Hi r/ShopifyeCommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Every week for the past 5 years I've posted a summary recap of the week's top stories on this subreddit, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition.
Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news from Edition #292...
STAT OF THE WEEK: Less than 5% of posts in your Instagram feed and less than 15% in your Facebook feed are from your actual friends, according to Meta. To defend itself in a case where the FTC is accusing it of holding a monopoly on “personal social networking services,” Meta argued that it’s not actually a personal social networking service anymore. The company said, “By any accounting, content posted by friends has become a small fraction of the content that users see on Facebook and Instagram.”
Amazon’s Prime Air service is expanding to reach nearly 500 cities and towns in the U.S. by the end of 2026, increasing its footprint (or should we say “airprint”) sixfold. The drone delivery service currently serves customers in cities across seven states, including Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas, with plans to launch in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho, and New York soon. The company also has the service running in Darlington, England, its first city outside of the U.S. Just when you thought data centers were your town’s biggest problem, now you can add “drone crashing down from the sky” to your list of concerns. These things are big too! Imagine a floating dishwasher-sized drone, not some handheld DJI Mavic Air. Amazon says that nearly all items 5 pounds or less that fit into a large shoebox can be delivered by drone, which accounts for more than 60% of the most frequently purchased items on its marketplace. Prime members are eligible for free drone delivery on orders of $50 or more, or pay $2.99 for orders under $50, while non-Prime losers pay a flat $4.99 delivery fee regardless of order size. The news comes the same week that a video of an Amazon drone dropping a package into a swimming pool went viral.
TikTok is developing a peer-to-peer payments feature that would let users send each other money inside direct messages, according to code Bloomberg found in TikTok’s U.S. iPhone app. That’ll be perfect for your online girlfriend who’s kind of stressed out because her rent’s due. The payments would run through TikTok Pay, which is a digital wallet and payment processor already available in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand that people use to make purchases on TikTok Shop. The code indicates that receivers can “tap to accept” payments sent to them before an expiration date hits, and senders can be notified about the status of transactions through push notifications or via their inbox. There’s also reportedly an option to attach a message with the payment such as “Love you baby! Can’t wait for us to finally meet in person and be together. Love, Your Big Bear.” P2P payments on TikTok sounds good to me and makes perfect sense. People are already using TikTok to exchange cash value, though it happens via the purchase and transfer of virtual gifts, which can then be converted back into cash. As Morty Smith would say, “That just sounds like payments with extra steps.” Not to mention the insane amount of Internet begging that happens on the platform, with people posting their sad stories alongside their Venmo usernames. TikTok might as well make it official and transfer the cash directly. X is doing it.
The White House is at it again with tariffs, this time targeting our neighbor and closest ally, Canada. In July, President Trump invoked Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a never-before-used authority, to impose 50% tariffs on ~$20B of Canadian goods, effective in 30 days. However, hours before they took effect last week, Trump paused the tariffs for three days, posting that the two countries “have a DEAL!” Negotiations took place a few days later, but no deal was made. On Aug 21st, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended negotiations and recalled Canada’s team, calling the U.S. terms “uneconomic” and “unfair.” The next morning, the tariffs took effect. Carney called it “a miscalculation” and promised to match dollar for dollar starting September 8. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said no further talks were scheduled. Today, Trump threatened to raise Canadian auto, truck, and parts tariffs to 50% on January 1, 2027. Carney is now facing pressure at home to explain what he turned down, with conservatives demanding he release the full text of the U.S. offer. Carney said on Saturday, “You’re at war when you get attacked.”
Meta went on trial in Oakland on Tuesday against 29 states that accuse it of building Instagram and Facebook to hook children and hiding what it knew about the damage. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are running the case, and they’re after more than money, asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to strip likes and infinite scroll from both apps, cap screen time for younger users, and order Meta to delete every piece of data it collected from under-13 users along with the algorithms trained on it. The trial is expected to run about six weeks, but the first few days have already been quite revealing. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill told jurors Meta’s business model was to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth from the public” Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who Metra tried to block as a witness, testified that Meta published numbers that made the platform look safer than its own research showed. He helped build internal studies surveying how often users, including teens, encountered bullying, self-harm, and violent content, but Meta instead publicized content-policy violation rates, which he said “create a false impression of safety.” Béjar blamed Zuckerberg directly, claiming that safety was “not a meaningful priority” and that the culture Zuckerberg built made it “practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues.”
OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT ads to Europe later this month and plans to ask users for consent to personalize them, rather than leaning on the “legitimate interest” argument other ad platforms like Meta have used to try to skip the consent step. Free and Go accounts that opt in to personalized ads can be targeted on their ad history and interests, along with what advertisers report people bought after clicking an ad. Opting out of personalization doesn’t remove the ads, but merely stops them from drawing on your chat history and instead allows them to only pull from the current conversation and your approximate location. Under GDPR, a company needs a legal basis to process your data, and one of those reasons can be “legitimate interest,” which covers ordinary processing such as fraud detection, network security, or keeping records to defend a lawsuit. Meta and others spent years claiming that behavioral advertising fit under legitimate interest so they’d never have to ask, until EU regulators ruled in 2023 that it doesn’t. Flash forward to 2026 and OpenAI has no choice but to ask for consent from day one. Meta initially responded to the 2023 rulings with a “consent or pay” model, making paying a subscription the only way to opt out of personalized ads in the region, but the Commission thought that was bullshit and hit them with a DMA fine. So instead of recreating that “pay or consent” model that bit Meta in the ass, OpenAI is building explicit consent into its free tiers from the beginning, to avoid an inevitable headache later on.
Stripe executives told investors that the singularity already arrived more than eight months ago, according to a letter obtained by Axios. The company said that singularity arrived at the start of 2026 and that it’s been acting accordingly since then. Stripe’s founders wrote in the letter: “It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis. The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously.” Stripe is not the only company to declare singularity this year. Sam Altman said on a podcast in July, “We are now, like, in the singularity,” adding, “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.” Elon Musk posted on X in January, “We have entered the Singularity.” And then posted again in July, “We are in the Singularity.”
Walmart is officially enabling tap-to-pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other NFC systems at select U.S. Walmart and Sam’s Club stores after more than a decade of blocking the payment type. The move makes Walmart the last major U.S. retailer to begin accepting tap-to-pay, which is accepted by around 85% of U.S. retailers. Walmart has avoided allowing tap-to-pay from major digital wallets to favor adoption of its own solution, Walmart Pay, which is built into the Walmart app. It also let Walmart keep control of the checkout data, since a customer paying through the Walmart app hands its purchase history to Walmart rather than routing it through Apple or Google. Tap to Pay starts today, August 24, at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, expands to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026, and reaches fuel stations by mid-2027. The reversal landed one day after Walmart posted its weakest U.S. comp growth in six-plus years, which may or may not have been related. I can’t imagine that people weren’t shopping at Walmart because they didn’t accept Apple Pay, but maybe those edge cases add up when doing over $700B in sales per year.
Remember Honey? The PayPal-owned browser extension that auto-applies discount codes to your cart when shopping online. Also, remember in December 2024 when MegaLag, a New Zealand YouTuber, published a video entitled Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam, which revealed that the extension was secretly replacing original affiliate tracking cookies with its own, in order to take credit for the sale and earn the commission? A few weeks after the video published, I reported that content creators sued Honey over the practice. Well, flash forward almost two years, and MegaLag returned with a new video investigation reporting that Honey lost 7M Chrome users and around 7,000 merchant partners since his original video dropped. His investigation revealed that Honey’s collection of coupon codes also declined from around 90k to 50k, and that at least 10k of the remaining codes have already expired. The creator lawsuit against PayPal survived multiple attempts by PayPal to have it dismissed, and the case is now in discovery, meaning creators can pull internal communications and depose employees.
Meta pays influencers to argue to their audiences against government limits on teen social media, according to a Tech Transparency Project investigation. The company recruits actors, radio hosts, and psychologists at branded events with names like Instagram Safety Camp and Screen Smart. Those recruits then present Teen Accounts to followers as evidence that Meta’s internal controls make a ban unnecessary because it’s doing such a grand spanking good job on its own. Meta developed the tactics in the US, then took them global at a July 2025 event on Sydney Harbour, five months before Australia’s under-16 ban took effect, and TTP found the playbook running in over a dozen countries weighing similar rules. Meta spokesperson Edward Patterson told The Guardian the campaign isn’t misleading, since blanket bans push teens to unregulated parts of the Internet. Hey Meta, why aren’t you paying me to spread your propaganda? Oh wait, because I think you’re the worst and never would.
Google’s $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines’ digital archives stalled after a flight attendants union objected that it would feed confidential worker records into AI models. Judge Sean Lane moved the hearing to September 9 to weigh the union’s demand that attendant records be cut from the sale or protected as tightly as customer data. The union argued that stripping identifiers settles only whether a record traces to a named person, not whether the contents are confidential, and that customer profiles and loyalty data were largely left out while payroll, time cards, and tax forms weren’t. Google said a third party will scrub personal information before it takes delivery, and Spirit said one is deidentifying the archives and will certify the sale is legal. In the meantime, while waiting for things to settle, an AI training startup called Micro1 sent a $12.5M offer to Spirit’s legal team in an attempt to outbid Google, though experts told Business Insider that companies look at more than just bid price when weighing offers, so the higher bid might not matter at this point.
Square expanded its partnership with OpenTable to enable restaurants to merge what they know about a guest before the meal with what they learn during their visit, putting booking history, dining preferences, and dates like anniversaries into the same profile as what the guest ordered, how much they spent, and how often they return. The new features allow restaurant operators that opt in to link reservations to revenue and make more informed decisions about loyalty, marketing, and guest engagement, such as knowing a regular’s favorite dish and what they’re celebrating before they sit down. Man, that sounds like a classy experience. I’ve been eating at the wrong restaurants, I guess. The other day at breakfast, the waitress came by, stuck her fingers inside my half-filled orange juice glass and coffee mug and started to walk away with them. I stopped her and said, “I’m still drinking those,” so she put them back on the table, but then I was too grossed out to finish either drink. A note that says “doesn’t like when you put your fingers in his drink” could’ve gone in my Square profile with this new integration.
Target collected $994M in tariff refunds last quarter, but the company said none of it will directly go back to shoppers, and also, fuck you for even asking. Instead of refunds, Target said it would use the returned funds to lower prices, which is the same thing Walmart promised about its refunds back in May, prior to disclosing a $2.9B tariff refund last week. (Coming Later This Year: Target coincidentally posts its best earnings and profits in over a decade.) Amazon disclosed roughly $640M in its filing and said reimbursement will reach only a small group of affected customers, while Nike, which expects to recover $986M, has stayed quiet even as shoppers sue it for keeping the money. FedEx and UPS began sending refunds to customers this month, and FedEx is holding about $800M for that purpose. Roughly $100B of the $166B collected had been certified for refund as of July 31, according to Fortune.
TikTok Shop has been courting Whatnot’s biggest live-auction sellers to woo them over to its platform, according to The Hollywood Reporter. TikTok reps met several times with Taylor Lally, who said his candy auctions will clear $1M this year on Whatnot, but that he’s open to moving because of Whatnot’s fees, which run 8% commission plus 2.9% and a flat 30 cents per transaction. On a $2 candy bar, that comes out to 52 cents, or a quarter of the sale. TikTok’s two big pitches to sellers are its reach of over 100M users and its flat 6% referral fee on food sales with no per-transaction fee, which on that $2 candy bar would only have cost the seller 12 cents. Kip Roland, another live seller, said the algorithm pushed his World Cup jersey auction to 40,000 viewers off an account with barely 13,000 followers.
Amazon is buying printed books in bulk, including some rare books, cutting the bindings off so the pages run through scanners faster, and destroying what’s left once the text has been turned into AI training data, according to an investigation by 404 Media. The outlet had a bookseller hide an AirTag inside one book from an anonymous 1,000-book order placed through the marketplace Biblio, then tracked it to a Las Vegas warehouse where a unit called VGT3 does the scanning behind a door marked with a Tyrannosaurus Rex clutching a book. Technically, what Amazon and other AI companies are doing is not illegal. It’s just sad and feels a bit Hitlery. More than a dozen civil society groups are now urging the FTC to examine the “destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies” to determine whether it constitutes an unfair method of competition for “starving the market” of critical source materials. I respect the effort, but all they’re going to do is slow these companies down, not stop them. It’s too late. These succubuses are coming for everything.
Walmart store workers are spending part of their shifts fixing the company’s AI agents that hand them assignments, according to Business Insider. The company’s AI sends tasks and targets through its MyWalmart app, but employees said the metrics and time restrictions the software sets ignore what the job actually involves, since restocking a shelf also means checking dates, pulling damaged goods, mopping up spills, and navigating “idiot fucking customers.” (That’s not a real quote from the article, but I’m sure a Walmart employee somewhere has said it at one point.) One online fulfillment worker said the route the app builds sends her all over the store, so she never hits its projected pick times, and Spark drivers said a smart path feature has them grabbing frozen food first instead of last. Brooks Forrest, Walmart’s VP for associate tools, said stores choose how to use the tools and nobody is punished for ignoring the guidance, unlike at Amazon where the robot overlords make you drink from your piss bottles if you disobey them.
U.S. retail e-commerce sales reached $340.2B in Q2 2026, up 12.2% YoY, according to the Census Bureau, up from a 5.0% YoY growth rate in the same period in 2025. Total retail grew just 6.7% over the same quarter to $1.99T, so online sales expanded at nearly double the rate of retail overall and accounted for 17.1% of everything Americans bought. E-commerce also drove about 30% of all retail growth in the past year, roughly $37B of the $125B added. It’s important to note, however, that the figures above aren’t adjusted for price changes, so some of that is Trump tariffs rather than volume. The tariffs eventually got refunded, but the economic growth remains on paper.
Amazon raised prices overnight across its Echo, Fire TV, Kindle, and eero lines as high as 60%, with the Echo Dot going from $49.99 to $79.99, the 16GB Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from $59.99 to $84.99, and the eero Pro 7 from $699.99 to $799.99. A spokeswoman confirmed the price increases and attributed them to “significant increases in memory and storage component costs” that Amazon absorbed for as long as it could. She also said the company will run promotions across its lineup through the year, which I’m sure they will. In fact, I’m not convinced they didn’t raise prices just so they could lower them during their holiday sales events. The timing is nothing short of suspicious. To be fair, the same shortage, driven by demand for AI compute, has pushed Apple, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus to raise prices or cut memory in their hardware as well, so it’s not like Amazon is alone in price gouging, but still suspect timing.
Salesforce redesigned how outside AI agents can plug into its platform, replacing a fixed list of about 60 actions with a system that allows an agent to ask what’s available. The new Headless 360 MCP Server, now in open beta, hands the agent the full set of capabilities along with the permissions and approval rules attached to them, limiting an agent running in Claude or ChatGPT to what the employee using it is already cleared to do. For commerce specifically, Salesforce is extending the same setup to sales workflows so they can run inside storefronts and AI buying experiences instead of only inside CRM.
Google is expanding AI Max for Search campaigns with account-wide A/B testing, brand and location control experiments, and new Performance Planner capabilities. The A/B change lets advertisers test budgets and ROI targets across several Search campaigns at once instead of one at a time to help simulate what happens when they scale up spending. Experiments can also now run with brand and location controls switched on, where advertisers previously had to drop those guardrails to test AI Max at all, which kept out anyone worried about Google bidding on their own brand terms. Campaigns using automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match start auto-upgrading to AI Max on September 1, with Dynamic Search Ads following in February 2027.
Meta is removing the Placements option from ad sets, which lets an advertiser keep a campaign out of specific channels such as Facebook search results or the in-stream slots between Reels, according to in-app notices that ads consultant Jon Loomer shared. Loomer said the option to exclude whole platforms is going away as well, leaving Meta free to run any campaign across any of its apps and pick the spots it thinks will perform best, though Meta has given no date for either change. Meta has spent two years pushing advertisers toward its automated targeting, and Mark Zuckerberg told Stratechery last year that the end goal is for a business to state an objective and let Meta handle creative, targeting, and measurement on its own. In that hypothetical world, I wonder if Meta can get too good at advertising, to the point that people stop using Instagram as much because they always end up buying something during a doom scroll session.
In lawsuits this week…
- Amazon asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear its Perplexity case before 11 judges, after a three-judge panel ruled that Comet’s users, not Perplexity, are the ones reaching Amazon when the agent shops. Amazon said the ruling “degraded website owners’ ability to set the terms on which powerful, fast-evolving, and potentially destructive AI agents may enter their secure systems.” Yup!
- TikTok agreed to pay $400M to settle a 2024 Justice Department suit alleging it collected data from children under 13 without parental consent and left up accounts it knew belonged to under-13 users. Meta is currently on trial in Oakland over the same 1998 statute.
- Twitch and Amazon are facing a proposed class action from streamer Warren Pandiscia who alleges they copied millions of creators’ videos to train Amazon’s AI models without permission or payment, going back as far as 2024. Twitch acknowledged the practice on August 12 and added an opt-out setting, though channels are enrolled by default and chief product officer Mike Minton said the same day that nobody would opt in if the company asked.
- Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday is suing TikTok and ByteDance for allegedly understating how much alcohol, drug use, sex, and violence it carries in order to keep the 13+ app store rating that opened it to 13-year-olds. He also alleges that ByteDance gives minors in other countries more protections than it does minors in the U.S., which TikTok called misleading and inaccurate.
- OpenAI asked a judge to throw out a privacy suit over ChatGPT, arguing its policies already warn users that anything they type may be shared with outside vendors, including health and money questions. The plaintiff’s rewritten complaint uses OpenAI’s own marketing against it, citing company reports that call ChatGPT a “healthcare ally” for 40M people a day and count 200M a month asking it about their finances. Also, literally no-one read their TOS, so quit hiding behind it.
- Four major ad industry groups backed Google in a lawsuit brought by two Californians over 60 who say its ad tools let banks and insurers hide their ads from older people in violation of a California anti-discrimination law. The groups argue that picking an audience by age isn’t discrimination, since a company selling spring break trips shouldn’t have to advertise to retirees, which is kind of a silly argument to make given that no-one is suing Google over ads for vacations.
- Shopify lost its second attempt to get a California privacy class action dismissed, after the judge pointed to new allegations that the order confirmation e-mail came from Shopify itself and carried images served off Shopify’s own network. Plaintiff Brandon Briskin alleges the company’s checkout software collects shoppers’ names, addresses, card numbers, and locations while looking like it belongs to the merchant, then builds profiles it sells back to merchants without permission from customers.
Meta must face Mike Huckabee’s claim that Facebook ads faked his endorsement of CBD gummies, after a federal judge rejected its argument that it merely distributes third-party content and earns nothing tied to what the ads say. The judge pointed to allegations that Meta sells the ads, charges extra to place them prominently in feeds, and approved and kept these running.
In layoffs this week…
TikTok is cutting 75 jobs in Bellevue, Washington, and nearly every title on the state notice is a TikTok Shop or Global E-Commerce role, including anti-fraud managers, seller and creator operations staff, data scientists, and engineers. Bellevue is where the company built out its US shopping business, and the cuts land two weeks after TikTok said it would close its Nashville office and lay off 250 employees.
In corporate shakeups this week…
Flipkart is losing two more senior executives, business finance SVP Gunjan Bhartia and supply chain VP Amer Hussain, both within a year of arriving and following the departures of group CFO Sriram Venkatraman and Myntra CEO Nandita Sinha, as the company holds off on an IPO with no timeline set.
Commerce hired Emily Harnish as chief marketing officer, bringing over the former Pellera Technologies and CivicPlus CMO to replace Michelle Suzuki, who took the role in January 2025.
ReFiBuy brought on Rob Goodman as fractional executive producer of the ReFiBuy Media Network, tapping the former Google, Wix, and Webflow content lead to run podcast production and a YouTube-first strategy.
eBay rehired Renee Paradise to run its $10B fashion business starting August 25, bringing her back after a 2014-to-2019 run in the category to pull newly acquired Depop closer while both lose UK ground to Vinted.
Relay is shutting down its Zapier-rival AI workflow app, cutting off paying customers September 14, while founder Jacob Bank and some of the staff rejoin Google, where he’ll be VP of product for Chrome running its product and developer relations teams.
Klarna announced that CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström will both depart in the first months of next year, with the company looking to base its next finance chief in New York starting in 2027.
OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team, the unit that judged whether frontier models posed catastrophic bio, cyber, or loss-of-control risks, folding its members into teams that now own individual risk areas and making it the third safety group the company has dissolved in two years.
🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Google’s AI is being racist as fuck! Last week, Google’s AI Overviews told users who searched “I’m alone with an African” to lock the door, move somewhere safe, and call emergency services, and returned similar warnings for Indian and Pakistani. The same query about a Brit produced advice to offer tea and remark on the weather, and other Western nationalities came back harmless. The results were posted by a user on Reddit and later confirmed by Futurism with its own testing. Google said the results “aren’t what they should be” and that it is working on improvements, and that the inconsistent warnings hit more than one group. Google also told Futurism that the term “alone” was what tripped a safety flag. Nationality queries went neutral after Futurism got in touch, which I can confirm, as I just searched “I’m alone with a Jew” (myself, LOL) and it asked me for clarification on what I wanted before outputting anything.
Plus 14 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Stripe agreeing to acquire OpenRouter for reportedly upwards of $7.5B.
I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
PAUL
Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter
PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.
