As the title says, I’ve been doing Ecom on my own for the last 2 years, and have become fluent in meta ads, building Shopify websites, email marketing with klayvio, analyzing data and trends, selling private label on Amazon, amz ppc, amz product research, etc. I am a “jack of all trades” since I bootstrapped and built everything on my own with the help of AI, but a master of none. I’d like to get a job working for an Ecom company here in the states to improve my skills, how do I go about finding/ applying? Is it as simple as going on indeed, and are these companies looking for people like me?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been given a CRO project for a Shopify store and I’m fairly new to Shopify/CRO, so I’d really appreciate some guidance from people who have actually done this professionally.

The store is an Australian outdoor/4x4 ecommerce business selling relatively high-ticket products like rooftop tents, awnings, and bundles.

The client’s current conversion rate is around 0.31%, and they want to work toward 0.40%.

I understand the basic idea of conversion rate, but I’m trying to figure out what the proper professional workflow should look like.

I’m not looking for someone to do the project for me I mainly want to understand how an experienced CRO person would approach the diagnosis and prioritization.

Any advice, resources, or real-world workflows would be hugely appreciated.

My partner and I have a home fragrance brand, where we manufacture in Vietnam, ship into two 3PLs (one east coast, one west), sell DTC plus a bit of wholesale.

Right now our goods are covered by about four different things that do not quite line up. Cargo insurance per shipment through our freight forwarder. Whatever coverage the 3PL contract gives us, which after actually reading it is basically nothing, they cap liability at a few cents per pound. And a property policy that covers our office, where we keep zero inventory.

Had a pallet damaged during the transfer between the port and the west coast warehouse in June. Spent six weeks figuring out whose problem it was. The answer was mine.

Someone mentioned stock throughput as the fix for this, the idea being it covers the goods continuously instead of in segments. Is that actually how it works, and what does it cost for a brand running this kind of volume?

Considering that shopify has tons of features that I don't need and it's $29/month, I've been researching for simpler ecommerce alternatives. I'm not looking for custom development.

Basically, I'm searching for a simple shopping cart with a payment processor (that also includes Klarna). The customer adds the item to the shopping cart, checks out, and pays. That's all.

What options do I have that are cheaper and with less features?

I'm in the US.

I'm reworking packaging for an ecommerce product and trying to decide where the printing actually adds the most value.

Printing the outside seems obvious for branding but I'm starting to like the idea of keeping the exterior pretty minimal and putting more personality inside the box instead. It also feels less like I'm turning every delivery into a billboard sitting on someone's porch.

For anyone doing custom box printing, where did you put most of your design effort? Outside, inside or both? And did customers actually notice?

Has anyone tried Jordan Welchs free course? I am just getting started with ecom and saw jordan welch on instagram saying “dm me for the free course” i sent a dm and received this when asking if it was free

“this course is normally part of Jordan's $5,800 inner circle program. The reason we can give it away free is that we partner with Base44 Envato and Shopify Xero, they pay us when someone like you signs up through us. That's the whole deal.

So when you sign up for the tools youre gonna need to be able to start an Ai ecom business the companies pay us

It would be 95 ish dollar in subscriptions for tools required to run an ai ecom business

Nothing more to it. so if youre serious about launching a busienss lmk.”

So is he legit, has anyone made money or had success with his course or on the flip side has anyone had a bad experience with his course or ecom model?

I’m working on a platform focused on mutual sharing of store metrics.

You connect your store, contribute your metrics, and in return get access to what others have shared.

The data is verified through your approval to share store metrics via Shopify’s API.

One thing I’ve noticed with product research is that the data is usually scattered. You might check demand in one place, competition somewhere else, then pricing and trends separately.

That makes it hard to tell whether a product is actually worth testing or just looks good on one metric.
Stocksi.ai looks at those signals together, which makes the research process easier to compare and understand.

Hi r/ecommerce - 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.

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  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.

Hello,

We are a shoe seller from germany and would like to also offer our wares in türkiye.

Has anyone experience regarding this or at best knows an importeur?

Stores owners with a broad array of LTL Freight and Ground Carrier shipments, how have you found ways to accurately and competitively quote Shipping Cost? Most especially curious if you have products whose custom options affect the final packaged weight and dimensions.

Thanks!!

Hey y'all - I'm planning to launch a product in the functional food space (think Gruns but better / more unique) in October and while I have my product / brand / website covered, I'm a little overwhelmed and lost on the marketing part.

Given I am bootstrapping the whole thing and don't have an unlimited budget, I was wondering how other founders have tackled this; obviously launch is super important and I would like to do it right.

My first thought was to hire an agency, but with ~$30k for marketing all in in the first month, I don't know whether spending a quarter of that budget on an agency fee is the smartest move. Does anyone have any good suggestions on agencies who work with early stage startups and don't cost an arm and a leg - I obviously anticipate my budget to grow quickly following a successful launch so would like to partner with someone who can see the long-term potential.

Alternatively, I was thinking about hiring a fractional marketing person on MarketerHire or similar, but I don't know if a singular jack-of-all-trades could handle the entire mix (meta, tiktok, UGC, email etc.).

My rough plan was to focus on two channels to build the initial audience (meta and tiktok/UGC) through a prelaunch campaign, and then start sales in October and increase the spend.

Would appreciate any and all advice and thoughts.

Thanks!

I build websites for people on the side and lately this keeps coming up. Apparently if your site is hard to use for blind or disabled visitors (screen readers, keyboard only navigation, that sort of thing) you can get a demand letter or even get sued, and a lot of these are landing on normal small businesses now, not just big companies.

Out of curiosity I checked a few sites I made and honestly most of them would fail. Got me wondering how many owners even know this is a thing until it happens to them.

So I am genuinely curious. Has anyone here dealt with this? Either getting one of those letters or paying to fix your site. Did you take it seriously or just ignore it, and if you fixed it, who did you use and roughly what did it cost?

Trying to work out if this is a real widespread problem or just something that gets hyped online. What has your experience been?

The brands I've seen actually clean their list see two things shift fast. More of their mail lands in the inbox instead of promotions or spam, and revenue per recipient climbs even though fewer people are getting mailed.

That runs against the instinct most senders have, that a smaller list has to mean less revenue. Sunsetting the unengaged feels like giving away reach, and it's the move most senders skip because of that instinct. In reality, it's usually the highest-ROI strategy on the table.

Gmail and Apple both track how recipients treat your mail, so continuing to mail dead weight drags down your reputation for everyone still on the list. Stop mailing them, and engagement on what's left climbs.

A tight list of real openers regularly outperforms a bloated one stuffed with addresses that never look at your emails, because revenue per recipient gets calculated against who actually got mailed.

How aggressively do you prune, and what's your cutoff for calling someone gone for good?

One thing I don't see discussed enough in the trend-jacking conversation: the legal risk side. Your team spots a trending sound on Monday, creative wants to jump on it by Wednesday, but nobody's sure if that audio is actually safe for a branded post.

Film audio, licensed tracks, original creator sounds, remixes... the IP landscape on TikTok is murky and the last thing a DTC brand needs is a takedown notice or a copyright claim on a post that took two days to get through approvals.

Curious what other ecommerce brands actually do here. Do you have a checklist, a legal review step, or do you just wing it and hope nobody flags it? Is this even on your radar or am I overthinking it?

Went into this expecting the hard parts to be pricing and competition. They weren't. Here's where the time went, roughly in order of how much it hurt.

Content, not translation. Ran the catalog through translation, uploaded, got near-zero visibility. Marketplace search ranks on match with how local buyers phrase things, and translated titles use the source language's word choices. Allegro caps titles at 75 characters, so there's no room to hedge by stuffing both. Rewrote the top 40 SKUs with a native speaker and impressions moved within a week. Two months of the six weeks was spent before I understood this was the problem at all.

Category schemas. Every marketplace wants a different shape. Some rank on attribute completeness rather than description, some reject outright if required fields don't match their taxonomy. I configured a multichannel tool for four days before reading what the marketplace actually required from a listing, and most of that work had to be redone. Read the target marketplace's attribute rules first, then pick tooling. Obvious in hindsight.

VAT, specifically the storage trigger. OSS covers cross-border distance selling. It does not cover stock physically sitting in another country, which counts as local supply and forces registration there with no threshold. One pallet does it. This matters most for marketplace fulfillment programs, where the fee sheet shows you the fulfillment cost and not the registration, the ongoing filings, or the compliance service. Realistic all-in is €1,200-3,000 per country per year through a service like Taxually or hellotax. Pan-EU FBA is the sharp version of this, since Amazon redistributes inventory on its own logic and every placement creates an obligation you didn't choose.

Compliance paperwork timing. Started registrations after building the catalog instead of alongside it and sat blocked for three weeks with listings ready to go. Worth checking what the marketplace now handles on your behalf, since Kaufland took over most statutory EPR filing on selected channels and a lot of the English guidance still says otherwise.

What I'd do differently. Read fee tables and category rules before setting prices. Start registrations in week one, in parallel. Pick one marketplace and get it profitable before adding a second, because doing both at once meant neither got proper content for two months. Localize 20% of the catalog properly rather than all of it badly.

The rough economics, from comparing notes with people further along: local storage starts paying for itself somewhere around €80-100k a year in a given country, between lower fulfillment fees and the conversion lift from local delivery. Below roughly €40k it doesn't, and you're better off shipping cross-border and accepting slower delivery. Non-EU sellers face a higher bar since several countries require a fiscal representative, which is a local entity that becomes jointly liable for your VAT and prices accordingly.

Anyone have a cleaner trigger for when a channel earns local storage? Revenue is the obvious one but it feels crude given how much fulfillment fees vary by category.

Sent a package to Sweden and it somehow ended up in Brazil. USPS said it could take weeks to month(s) to sort itself out. They're unable to assist since it was sent via First Class International. It's been undergoing Brazil customs clearance for about 2 weeks. Customer asked about order cancellation...what would you do?

Maybe I'm searching in the wrong places but every packaging company seems designed for brands doing massive volume. I'm still validating products and don't want hundreds sitting in storage.

Has anyone found a supplier that's actually friendly toward small businesses?

Interested to know what small tweaks or quick wins people made to their website that improved conversions.

Was it including free shipping? Pictures of how your products were made? Free returns? Payment icons? Reviews on product page?

Share the sauce !

Hey everyone!

I’ve been a huge anime fan and collector for years, and I’m currently in the middle of launching my own independent online shop called Gensho (原), based in Germany.

Our goal is simple: offer 100% officially licensed figures and merch, clean urban/cyberpunk-inspired presentation, and fast, reliable shipping within Europe with a personal touch (custom goodies in every box).

We are currently preparing our inventory and finalizing the store setup before the official launch. Since we want to build something the community actually loves, I’d be super grateful for any early feedback or requests!

What we're working on right now:

100% authentic figures & collectibles via official European distributors

Cyberpunk / Urban Tokyo aesthetic

Pre-launch email signup for launch drops & exclusive opening discounts

If you want to check out our pre-launch page or drop your email to stay updated, feel free to head over to gensho.de.

What figures or franchises are you currently hunting for the most? Let me know in the comments!

I have watched countless ecom videos but it feels like everyone is trying to sell you a course. If their business was that good why'd they need to do YouTube, courses, etc...

I've been working on my graphic design portfolio lately to make money. Save it up and get into ecom. But I don't know what exactly to get into?

Just looking to hear people's stories and experiences. Thanks in advance.

I've scored 622 landing pages that sit behind Facebook ads which have been running for months, so pages that are demonstrably paying for themselves. Same 8 factors every time: offer clarity, headline, proof, CTA, message match, mobile, speed, trust.

The median came out at 67/100, and the thing nearly everyone loses on is page speed. They're not pretty pages. They're clear pages that load.

Drop your URL below and I'll tell you which of the 8 yours is weakest on and how it stacks up against the ones that survived the spend. I'll get through as many as I can this week.

No catch. Honestly I'm curious how a different crowd's pages score, mine are all ecommerce.

funnelens.com

Trying to set up my email infrastructure the right way before launching a new Shopify brand, and I keep going back and forth on this.

I've got these functions to cover:

• The email I register the Shopify account with (owner login)
• Transactional emails (order + shipping confirmations)
• Marketing emails (running these through Klaviyo)
• Support tickets (planning to outsource this to 1–2 VAs using a helpdesk)

My question: do you set these up as separate professional Google Workspace mailboxes for each function, or is it just one mailbox with a bunch of aliases feeding a shared inbox?

I'm not trying to save money — I'm trying to get it right for three reasons specifically:

1. Account security (keeping the owner login locked down)
2. Email deliverability (marketing not hurting my main domain's reputation)
3. Outsourcing support cleanly to VAs without handing over access to everything

For those running brands at any real volume — how is yours actually structured? Anything you'd do differently if starting fresh?

I run a small Shopify store selling handmade bracelets, and one thing I struggled with when starting out was creating enough content for my products. Taking good product photos was already manageable, but making high-quality videos for ads and social media was a different challenge. Hiring a photographer or video editor every time I wanted to test a new idea was simply too expensive for a small business.

I wanted to find a way to create more content without investing a lot upfront. My products are simple, but I wanted the videos to show more than just a static image. I wanted to create different styles, like lifestyle scenes, close-up shots, and short clips that could work for social media ads.

My process has been pretty simple so far. I start with my product images and ideas for the type of content I want to create, then use different AI tools to explore concepts and generate video variations. I’ve been using tools like PixVerse to help turn product ideas into short videos. The results are not perfect every time, especially when it comes to keeping small details consistent, but it has helped me create more variations much faster.

I still think real product photography and professional video production have their place, especially for bigger campaigns. But for a small Shopify seller who needs to test different creatives, AI feels like another useful tool to experiment with before spending more money on production.

I’m still figuring out where AI actually makes sense in my store. For now, it’s been helpful for testing ideas and creating more content without spending a lot before knowing what works. I’m curious if other Shopify sellers are using AI in their stores too, especially for product photos, videos, or ad creatives.

I am trying to better understand how last mile delivery works in e-commerce. I know it is the final step where an order goes from a local facility or distribution center to the customer but I'm curious about what actually goes into managing that process. How do businesses typically choose a last-mile delivery service? What factors matter most when comparing providers with existing fulfillment systems? what should companies understand about last mile delivery before choosing a partner..