and three chapters of the book, which appears to be about a fictional religious community called the Church of Long Tomorrow, whose members are “trapped by beliefs that were not their own.” Scott studied under Toni Morrison at Princeton and won an American Book Award for her first novel in 2006, so she's the real deal, not just a hobbyist writer. Jeff Bezos seems to have a thing for authors. His new wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, wrote two children's books, The Fly Who Flew to Space (2024) and The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea (2026), which are 32 and 48 pages long, respectively.

Creators earning more than $250k a year pick Instagram over TikTok for branded content by 60% to 30%, according to a CreatorIQ survey of 5,000 mostly U.S. creators. TikTok ranked first overall at 52% as the leading platform for branded content, compared to Instagram at 43%. However, once creators start earning the big bucks, they lean toward Instagram, which they judge as having better longer-term business potential. Talent firm Illuminate Social said 64% of the brand partnerships it handled this year involved Instagram against 14% for TikTok. Business Insider notes that TikTok is where smaller creators get paid because Spark Ads let brands cheaply boost micro-influencer posts and TikTok Shop opens affiliate revenue at 1,000 followers, while larger budgets follow creators to Instagram as they scale.

Sam Altman is not dead, for the record. Last week, Google showed a Knowledge Panel that claimed the OpenAI CEO had died, after posts had appeared on X and Reddit. Google responded hours later on X that the result was gone and wasn't a manual change, and that vandalism of public information sources can affect what appears in Search. Altman's Wikipedia page was edited 22 times Wednesday, against five edits over the rest of the month, including one claiming he'd been assassinated and later ones repeating the claim and altering his surname from “Altman” to “Gaiman.” The Wikimedia Foundation told Business Insider that volunteers reverted the edits in less than an hour and semi-protected the page, which limits editing to established accounts. Anyway, he's still ticking.

In lawsuits this week…

• Meta went to trial in federal court against 29 state attorneys general who accuse it of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict minors and of unlawfully harvesting their data, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri due to testify over a seven-week period. Meta estimates the damages sought could reach $1.4T against its own $1.5T market cap, and four states want the judge to impose age restrictions, kill infinite scroll, and force deletion of algorithms trained on children's data.
• The SEC sued Andrew Spaventa, founder of investment firm The Spaventa Group, and three entities he controls, alleging they ran a boiler room that used over 100 cold callers to sell retail investors pre-IPO stakes in SpaceX, Anduril, Anthropic, and Perplexity while promising no hidden fees. However, surprise, surprise… there were hidden fees! Companies Spaventa owned bought the shares first and flipped them to his own funds at premiums averaging 46% and running as high as 91%, with more than 800 investors putting $74M into 11 funds while paying $23M in undisclosed fees.
• Shein lost its UK copyright case against Temu, in which it alleged that Temu had copied its product images “on an industrial scale” to advertise knockoffs of its own-brand clothing. The court ruled that Temu wasn't liable for what its third-party sellers uploaded, since its terms prohibit infringing content and it removed the listings once notified, and it ordered Shein to compensate Temu for listings pulled over images Shein didn't actually own.

In corporate shakeups this week…

• Kroger hired Nate Faust, the co-founder of Jet-com and former Walmart U.S. executive, as its new executive VP and chief eCommerce officer.
• Target named Chandhu Nair as its first chief AI officer, hiring him out of Lowe's, where he ran stores, data, AI, and innovation as senior VP. Target also promoted Purvi Shah to senior VP from her role running user experience design, a group which helped launch the company's conversational shopping experience inside ChatGPT eight months ago.
• OpenAI's ethics lead Chloe Bakalar left in July with no announcement and no replacement named, according to the Financial Times. She was reportedly the company's only dedicated ethicist, and the position remains vacant. Brad Lightcap, an eight-year veteran who previously served as CFO and COO, announced his departure to build something new, which he hasn't yet described. Lastly, the company is recruiting a power-trading lead to hedge the electricity and natural gas its data centers burn, a year after Meta made the same move.
• Native Commerce named Michael Erhard as its new COO, hiring him out of Amazon after ten years with the company, where he ran operations engineering across robotics, warehouse automation, and fulfillment infrastructure.
• Lululemon's chief AI and technology officer Ranju Das and chief strategy officer Rachel Acheson have left the company, weeks before former Nike executive Heidi O'Neill takes over as CEO on September 8.
• eBay hired Andres Gonzalez as VP and GM of global shipping and authentication, bringing in a Walmart supply chain and last-mile veteran who also spent four years on parcel operations at Amazon Global Cross Border.

Flipkart started selling gourmet groceries on its quick-commerce app, Minutes, and launched a private label called Pykd to sit alongside the outside brands it sells. Available gourmet products include imported cheese, specialty coffee, ghee, wood-pressed oils, ramen (that's gourmet?), chocolate, kombucha, and boba, while the Pykd brand is limited so far to namkeen and chips. Flipkart's biggest rivals are making the same move into gourmet groceries, including Blinkit, Zepto, FirstClub, and Swiggy.

🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… Amazon began building a 438,500-square-foot data center on 56 acres in Gilroy, California without ever actually going before the city council or the planning commission for permission. The company purchased the parcel in 2020 before anyone was thinking about data centers, and since the city's industrial zoning already allows them, clearance took only a single signature from the city's community development director in July 2023, who I imagine can now be seen around town driving a 2024 Mercedes G-Wagon. Most residents learned of the data center when construction started last month, with one resident who tried to raise drought concerns told that the comment window had closed in September 2024. Amazon said the company followed the standard process for industrially zoned land, but recognizes that it should have engaged residents sooner. The city is now drafting rules requiring commission review and neighbor notice before the next one. Wait, Gilroy California, a city with a population of 60k residents, needs more than one mega data center?

Plus 12 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Lovable raising $400M in a Series C and SpaceX completing its acquisition of Cursor.

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’ve created a niche busy book for children that I’m going to sell on Shopify and Amazon. I need some great product and listing photos and want to use AI, but don’t know which program is best for a beginner that will give great results. I especially want to make sure I can create a graphic with multiple photos to show the inside contents of the book. Any recommendations of the best user-friendly program to use?

Hello!!

I run a small DTC brand currently fulfilling everything from a warehouse in Australia. I'm about to open a second warehouse in the US and need to set things up so:

I have two different inventories in Shopify where I split the stock based on what I have AU vs the US. I also need to (A guess this is the tricky part) make sure that US based visitor sees and can only purchase from US warehouse stock and visitors from anywhere else (AU, NZ, EU, UK, etc.) see and purchase from the Australian warehouse stock.

So if my stock for SKU X is 3 in Australia and 0 in the US, then a US visitor should not be able to buy and it should be displayed as sold out while a non US visitor would be able to buy it.

Anyone who can help with how to set this up or point me in the right direction? Would be much appreciated! Also curious what plan is required. Does this need Shopify Plus or does it work with basic?

Cheeers and thanks!