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) to r/Shopify. Although my news recaps aren't strictly about Shopify (some weeks Shopify is covered more than others -- like this week!), I hope they bring value to your business no matter what platform you're on.
Let's dive into this week's top stories...
STAT OF THE WEEK: PDD Holdings, parent of Temu, reported a 38% drop in Q1 2025 profits, citing US tariffs, heightened competition, and expanded merchant support programs. Co-CEO Lei Chen said global policy shifts like tariffs have hurt merchant adaptability, forcing Temu to rethink its supply chain and stop shipping directly from China. The company is prioritizing long-term platform health over short-term gains.
The US Court of International Trade struck down President Trump’s worldwide reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday, ruling that he exceeded his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — a law that came into effect in 1977 that allows the president to bypass congressional approval and regulate commerce during a declared national emergency involving an unusual and extraordinary foreign threat. The court, however, found no legal connection between the tariffs and the Trump administration's stated emergency of drug trafficking, halting their enforcement and barring future modifications. The Trump administration was given 10 days to carry out the judges’ orders, to which they immediately appealed the decision, and a federal appeals court temporarily reinstated most of Trump's tariffs the next day. The initial ruling would have lowered the overall effective US tariff rate to about 6%, but the appellate court's temporary reinstatement means it will remain at about 15%, according to estimates from Oxford Research.
Amazon quietly launched a major internal initiative called “Bend the Curve” to delete billions of underperforming product listings from its marketplace, targeting ASINs that are inactive, have no inventory, or haven’t been updated in years, according to an internal planning document obtained by Business Insider. The project aims to reduce the number of active listings to under 50B, down from an estimated 74B , while maintaining growth in actual product selection. As part of the effort, Amazon introduced “creation throttling” to restrict large, low-performing seller accounts from adding more listings, affecting around 12,000 sellers and preventing 110M new listings.
Meta aims to enable businesses to fully create and target ads using AI by the end of next year, according to Wall Street Journal sources. The company already offers some AI tools that can generate ad variations, and now Meta wants to help brands create advertising concepts from scratch. With the ad tools that Meta is developing, a brand could present an image of the product it wants to promote along with a budgetary goal, and AI would create the entire ad, including imagery, video, and text, and decide which Instagram and Facebook users to target and where to place the ads. Meta also plans to allow advertisers to personalize ads with AI so that users see different versions of the ad in real-time based on their geolocation and other factors (as opposed to having to manually create separate creatives and ad sets).
China’s eCommerce regulator issued draft guidelines for fees that e-commerce marketplaces can charge third-party merchants, saying that online platform should charge reasonable fees while taking into consideration factors like operating costs for the merchants they do business with. The regulator is calling on platforms to set flexible pricing strategies, clearly publicize their fee structures, establish dedicated compliance teams and internal mechanisms to identify and prevent unreasonable charges, and provide better support to smaller merchants. These proposed regulations are part of a broader effort by Chinese authorities to support local merchants amid economic challenges and to address concerns over non-transparent and complex fee structures on e-commerce platforms.
OpenAI abandoned its plan to spin off its for-profit arm and instead is proposing converting it into a public benefit corporation under its nonprofit's control that would be valued at $300B. Under this new structure, the nonprofit would continue to oversee and control the for-profit arm, however, the latter could issue shares, as well as exchange the profit-sharing units of investors like Microsoft and Thrive Capital for equity. The nonprofit would continue to own a stake in the for-profit arm, however OpenAI hasn't disclosed what exactly that would be — which is a big question for both state regulators and critics of the restructuring. Various groups are pressing attorneys general in Delaware and California to investigate the matter fully before giving approval.
The seven-week trial between Meta and the FTC has ended, and a decision now rests in US District Judge James Boasberg's hands as to whether Meta holds an illegal monopoly in social media. Judge Boasberg says the key question he must answer is how to define social media, which has changed rapidly over the past decade as platforms have branched out into entertainment, gaming, and commerce. Both sides will have the chance to file follow-up briefings this summer. Judge Boasberg said he would work “expeditiously” to issue an opinion.
DHL is now a pre-integrated partner on Shopify's shipping platform in the US and Germany, with plans to expand to other major markets in the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region by 2026. For merchants in the USA, it also brings “Delivered Duty Paid” shipping as a native feature, a service which protects consumers from unexpected additional fees such as customs charges or import sales tax. DHL joins USPS, which offers up to 88% off shipping rates, and UPS, which advertises up to 83% off rates, as a Shopify pre-integrated shipping partner, advertising up to 80% international shipping from DHL Express to over 220 countries and territories. Noticeably absent from that list is FedEx, who I guess is too busy servicing packages from their non-competitor Amazon to strike a deal with Shopify.
Brazil is piloting a digital wallet program called dWallet that lets citizens earn money from their personal data. Through dWallets, users can accept bids from companies on their data, receive payment, and transfer funds to bank accounts. Last year, the country announced that it is rolling out a data ownership pilot that will allow Brazilians to manage, own, and profit from their digital footprint, marking the first initiative of its kind in the world. The pilot includes a small group Brazilians who will use data wallets to apply for payroll loans. Once the users give permission for the lenders to collect data in the wallets, the companies will be able to view the information and then bid on the loan.
Amazon significantly pulled back its ad presence across Google Shopping during the past week, marking its most notable retreat since 2020 when it paused ads for nearly three months at the start of the pandemic. Tinuiti data shows that Amazon's daily impression share dropped sharply, which could signal a strategic pivot or larger market dynamics at play. Tinuiti also noted that Walmart's presence in Google auctions diminished in the last month, but not as dramatically, however, seeing large swings in Walmart's share of Google Shopping impressions isn't as unusual.
The European Union warned Shein that several of its practices violate the region's consumer protection laws, including the retailer offering “fake discounts,” pressuring customers into completing purchases with phony deadlines, and using deceptive product labels to trick users into thinking an item comes with special characters when “the relevant feature is required by law.” Shein was told that it needs to bring its practices in line with the law or face a fine.
Temu was featured at Google I/O 2025 as an early adopter of Google's new Web UI primitives, which are a set of Web UI APIs designed to improve interactivity, performance, and responsiveness in web applications. The platform was was presented as a case study for implementing these technologies to deliver a more dynamic and engaging digital shopping experience, for example, by using carousels, tooltips, and dropdown menus to create more seamless and responsive user experiences.
Shopify's new Chief Design Officer, Carl Rivera, described his future vision for the platform as “an interface where you can quickly shift between talking, typing, clicking, and even drawing to instruct software, like moving around a whiteboard in a dynamic conversation. An experience in which users are not presented with a barrage of nested menus, but with a blank canvas that invites creativity aided by an artificial intelligence that knows everything there is to know about online and brick-and-mortar retail and marketing.” He went on to say that “by the end of this year, we'll have made a ton more progress. And by the end of next year, we'll be pretty science fiction-like.”
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. championed Bitcoin and decentralized finance at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, promoting their family's World Liberty Fi platform and slamming traditional banks. The brothers cited being “debanked” as their entry point into crypto and criticized the current financial system as invasive and outdated. Their appearance followed Vice President J.D. Vance’s pro-crypto remarks, highlighting the Trump administration’s active embrace of digital assets.
Poshmark is the latest marketplace to take advantage of Meta's new Facebook Marketplace Partnership program, testing things out in the US with a small number of listings to start. Select Poshmark listings now appear on Facebook clearly designated as Marketplace Partner listings with a “check out with Poshmark” button that takes the user to Poshmark's website to complete the purchase. Meta launched the partnership program earlier this year in response to antirust scrutiny in Europe and the US, first partnering with eBay before expanding to other marketplaces.
Temu and Shein are gaining ground in Europe with Temu's year-over-year sales in the region surging more than 60% in early May and Shein growing 50% in the UK, according to data from Consumer Edge. Both companies have slashed ad budgets in the US and ramped up digital advertising in European markets, primarily in France and the UK. However in absolute terms, US consumers still make up the majority share of both retailers' revenue.
Anthropic hit $3B in annualized revenue, up from $1B in December 2024, according to two Reuters sources. The figure crossed $2B at the end of March, and hit $3B at the end of May. The surge is largely from selling AI models as a service to other companies, primarily its code generation software. In comparison, OpenAI has projected t will end 2025 with more than $12B in total revenue, up from $3.7B last year.
Speaking of AI popping off… MetaAI now has one billion monthly active users across its apps, according to Mark Zuckerberg, doubling the 500M monthly active users it had in September 2024. Zuckerberg said at the company's annual shareholder meeting that the “focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations and entertainment,” adding that Meta's plan is to keep building out the AI assistant before creating a business around it.
Google's not letting Meta have all the fun though. Last week Google released an app called Google AI Edge Gallery that lets users run a range of publicly available AI models from the AI dev platform Hugging Face on their phones. The app allows users to find, download, and run compatible models that generate images, answer questions, write and edit code, and perform other tasks completely offline by tapping into the phone's processor.
Block is launching Bitcoin for Businesses, a feature that enables Square merchants to accept BTC payments via the Lightning Network, a decentralized network that uses blockchain smart contracts for instant, low-cost payments. The feature builds on its existing Bitcoin Conversions tool, which allows merchants to automatically convert a portion of sales into bitcoin and offer QR code payments.
Victoria's Secret temporarily shut down its e-commerce site for three days last week during a cyber attack. The company declined to answer questions about a possible ransomware infection, the timeline of the problems, or whether it has asked police to investigate, however, the site appears to be operational again as of Friday. In the last six weeks, three major UK retail chains including Marks and Spencer, Harrods, and the Co-op have all suffered attacks.
Amazon and The New York Times entered into a multi-year licensing agreement that allows Amazon to access much of the publication's editorial content for AI-related uses such as training its AI models and accessing summaries of its content using Alexa. The New York Times previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft for training their models on the company's content without permission back in 2023, but the case is still ongoing.
Last year one basic bitch sued another basic bitch for copying her style on social media. Amazon influencer Sydney Nicole Gifford accused Alyssa Sheil of copying her aesthetic to sell the same Amazon products, citing dozens of similar posts, while Sheil denied the claims and presented data showing that some of her posts predated Gifford's. The two influencers have now asked the judge to dismiss the closely watched copyright lawsuit, with no money exchanging hands in the resolution. Gifford finally spoke out on social media about the case, showing some of her evidence, and it's pretty damning! Watch the video and decide for yourself whether the lawsuit had merit.
Meta is reorganizing its gen-AI team into two groups — one team to oversee the company’s AI research and another to handle its consumer AI products. The products team will be responsible for the Meta AI Assistant, AI Studio, and AI features within Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, while the other team will oversee the company's Llama models, as well as efforts to improve capabilities in reasoning, multimedia and voice. The reorganization aims to streamline operations and clarify roles, enhancing Meta's competitive edge by allowing it to accelerate rollouts of products and features.
In layoffs this week… eBay is shutting down its R&D operations in Israel, with over 200 employees losing their jobs by Q1 2026. TikTok is eliminating several hundred jobs in Indonesia in its latest round of cuts, slashing costs after taking over Tokopedia operations last year. IBM laid off nearly 8,000 employees, with the HR department affected the most, attributing the cuts to AI deployment that can virtually handle the department's operations. LinkedIn announced 281 layoffs across California including software engineers, product managers, deal desk strategists, and designers. Last but not least, Business Insider laid off about one fifth of its workforce across all departments, with plans to embrace AI to help the remaining staff “work faster, smarter, and better.”
Japan Post launched a new “digital address” system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses. Under the new system, users can input these codes on online shopping websites and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites. The digital addresses are permanent and will not change even if the person moves. Rakuten and other platforms are considering adopting the system soon.
India's government has called major e-commerce platforms including Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, Zomato, Apple, and Meta for a meeting to push for stronger measures against dark patterns and to discuss penal actions for violations. India officials said that the government's approach is not to punish innovation, but to “ensure that technology does not come at the cost of consumer exploitation.” In November 2023, the Department of Consumer Affairs issued detailed guidelines on dark patterns, which was followed by the launch of a Dark Patterns Buster Hackathon, inviting tech solutions to detect and prevent such practices.
An Amazon delivery drone crash landed in the middle of an apartment complex in Tolleson, Arizona last Wednesday, just a few weeks after the company launched its Prime Air Drone Delivery service in the city. Luckily no-one was around when the drone went down and no-one was harmed in the accident. Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery program has experienced multiple crashes during its testing phases, with at least eight crashes reported between 2021 and 2022, including an incident in June 2021 where a drone crash sparked a 22-acre fire in Oregon. In December 2024, two MK30 drones crashed during test flights in Oregon due to faulty altitude readings caused by a software update that increased the sensitivity of their lidar sensors.
German courts ruled that websites in the country must now provide an equally visible “reject all” button on cookie consent banners if offering an “accept all” option. The decision aims to curb manipulative designs that pressure users into consenting to cookies and reinforces that manipulative cookie banners violate GDPR and national privacy laws. The case sets a precedent mandating fairer digital consent practices and greater transparency for data processing online.
Amazon Fire Sticks and hardware from Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are enabling “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy, according to a report from media research firm Enders Analysis. The report points to the availability of multiple, simultaneous illegal streams for big events that draw tens of thousands of pirate viewers and places blame on Facebook for showing advertisements for access to illegal streams, as well as Google and Microsoft for the alleged “continued depreciation” of their digital rights management systems. Nick Herm, COO of Comcast-owned Sky Group, estimated that piracy is costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and that Fire Sticks account for about half of the piracy in the UK.
Amazon is facing scrutiny again for selling over 100k kitchen faucets that were recalled for containing dangerous levels of lead. In the past few months, the company has been caught selling facial recognition tech to police departments, AI-generated books on managing ADHD, rice contaminated with arsenic and other heavy metals, and concentrated sodium nitrate that led to the death of a teenager. Historically Amazon has dodged liability for third-party sales, but a 2023 Consumer Product Safety Commission ruling now holds the company responsible for unsafe FBA items.
Duolingo's CEO Luis von Ahn retracted his claim that AI will replace the company's human workforce, saying now that AI should be treated as a tool to help employees rather than supplant them. The week prior, Duolingo said it would “gradually stop using contractors to do work AI can handle,” which led to tremendous backlash, with many users canceling their subscriptions or deleting their accounts. The company abruptly deleted all of its posts on social media to avoid the backlash, and then followed up with a cryptic video that aimed to separate itself (the social media team?) from its corporate leadership. Check out my conspiracy theory on LinkedIn, where I postulate how the company faked a data breach to inflate its monthly average user count.
Sorry short kings… Tinder launched a new feature that lets paid subscribers add their height preferences to their profiles. (Good thing it's impossible to lie about your height!) The company says that the setting will indicate a preference, rather than functioning as a “hard filter,” which means it won't actually block or exclude profiles, but simply inform recommendations. One Reddit user commented, “It's the only way they're going to get women to pay for the service too,” while another user wrote, “gotta add the weight and single mom filter now.”
Shopify was ranked the number one brand advertising on Australian podcasts for Q1 2025, according to a report by ARN's iHeart and Magellan AI, signaling the company's increased efforts to tap into the Australian market. As of Q2 2024, Australia hosts over 115k Shopify stores, including more than 2,300 Shopify Plus stores, representing 32% YoY growth. Other e-commerce companies on the list include Wise (#5), Airbnb (#6), Squarespace (#7), and American Express (#13).
24% of BNPL users in the US were behind on payments in 2024, up from 18% in 2023, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve. Low-income borrowers were the most likely to miss payments, with 40% of users earning less than $25,000 a year reporting a delinquency. More than half of BNPL users said they would not otherwise have been able to afford their purchases if it weren't for the installment payment option.
🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… former Facebook executive Nick Clegg insisted during an arts festival last weekend that it's “implausible” to ask tech companies to ask for consent from creators before using their work to train their AI models. He said, “I just don't know how you go around, asking everyone first,” and noted that if AI companies were required only in Britain to gain permission to use copyright holders' works, “you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.” I call BS on that one! Sure it would cost AI companies some upfront capital to obtain consent and pay copyright holders, but we're talking about a very small slice of the pie. It's been estimated that it only would have cost Meta around $150M to buy a copy of each of the 7.5M books it pirated to train its LLM.
Plus 15 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Portless, a direct-from-manufacturer logistics startup that ships from facilities close to manufacturers in China, Vietnam, and soon India, raising $18M in a Series A round led by Commerce Ventures.
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.
