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 #297...
STAT OF THE WEEK: Monthly U.S. visits to roughly 100 of the biggest news sites dropped to 47.6M in July, down from more than 70M at their 2024 high, according to Similarweb data. Traffic topped out that year before Google’s AI Overviews and Meta’s wider rollout of its AI assistant started keeping readers off publisher pages, and direct visits to the sites have since dropped 25%. AI chatbots now send those same sites more than 150k referrals a month, up from almost none, but that doesn’t come close to covering the more than 22M monthly visits the sites have lost since 2024.
McDonald’s unveiled the McDonald’s Media Network at its investor day last week, a new division of the company that will sell ads from other brands across its app, self-order kiosks, menu boards, and drive-thru screens. It had been testing the concept since August at 450 company-owned restaurants in the US, which is just about 3% of its roughly 14,000 US locations, most of which are franchise-owned. McDonald’s plans to eventually roll out the ads to more stores, though it hasn’t indicated if or how it would split the revenue with franchise owners or if franchises will even be included. So far, the ads just show up after you’ve ordered, while waiting for your food. (Uh oh, did McDonald’s just find an incentive to make the wait time longer?) Global CMO Morgan Flatley pitched it as “an opportunity to generate revenue for the system, with little in the way of additional costs, no operational complexity, and no disruption to our customer experience.” The timing is good for the company too, as US traffic fell 4.5% last quarter, sales growth stalled out, and the stock just hit a 52-week low after CEO Chris Kempczinski told CNBC, “We’re not expecting things to change.” (Is that the same guy who couldn’t stand the taste of his own “product” in a viral video?)
Not to be outdone by the Hamburglar, guess who’s also entering the ad business? Citi is creating a new unit called Citi Commerce Media that will let brands advertise to its 70M+ customers based on their spending histories, according to Business Insider. The ads will target users inside Citi’s mobile app and on its website, as well as on outside platforms like Facebook. Citi says it can link its ads to measurable business impacts based on intel from 6.5B annual transactions across more than 700 spending categories. Citi already ran a pilot with health and beauty brands that it says produced an average 15% lift in spending compared to people who weren’t shown ads. But at what cost?! The Business Insider article didn’t mention anything about ROAS, just revenue increase, which can be a bit deceiving.
Last Monday, I reported that Amazon blocked Meta’s new Muse agent from making purchases on its marketplace. Later that same day, Shopify stepped in to fill the void. The next day, PayPal joined the party. Muse locates products through Shopify Catalog and runs the order over the Universal Commerce Protocol, with payments running through Shop Pay, which already holds a buyer’s shipping and billing details. The transactions aren’t fully agentic, or even one-tap, yet. Muse simply finds the products, loads them into a cart, and then shoppers get handed to an in-app browser to finish the transaction. Similar to how Muse works with Link by Stripe, its first payments partner that Muse launched with, each purchase draws a credential good for just that transaction, so the card number never reaches Muse. As for PayPal… pretty much the same setup as Shopify. The big perk of PayPal though is that it reaches a much wider network of businesses. Shop Pay almost exclusively touches retail e-commerce, while PayPal works across travel, hospitality, SaaS, and other categories that Muse can assist users in.
Amazon began rolling out free multichannel selling tools to US sellers that let them connect accounts on eBay, Shopify, TikTok, and Walmart and run those channels from the same Seller Central workspace as their Amazon store. A seller can edit a product description once and have it reformatted for every channel carrying the item, as well as send a Shopify or Walmart order to Amazon’s Multichannel Fulfillment with tracking passed back to the original platform. A profit dashboard combines each linked account’s sales, ad spend, and traffic, replacing the need for manual spreadsheets or third-party data consolidation tools. Amazon admits that linking a channel provides it with that channel’s sales data, but said that it won’t share the information with other sellers or use it to inform its retail business. Though I do find it interesting that Amazon specifically wrote “retail business” in its announcement without mentioning its “ads business.” Accidental oversight or strategic omission? As much crap as I give Amazon, they truly are a brilliant company. Rather than being on the receiving end of product data management and synchronization, Amazon has positioned itself to be the master copy.
Best Buy is launching a TikTok Shop storefront in late October with close to 10,000 products, including headphones, cameras, laptops, and small appliances from major brands. The storefront will allow shoppers to buy products from Best Buy without leaving TikTok, just in time for the holiday season. Best Buy will fulfill the orders themselves, same as they do with non-marketplace items sold on their own website, and shoppers will be able to return eligible purchases directly at a Best Buy store or by mail — a great perk that separates the retailer from most other brands that sell on TikTok Shop. The partnership also unlocks new ways for brands to work with TikTok creators. Brands that advertise through Best Buy Ads will be able to run creator videos as paid campaigns with shoppable links, then measure which creators and products drove sales using Best Buy’s own shopper data.
YouTube is expanding Ask YouTube, its experimental AI search tool, into a product research tool that pulls information from videos and outside sources to build product comparison tables, with viewers able to continue asking questions from a video’s watch page. For example, if you search for information about the new iPhone Duo, Ask YouTube can show you how it stacks up against better foldable phones from rivals like Samsung and Google. Is this the beginning of AI eating your video views, like it has your website traffic? A YouTube spokesperson told CNET, “Our goal is to connect viewers with the right video faster. With Ask YouTube, we expect watch time to remain steady or improve.” The spokesperson compared the tool to other AI features, such as chapters and AI summaries, which they said “showed no negative impact on watch time; instead, they helped retain viewers.” They added that videos included in the AI search’s answers will “prominently display the video title and channel name.” YouTube says more than 140M people used Ask YouTube in June alone, which either indicates that the tool is really good, or that people’s attention spans are shrinking to the point that they don’t even want to watch full videos anymore.
Earlier this month, I reported that Temu appeared to be pushing products on Facebook and Instagram through fake creator accounts. Fortune shared the story of Ya Lili, a creator account with 183k Instagram followers and 129k Facebook followers whose content ran in over 100k Temu ad campaigns throughout the 16 months ending in April 2026, which is about 225 campaigns per day. Temu spent as much as $962M on ads like these across all of its “creators” during the same time period in the UK and Europe, according to Online Risk Labs research. Well, now Fortune reports that Temu has mostly stopped the practice. It originally broke the story on August 31 and said that Temu was running 4,900 separate partnership campaigns a day at the time. However, by September 4, Ya Lili only had five ads appearing on Meta platforms, likely as remnants from previously scheduled ad buys, and the account, which previously posted multiple times per day, had stopped posting entirely on September 7. Fortune also reports that Temu maintained its ad budget for “legitimate creators,” but that ads in Ireland, Cyprus, Austria, Denmark, Latvia, and Slovenia ceased almost entirely, according to ORL, which might have to do with laws in those countries against misleading advertising.
Meta could owe more than $200B in penalties after a New Mexico jury found Facebook committed more than 43M violations of the state’s consumer protection law by misleading users about how it protected their data after the Cambridge Analytica breach. Though if history teaches us anything, it’ll probably end up with a slap on the wrist and pay a fraction of that amount. New Mexico sued Facebook back in 2021, after a personality quiz app harvested data from about 87M Facebook profiles and passed it to Cambridge Analytica. The state accused Facebook of misleading users about how much control they had over their data, and about how seriously it investigated the third-party app developers who were scraping it. The suit also claimed Facebook made false statements about fighting hate speech and misinformation on its platform. Flash forward to last week: The jury sided with the state on 26 of the 29 statements it challenged, agreeing that Facebook misled people about how much control they had over their data and about its investigations into data-harvesting app developers. However, it rejected the state’s claims about how Facebook removed harmful content. New Mexico is seeking the $5,000 maximum for each violation, and the judge will set penalties at an October 1 hearing.
ChatGPT can set a cookie called obi that stays in a browser for up to a year and can send conversion and page data back to OpenAI when the user visits sites running its ad pixel, according to independent researcher Buchodi. The researcher didn’t directly observe OpenAI linking that off-site activity to specific ChatGPT accounts, as that would happen on OpenAI’s servers, but the setup would allow for it since it works the way a standard third-party ad cookie does. OpenAI classifies obi as an analytics cookie, which means it could still be set for users who allowed analytics cookies but turned down marketing ones, despite collecting and sending ad conversion data. OpenAI told Buchodi it would pass the findings along internally but hasn’t explained publicly why the cookie is labeled analytics.
Meta unveiled new consumer hardware at its Connect event, including a VR device and a handheld gadget. Its VR Glasses are the company’s first new VR device since the Quest 3S in 2024 and are priced at $1,299 with shipping set for spring 2027. Notably, the glasses are super lightweight, weighing about a fifth as much as the Quest 3, because the Qualcomm chip, battery, and storage sit in a separate puck that clips to a pocket and connects to the glasses via a cable. Meta’s palm-sized handheld device, called the Muse Charm, is built around its Muse AI agent and puts an animated Muse character on a 2″ touch screen with front and rear cameras so the agent can see what’s around it. Charms can also detect and interact with one another, though Meta hasn’t said what they can actually do. My guess is some creepy, privacy-invasive shit. Meta hasn’t announced a price, but says the devices will go on sale in time for the holidays this December. Despite looking like an old school Tamagotchi device, Meta says that Charm is not a toy and isn’t marketed to kids.
The Pentagon can label Anthropic a supply chain risk, which prevents the US military and defense contractors from using its models, according to a 2-1 decision by a federal appeals court. The Pentagon applied the label in March after Anthropic refused to drop contract terms barring the military from using Claude for lethal autonomous warfare or domestic surveillance, and because the Pentagon relied on two separate legal designations, Anthropic had to fight them in two courts. A federal judge in San Francisco struck down one of them in August, but the DC Circuit has now upheld the other. The two judges in the majority said there was ample support for the Pentagon’s conclusion that Claude’s built-in restrictions, which had repeatedly blocked government users from completing requested tasks, posed a national security risk, while the dissenting judge argued the law targets suppliers that sabotage or secretly manipulate their products, not a company that openly enforces its own usage restrictions. Anthropic says it’s considering all options, including further review.
Amazon is still pursuing its goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, but doesn’t exactly know how it’s going to do so, according to its Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst. Hurst said at an Axios event that “we are still striving towards that target,” but later added that she is “not going to sit here and say, ‘We know all the ways that we’re going to do this.'” Honestly, how could they, given how fast the world is changing? AI wasn’t even part of the conversation in 2019 when Amazon made the pledge, but now it’s undoubtedly causing emission growth at the company. Last year, carbon intensity rose YoY for the first time since Amazon began tracking the metric, erasing some of the progress it had made since 2022. Hurst said “we hold ourselves accountable” to the 2040 climate pledge and that the “commitment hasn’t changed,” but no one knows what that accountability actually looks like, as no consequence has ever been disclosed. Accountability could simply mean issuing a corporate apology in 2040 and moving the goalpost another decade.
Speaking of Amazon’s carbon emission goals… The company co-founded the Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition with Stella McCartney, a British luxury fashion house, and Canopy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the world’s forests, bringing in more than 60 brands, retailers, manufacturers and material makers. Members will pool their purchases of lower-carbon materials so fiber and fabric suppliers can count on steady, committed orders, which, in turn, will allow them to lower their prices. Members also get access to a library of more than 100 ways to cut emissions from fashion materials, with guidance for each type of fiber and a directory of companies making the alternatives. The goal of the coalition is to get those more sustainable materials priced at or below conventional fabrics, as fashion brands don’t want to pay a premium for lower-carbon materials, while the startups making them can’t cut prices without scale. I’ve been saying for years that someone should do this with plastic bottle alternatives, and I’d love it if Amazon spearheaded that next.
Gemini gave at least one answer that could cost a buyer money or land them the wrong product on 56% of 220 shopping questions on its free tier and 54% on its paid tier, the worst of four AI chatbots tested, according to a study by Product.ai. Claude’s paid tier did far better than its free tier, at 21% versus 44%, while Perplexity scored best out of all four chatbots on both tiers at 15% free and 14% paid. ChatGPT landed somewhere in the middle, at 19% free and 17% paid. Product.ai asked every chatbot each question five times, and Gemini contradicted its own earlier answer with no new information to justify the change on 29% of questions, more often than any rival. Most prices were accurate, with 85% of verifiable answers matching the seller’s listed price exactly, but the wrong ones were rarely close, missing by a median of $300. Moral of the story: AI still kind of sucks at comparative shopping.
Shopify began rolling out a redesigned Admin to all merchants, with new colors, type, and icons on every page, and a more prominently positioned Sidekick. The store picker, search, and notifications have moved out of the top bar and into a side navigation that merchants can collapse when they want more room. Sidekick now opens as a small chat window floating at the foot of each page and expands into a side panel for longer tasks, because Shopify says merchants increasingly use the assistant as their main way of working, with daily Sidekick sessions up 4.8x from 2025 to 2026. Admin UI extensions pick up the new styles automatically, but custom App Home interfaces built without Polaris web components stay on the old look until their developers migrate. Small request while you’re at it, Shopify… Can you make my selected date range stick when I switch between reports? I’m tired of resetting it every single time.
eBay is expanding Ship with eBay, its managed shipping program, to more US sellers with personal accounts in categories like Collectibles, Fashion, Electronics, and Home & Garden. Instead of sellers picking a carrier and setting their own shipping charge, eBay gives the buyer an option between standard and expedited shipping at checkout, and then delivers a prepaid USPS or FedEx label to the seller. Eligible listings must have a Buy It Now price of $200 or less, weigh less than 70 pounds, measure in at less than 130 inches combined length and girth, and both the buyer and seller must be located in the US. The weird part, as noted by Liz Morton of Value Added Resource, is that eBay collects the shipping fees and pays the carrier directly, yet it still charges sellers a Final Value Fee on the amount, which can range from 13% to 15% in most categories, even though that money never reached them. It sounds like eBay is being a greedy little pig when it comes to shipping.
Shopify released Shopcast, an Apple TV app that turns a television into a store dashboard for an office or warehouse. (No thanks, we prefer to stream episodes of The Office on our shop floor.) Merchants can use the remote to move through five views reporting sales, orders, units sold, and average order value, with retail and geography views that show the busiest store locations, compares online sales with Shopify POS, and plots incoming orders on a globe. Merchants running several stores can switch between them, with each shop’s data kept separate. The app itself is read-only, with totals refreshing through the day rather than streaming, and currently doesn’t offer any administrative capabilities, such as the ability to fulfill orders or edit products and pages. It’s a shame that the app doesn’t announce new orders in real-time as they come in with a loud cowbell ring or other customizable sound. It’s a missed opportunity to make the app something that merchants are glued to all day, celebrating as new sales come in.
Google introduced Live Avatar, a feature that creates an AI persona that can dynamically listen, see, and speak, complete with facial expressions. The tool is being positioned as something brands can use to create conversational experiences with customers that provide information to make better purchase decisions. For example, a skincare brand could put an avatar on its website that looks at a shopper through their webcam, asks about their skin type and concerns, and recommends products face to face, like a virtual beauty advisor. The avatar can also pull up product details, inventory, and company information in the background while it talks without skipping a beat, so the customer never has to wait for an answer, unlike those annoying AI customer service chatbots that make you wait while they pretend to type. Live Avatar is currently only available to Gemini Enterprise customers.
Meta and YouTube agreed to accept advertising for director Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary about Elon Musk after reportedly rejecting it as political content, with Meta calling it an error and YouTube saying its system had temporarily restricted the ad. X, on the other hand, unapologetically rejected the ads and couldn’t give two fucks about making excuses, with Musk himself posting that “Dogshit is worth more respect than Gibney.” TikTok also rejected the ads and hasn’t budged. The four-hour documentary touches on Musk’s tech career, his political alliance with President Trump, and his personal life, including interviews with two of his baby mamas. “Musk” premiered at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month and is set for theatrical release in the US on October 9.
Google is testing a Buy button on some Flipkart product listings in Gemini and AI Mode in India that takes shoppers directly to a Flipkart checkout flow without leaving the AI interface, according to TechCrunch. The checkout is Flipkart-branded rather than Google-hosted, and TechCrunch says it isn’t clear what technology powers the experience, though I’m assuming it runs on Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol. Only a small group of users can see it, and only on a limited set of phones, electronics, and accessories, but Google said it plans a wider rollout later in October, before India’s festive sales season. Google acquired a minority stake in Flipkart for $350M in 2024, and earlier this month, Google said Flipkart, which is majority-owned by Walmart, was among the merchants partnering with it to bring agentic shopping experiences to consumers in India.
Amazon is investing another $1.9B into its Delivery Service Partner program next year, aiming to lift average driver pay nationwide by $1 to nearly $24/hour. Wait, I thought DSP drivers worked for independent contractors and that Amazon had nothing to do with setting wages? So technically, the DSP owners can just keep the increased rates they receive, and Amazon can’t do anything about it, right? Amazon also announced at its annual Ignite Live conference that it’s adding surround-view cameras to its Rivian vans that warn drivers about cars, cyclists and pedestrians, with plans to have them in half of its fleet by year-end. The company also expects more than 20,000 pairs of its Smart Delivery Glasses, which show drivers real-time navigation and delivery details in their line of sight, in use by the end of 2027. The announcements about driver pay arrive weeks after New Jersey’s attorney general sued Amazon, arguing it is a monopsonist that sets pay and conditions for drivers it classifies as independent, while preventing them from unionizing and barring contractors from hiring one another’s drivers.
Square launched an integration with Apple Business that lets sellers manage how their physical locations appear on Apple Maps, Siri AI, Apple Wallet, and other Apple apps from the Square Dashboard. Hours, addresses, and phone numbers that sellers update in Square now carry over automatically to each connected location’s Apple Maps place card, and they can add buttons like Order, Delivery, or Book that link to their Square commerce pages. The integration is available in eight countries, including the US, UK, Japan, and Australia, and sellers in the US and Canada who aren’t on Apple Business yet can enroll from Square. The move follows Square’s recent integrations with ChatGPT and Claude, which also position Square as the hub of a seller’s online presence.
In lawsuits this week…
- OpenAI is facing a proposed class action from two California ChatGPT users who allege that OpenAI presented the chatbot as a private exchange and never clearly disclosed that outside contractors would read and score real user conversations. The suit says that OpenAI’s automated filter misses personal details in chats about health, money, and legal problems, which the contractors are able to see in violation of multiple California consumer protection and privacy laws.
- Depop has been sued again over its buyer-paid Marketplace Fee, this time by a shopper who says a $20.70 fee on a $400 purchase didn’t appear until the last screen before he paid. The complaint calls it “drip pricing” and claims that it stops buyers from comparing prices with rivals, while noting that eBay, which bought Depop in July, already shows fee-inclusive prices upfront for a similar fee in the UK and Australia.
- X.com sued two men in London’s High Court, alleging they ran a network of Bitcoin accounts that posted duplicate crypto news and boosted each other with fake engagement to collect at least £207k (about $278k) in Creator Revenue Sharing payouts. X called the coordinated efforts “coordinated revenue sharing fraud” and wants the money back, plus at least £75k to cover the cost of its investigation. Personally, I think if X’s now-defunct creator revenue program was that easily exploitable, that’s on them, but that’s up to the courts to decide.
- YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said the company won’t join Meta’s multistate child safety settlement, which requires a two-hour daily limit and an overnight block for users under 18, arguing that it has spent years on teen safety and is a “very different platform” from Meta. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he’s willing to take YouTube and TikTok to court if needed to get them on board with the deal.
- TikTok settled Alabama’s teen safety lawsuit for at least $100M without admitting wrongdoing, agreeing to cap teen use at two hours a day and block minors from the app between midnight and 6 a.m. The payout rises to as much as $300M if 40 more states sign similar deals. The Alabama deal is separate from Meta’s multistate settlement that YouTube refused to join, but it puts TikTok under nearly the same restrictions.
- TikTok agreed to pay a £12.7M fine from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, dropping its three-year appeal of the regulator’s finding that it let as many as 1.75M British children under 13 use the app without parental consent. TikTok said it still disagrees with the ruling but paid because the fine covers 2018 to 2020, before it added many of its current youth safety policies.
- Apple asked the judge in its trade secrets suit against OpenAI and io to let its own forensic experts examine former employees’ devices and to force OpenAI to hand over hardware development records, which OpenAI called an attempt to “snoop on a competitor.” OpenAI wants a neutral expert to handle the device images instead, but Apple says that would leave it a step behind defense experts who have already been through the material.
In corporate shakeups this week…
- Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg named a new board, including science-fiction author Hugh Howey and two co-founders of IRL, the defunct social app whose users turned out to be mostly bots, weeks after the previous board tried to put him on leave. Well, isn’t that just a ragtag group of people who will likely say “yes” to anything Matt wants? Yay!
- Shopify’s APAC and Japan managing director Shaun Broughton is leaving after eight years, less than a week after EMEA managing director Deann Evans announced her own departure.
- OpenAI hired Patreon co-founder Sam Yam, along with Patreon’s former heads of product and engineering, to lead a new Creator Product team, with a first look expected at OpenAI’s DevDay on Sept. 29.
- Amazon is recruiting former employees, including some it laid off, for AWS and AI roles after cutting more than 30,000 jobs over the past year, with one recruiter asking a former employee whether the five-day office mandate had pushed them out.
- OpenAI contractors hired to grade ChatGPT’s answers are getting fired for using AI to do the work, and reviewers are told to flag telltale signs like repeated words, heavy em dash use, and work finished suspiciously fast. Meanwhile, one contractor told 404 Media that even though they don’t use AI, they deliberately pick the worst responses to sabotage the models. Now that’s funny!
Amazon added Affirm as a payment option on Amazon.co.uk, letting approved UK shoppers pay for orders of £50 or more in three monthly installments at 0% interest or finance them over as long as 48 months at a fixed 22% representative APR. Neither plan charges late fees or penalties for paying early, and purchases above £100 also get Section 75 protection under the Consumer Credit Act. Affirm is rolling out to eligible Amazon shoppers over the coming weeks and covers most categories, though gift cards, groceries, and digital content such as Kindle books are excluded. Affirm has powered Amazon’s installment plans in the US since 2021, and the UK launch follows its Costco deal in the country earlier this month.
Google was fined €403M (about $462M) by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which ruled that the way it processed location data between May 2018 and February 2020 was not lawful, fair or transparent enough under GDPR. The regulator said people using Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy may not have realized their whereabouts could feed targeted advertising and guesses about their interests, and that Google held on to the data longer than it needed to. Google has six months to fix the practices, though it says the ruling covers policies it has already changed, pointing to controls it added from 2019. The move marks the DPC’s fourth-largest fine, behind the €1.2B it hit Meta with in 2023. Google may appeal parts of the ruling.
🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Meta has been secretly using human contractors in call centers to make phone calls for Muse users when the AI agent couldn’t handle the task, according to internal posts seen by Reuters. The company quietly turned on these “human agent calls” a couple of weeks ago for half its staff, after businesses kept hanging up on Muse once they realized an AI was calling. A Superintelligence Labs vice president said internal tests showed humans could complete 95% to 98% of calls, but she also conceded it had been “a miss” to begin testing without the right disclosures, adding that Meta had rolled the test back. Employees warned that sensitive details could leak to contractors, and one even found that a contractor made a racist reference on his call. Another employee wrote in an internal post, “It’s baffling to me why we think this feature is worth the risk. We are one bug away from unnecessary information being leaked to human callers.” It’s baffling to me too, my friend! However, I’ve stopped being shocked at every unscrupulous thing Meta does, because otherwise I’d be walking around with a permanent surprised Pikachu face my whole life. Meta said it will launch the feature only once it’s ready and properly disclosed.
Plus 15 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Numeral raising $100M in a Series C and Baselayer raising $35M in a Series A.
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.
