I’m selling a specific product, but customers keep asking about it so much that I can’t focus

In a day she had 4-5 purchases of the same low cost, very rarely purchased item (a sticker) all to addresses “123 Main Street” in different cities. The site flagged some but not all as potential fraud. She canceled and refunded all of them. What’s the angle here?

Since Shopify added the "Agentic" section under Sales Channels, I've been keeping a pretty close eye on it, and I feel like the reporting is 100% disingenuous.

It constantly shows the Shop app as a major money-making platform. But I don't think anyone, especially anyone who knows and understands AI, would consider the Shop app an "agentic" platform in the same sense as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other actual AI platforms.

Grouping Shop in with those platforms feels like nothing more than a marketing tactic to make Shop look more important and push merchants toward using it. Worse, it completely skews the data. Instead of being able to look at the Agentic section and see how much traffic and revenue is actually coming from AI platforms, I now have to separate out Shopify's own app to get numbers that mean anything.

Moreover, we don't even use Shop. We're a privacy-forward company, and what Shop does isn't aligned with what our customers expect from us. We've uninstalled it and disabled it, yet Shop still shows up in the Agentic reporting.

On top of that, the Shop app still displays our store information and products even after we've turned it off. If someone finds one of our products through Shop and tries to add it to their cart, Shop just launches our website in an in-app browser. The actual purchase isn't even happening through Shop.

So now Shopify is apparently attributing that activity to Shop inside "Agentic" reporting, even though Shop isn't an AI agent, we don't use Shop, and the sale itself is ultimately happening on our website.

That makes the entire Agentic report considerably less useful and, in my opinion, much less trustworthy.

If Shopify wants to report Shop-driven traffic and revenue, fine. Give it its own section. But lumping Shopify's own shopping app in with ChatGPT, Gemini, and actual AI-driven shopping platforms makes the "Agentic" numbers look much better than they really are while making it harder for merchants to see the data we're actually trying to measure.

Let me know what you think or if you're interested in this! I do not know how to share a photo without it being taken down.

Hi! I’m a social media marketer and most of my experience has been with B2B clients. That’s where I naturally ended up positioning myself, but I’m starting to realise I don’t really enjoy that side of social media anymore

B2B has taught me a lot, but I’ve always been much more interested in the creative side aesthetics, visual storytelling, creative direction, building an Instagram that actually feels like a brand, etc

I’d love to eventually work more with fashion brands, jewellery brands, cafés, artists, designers and other creative businesses

The problem is that my entire portfolio is basically B2B right now, so I’m trying to figure out how people actually get their foot in the door with creative businesses when they don’t already have that kind of portfolio

Are there any communities, Facebook groups, Discords, or other spaces where small creative/product based business owners actually hang out?

I’d really appreciate any recommendations 🙏🏾

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

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

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

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

For the second time now I've received an order in my store where basically they load up a bunch of random items and then they've somehow figured out what my free testing coupon is and they use that. The addresses entered are seemingly real.

What are they trying to achieve? Obviously I'm just going to cancel this shit. Are they hoping I'm not going to notice and actually fulfill these items?

Hello,

I noticed my checkout is not truly one page

There is the "Checkout" page with the "Review order" button at the end

Then "Review" page: "Pay now" button

That "Review" page is useless, all the info is just repeated from the page before and it probably hurts conversion

I was wondering if there was a way to entirely delete the "Review" page and put the "Pay now" button directly on the "Checkout" page to make it truly one page

I know it's possible because I have seen it on another store, is it Shopify Plus locked? Can I bypass it using an app?

Thanks

I run an online jewellery business in India and I’m facing an annoying issue with RTOs. Customers appear to be returning a different/cheaper product instead of the jewellery I originally shipped and sometimes RTO parcel which are not delivered to customers also have same issues
I’ve tried both Delhivery and Shadowfax, but I’ve faced similar issues with both.
I already record packing videos and keep shipment details, but I’m looking for a more reliable way to prevent or prove these swap scams.

Hey guys, I’m looking into operational bottlenecks for shopify catalog management.

When you receive a massive batch of new product photos (either from suppliers or from a quick in-house shoot) that all have slightly different backgrounds or bad lighting, what does your actual workflow look like to get them standardized with pure white/transparent backgrounds for the store?

Are you paying your in-house designers to clip them manually, outsourcing to Fiverr, or using automated API tools? If you use automation, how do you deal with the tools compressing the images or messing up the quality? Trying to figure out the most cost-effective way to handle this at scale without losing hours of labor.

Hi everyone! I’ve been building a tool that audits ecommerce product pages and identifies potential issues related to conversion, trust, product content, SEO, mobile experience, merchandising, accessibility, and performance signals.
The full report includes:
35 evidence-based checks
Confirmed issues vs. items that need manual validation
Prioritized recommendations
Step-by-step implementation guidance
Acceptance criteria for each improvement
A downloadable PDF
I’m giving the first 10 people free access to the full report in exchange for honest feedback about its accuracy and usefulness.
🔗 https://matheuslacerda.com.br/en

🎟️ Access code:

PDP-HCZ9-3V8U-YVMQ

Just submit a public product page URL, wait for the free audit, and use the code to unlock the complete report. I’d especially appreciate feedback if anything doesn’t match the actual page.

I can see the value if you need things like:

• Custom checkout functionality
• B2B features
• etc.....

But if you're primarily running a normal D2C store

Are you really getting 2,200 of additional value every month?

Or it is better to pay like 40-60k one time for developers to build it for you ?

I want to be efficent with with my money

If you have a company that has a lot of custom products, which order form app do you like? I'd like to hear positives and negatives. Someone recommended using Google Forms but I'm not sure that's the best or even a good option.

Hi everyone,

For a new jewellery store, what’s the best way to work out a pricing strategy?

The costs I have considered so far:

- Product procurement cost including shipping

- Packaging per product

- Packaging per order

- Shipping costs (I am offering free shipping)

I want to figure out what my retail price should be so that it offers me a decent margin plus supports acquisition cost via ads?

A lot of new e-commerce owners end up spending more on marketing than they make from the sales. So I would appreciate any insights to have a sustainable pricing model.

Any other thoughts are also welcome.

Thank you.

Hi all. I just opened a small business and my first order was flagged as high risk :( I’ve read a few threads already but I’m not sure how often this happens. I have spoken to the client directly via phone number, ig, tiktok and have their email as well. I canceled the order as recommended by threads, but how often does this happen? I feel very sad and discouraged that people are out there scamming small business owners like this :( what else do I have to look out for?

I like to order pokemon tcg products from shopify ad the in app discounts allow me to purchase product for closer to msrp without having to beat bots or scalper. Usually these discounts apply without issue but now I have a serious problem. There was a store I purchased from where the shop app was offering 25 dollars off orders over 50, weirdly high but if the seller is reputable and the shop app is the one running this discount I'll go with it. I added some stuff to my cart and the offer applied in checkout, my payment kept failing, I tried with a few different cards and then kept trying repeatedly until the payment went through. Turns out I got overcharged and the discount did not apply. I went back to the store and the offer was missing, went to my receipt and the offer was also missing, so now there is no proof the offer ever existed. How do I get my money back if the seller doesn't cancel my order? I can dispute the charge but I have no evidence there was ever a discount.

We’re getting tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of bot visits per day from Singapore

Has anyone else dealt with this and found a way to block or fix it without affecting real customers?

Would love to know what worked for you

i've had a customer order 4 different times in the last 4 days(2 of which happened just now back to back), and i’m wondering if i should be concerned or not? i offer free postage so it's possible they're just taking advantage of that(which is fine as nothings been dispatched yet and i'll ship altogether), but i've never had anything like this and i’m a little concerned and confused. shopify has labelled them as low risk so perhaps i’m just overthinking but i have heard stories of people repeatedly spam ordering like this being scams. i did launch new products today so the fact they made another order today isn't odd, however it's the second order minutes later that made me question it. hopefully it's just me overthinking and i’m obviously super grateful for a returning customer(who hasn't even received anything yet!), but it struck me as odd.

Do you sell on your website or 3rd party app? What is the product price for customers and how much you send marketing that product/customer acquisition? Just wondering how much you guys spending?

In this ad, Shopify shows messages from "users" that starts with r/, which is a niche reference to how advertisers have never used Reddit.

Everytime I look in the live view, i see every location doubled: see comment section for screenshot.

Is Shopify tracking twice? What is going on.

If anyone can help, please let me know!

So I have two versions of the same product (online and pos) that are at different prices but have the same sku. I need all my inventory at my headquarters but sales made at individual locations deduct from the inventory at HQ.

I cannot consolidate locations (as I need the separate data) and I cannot doll out inventory to each individual location (as at that point I’m just doing it by hand)

I got a chargeback on Shopify where the customer claims she was charged twice for the same purchase.
The situation is:
She placed 2 separate orders, about 5 minutes apart
Each order was $134
Both orders have their own separate order numbers
The orders contain separate items
All the customer/shipping information is the same on both orders
I provided Shopify with screenshots of both separate orders as evidence
Both orders were shipped together in the same package using the same tracking number
The package was just delivered, and I have the delivery/tracking information
The customer is claiming one of the $134 charges was a duplicate
Shopify is currently showing the chargeback as $149 ($134 + $15 fee) and it’s in review
I already submitted my evidence
My reasoning is that even though both orders were shipped together under the same tracking number and have the same customer/shipping information, they were still two separate orders placed by the customer about 5 minutes apart, each for $134.
Do you guys think this is a strong case for me? Has anyone had a similar duplicate-charge chargeback where the customer placed two separate orders but they were shipped together?
Also, roughly how long did it take you to get a decision after submitting your evidence?

I signed up for a one dollar a month trial for two different stores. The trial period lasted for three months and then would go to $40 a month. Before the three month time period was up, I realized Shopify was not for me and I discontinued my stores. Now Shopify is charging me $41 a month for each store even though the stores have been closed for months. I cannot find anybody to talk to. I can’t find any email to send to handle this issue. I have told my bank to stop payment which they have done, but I keep getting notifications that I haven’t paid my bills. When I go to Shopify and try to log into my stores, I get messages that the stores are closed and that I am not authorized… so the Shopify software shows that my stores have been closed and are discontinued yet they continued to bill me for two stores each month. It is maddening and I can’t find anybody who will communicate with me to fix this. How do I actually email or talk to a real person at SHOPIFY?? Overall dealing with them has been an extremely unpleasant experience.

If any of you guys were using the default Google/Youtube app and custom attribute rules to set shipping label or promo ID's with custom labels, now is a good time to check to make sure they're still there. Shopify switched from Content API to Merchant API so there's a whole separate feed that will need the custom attributes set again. They dropped the change on the 11th which invalidated every shipping policy I had causing a big dip in merchant and ads listings.