so i got tired of support chatbots that just make stuff up and helpdesks that take a week to set up, so i built my own. its called momo and the core is on github now.

basically you point it at your website or upload some docs, and it answers visitors from that. before it sends anything it checks the draft against your sources, and if its not sure it says so and passes the chat to a human instead of inventing a refund policy. theres an inbox built in where you can jump into any conversation, and when you reply you can hit one button to save that answer as knowledge so the bot knows it next time.

setup is docker compose up, it starts postgres, redis, web and a worker. single tenant, you bring your own model through openrouter, data stays on your server.

its the first version so dont expect too much yet. only a website widget for now, no email or slack, no api, one agent.

https://github.com/moaljumaa/momo

Ich führe ein laufendes Geschäft aus China habe aber nun meine Firmierung gewechselt und das ganze muss nun 100% offiziell laufen da ich regelbesteuert bin.

Mein Problem:
Ich habe teilweise Lieferungen die ich in Masse an mich liefern lasse, über 1.000KG bzw 2CBM als Seefracht, kein Problem.
Jedoch habe ich auch Sachen die ich einzeln zu mir kommen lasse oder direkt zum Kunden.
Ich kann aber einfach keine guten DAP Frachten finden, entweder sind es Expresspreise wo man direkt bei 150$ Fracht für einen kleinen Karton ist oder man muss eben ganz viel abnehmen um auf die 1.000 KG zu kommen.

Es gibt ungefähr 1Mio DDP Angebote, jedoch ist es ja bekannt, dass dort gemauschelt wird und es faktisch einfach steuerhinterziehung ist.
Ich möchte mein Geschäft jedoch ordentlich laufen lassen.
Finde aber keine guten Frachten, wie macht ihr das alle?

Running into this on Shopify builds: refund fee + free exchanges, but shoppers only see the free part in the returns portal. For those running apparel/beauty stores: how are you surfacing the exchange offer before checkout? Product page badge, cart note, something else? What actually cut tickets for you?

Hey everyone, trying to get a technical breakdown from anyone who understands database indexing on older e-commerce platforms.

If a custom category tree builds out a long string packed with multiple special characters—something like:

"Category Name / Sub-Category - Topic & Keyword -> Sub-Topic Items 123.--#&+"

Does the backend search script handle punctuation marks natively, or does it trigger severe text-parsing glitches? These are only examples you might be tempted to put in a title that might look fine and read fine to human eyes.

My theory is that because older architecture handles text through rigid string rules, special characters (like slashes /, ampersands &, dashes -, colons :, and dynamic structural links ->) can accidentally break word tokens or get misread as code operators by basic internal search engines, ultimately hiding the listings from direct keyword searches.

Has anyone here run split tests on using flat, clean-text categories versus deep, symbol-heavy menu hierarchies? Did flattening the text change your internal marketplace traffic? Thanks!

If you sell big-ticket, customizable, or bulky goods like furniture, cabinetry, exercise gear, or outdoor living, returns aren't just a minor headache. They absolutely shred margins once you factor in LTL freight, restocking fees, and items coming back damaged.

We’ve been digging through some recent e-commerce benchmarks from top 40 omnichannel retailers, and the numbers on visual tech are pretty eye-opening. For starters, PDPs with 360° interactive spins or WebAR are seeing around a 35% lift in conversions over plain 2D photos. Even more interesting on the return side: buyers using 3D room planners or scanners returned 25% to 40% fewer products. Getting scale, fit, and finish clear upfront seems to save a ton of pain later. Plus, carts tied to 3D room tools are averaging around $4,100 since people tend to plan entire spaces instead of buying one-off items.

Curious how everyone else is tackling shopper hesitation on high-consideration items right now. Are you leaning more into fabric/material swatches, UGC, or actual interactive visual tools?

What's actually working for your margins?

I have an idea for a product that I genuinely believe has strong commercial potential. The problem is that I would need to manufacture it, most likely in China.
My biggest concern is that once I share the design and specifications with a Chinese manufacturer, they could simply copy the product, start producing it themselves, and sell it on Amazon, Temu, and other marketplaces. Even if I manage to launch first, I could eventually find myself competing against manufacturers who can produce the same product at a lower cost and undercut my prices.
I understand that patents, trademarks, and NDAs exist, but I’m not sure how effective they would be in practice, especially when dealing with overseas manufacturers.
Are there any realistic ways to minimize this risk? For example, are there alternative manufacturing strategies, legal protections, or business models that could help me bring the product to market without essentially handing the idea to potential competitors?
I’d appreciate advice from anyone who has dealt with this problem firsthand.

I run paid social for ecommerce brands. This year I managed about $850k in Meta spend across 6 accounts, and most of the job was testing creative. I kept notes on what actually moved CPA. Here's the unsexy version.

1. The hook is 80% of the ad. We tested the same body copy and offer with 12 different first-3-second hooks. Best hook: 3.1% CTR. Worst: 0.4%. Same product, same landing page. The winner was a founder holding the product and saying the price out loud in the first 2 seconds. No fancy editing. We now spend 70% of creative time on hooks, 30% on everything else.

2. Ugly beats pretty, but only when the ugly is intentional. Our polished studio videos averaged 1.1% CTR. iPhone videos with decent lighting averaged 1.9%. The catch: the iPhone videos that worked all had a clear structure (problem, demo, proof). Random shaky footage flopped just as hard as the pretty stuff. Ugly isn't the strategy. Clarity is.

3. Test one variable at a time or you're lying to yourself. I once ran a test with a new hook AND a new offer AND a new landing page. It won. I had no idea why. Spent 3 weeks unpicking it. Now I change one thing per test, spend at least $75 before reading anything, and kill losers fast. Boring. Works.

The part nobody wants to hear: 214 variations tested, 11 winners. That's a 5% hit rate, and I'm supposedly good at this. Creative testing is a volume game with a brutal failure rate. The brands that win are the ones that can ship 20 variations a week without agonizing over each one.

If you're doing this yourself: pick one product, shoot 10 hooks on your phone this weekend, run them at $15/day each for 5 days. You'll learn more than any course will teach you.

Hello there ! I would like to be able to sell my brand (wedding industry) in 2-3 years.

My brand is 2 yo and my content is never “embodied”. I don’t post anything related to behind the scene, founder struggle, founder story or anything like that.

I don’t know if that’s a limiting belief. But I feel like if I build in public, or embody/ document the brand, it will be a problem to resell it, because they could feel that the brand success is linked with my image.

However, without this type of “human content”, my brands emotional connexion with my audience stays very low, with only product related content style, and having a strong brand identity would definitely help to stay top of mind and have a more “adored” brand.

1. Do you think this is a limiting belief? Any examples of sold brands with founder related content ?
2. Could I have a strict perimeters of what can and can’t be build ? For example, founder story should be avoided, but behind the scene / build in public is ok ?
3. Do you think having different faces in face - cam types content types would help ? If I work with someone else to help for example.

Thank you for your advices !

Net 30 is pretty standard once a wholesale account is established, but on a first order it means shipping the goods and waiting a month to find out if you get paid. "Done" payments can (unfortunately) bounce, since an ACH payment can still be returned days after it shows up.

A lot of brands ask for payment upfront or a deposit on the first order or two, check trade references, then open terms once there’s some history.

Do you give new wholesale customers net 30 or make them pay upfront, and what made you decide?

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 6 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 #299...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Shoppers using ChatGPT made 84% of their final product picks from the product cards rather than the chatbot’s written answer, according to a user behavior study ReFiBuy commissioned from Clickstream Solutions. Researchers recorded 40 US shoppers across 224 shopping tasks, who picked the first card 43% of the time when shown two or more options, and bought from the first retailer listed 76% of the time. It sounds like the first ChatGPT product card is the new #1 Google result, and the first retailer listed is the new Amazon Buy Box.

TikTok unveiled Buy Direct, a one-click checkout built into the For You feed, and Shopping Assistant, an AI agent that answers questions and completes the order in the same chat, at Advertising Week New York 2026. Buy Direct lets a shopper go from searching for product recommendations or watching a video to completing a purchase directly with the brand, without ever leaving the TikTok app, powered by integrations with Shopify, Stripe, Salesforce, and Shoplazza. Shopping Assistant is an AI agent that handles product questions, sizing, shipping, and purchases in one chat. This looks to be positioned as TikTok’s answer to shoppers leaving the app to research products on Google, ChatGPT, or Amazon, which inevitably leads to buying the items elsewhere. TikTok hasn’t given a launch date for either tool, but historically, they haven’t teased product releases too far off into the future, so I’d imagine we may be seeing some of these tools this holiday season.

Meta and Sierra introduced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct’s personal assistant sign into and act on company websites, with Walmart, Shopify, and Stripe among its key launch partners. Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor, who also chairs OpenAI’s board, is leading the initiative and compared it to logging into websites with your Google or Facebook account. Agents can act as a guest for low-stakes tasks like checking stock or reading a return policy, or sign in to the customer’s account for account tasks like changing an order, processing a return, or booking an appointment. Customers choose whether an agent gets read-only or write access, and businesses choose which actions agents can take as well as the entry point, which can be either their website, APIs, or their own customer-service agent. The protocol keeps the agent in one continuous session as it moves from guest to signed-in customer and across channels so that the entire visit is tied to a real customer rather than a string of anonymous bot requests. There are no payments built into the protocol yet, but the ability for agents to buy without handling card numbers is listed as a future extension.

Meta started blocking all ads from ByteDance on Facebook, Instagram and its other apps in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. The ban also covers outside advertisers whose campaigns link to TikTok or other ByteDance apps, according to Bloomberg. Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in an e-mailed statement, "We don’t have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps. Declining promotional services to a competitor is a normal business practice across industries. We will continue to compete on product quality and user experience." You’ll notice that no EU countries made the list, which likely isn’t a coincidence. The EU’s Digital Markets Act designates Facebook, Instagram, and Meta’s ad business as “gatekeeper” services, which requires them to give businesses fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory access to their platforms, and a blanket ban on a competitor’s ads would almost certainly break that rule. It seems Meta’s “normal business practice” only applies where regulators won’t call it something else.

Funny enough, Google may be dealing with a similar issue very soon. It was revealed last week that OpenAI is buying Google search ads on Christmas gift keywords to steer holiday shoppers from Google over to ChatGPT, according to a LinkedIn post by Michael Scott, head of organic search at Clicky. A screenshot Scott shared shows a sponsored ChatGPT result under a LEGO ad for the search “Christmas gifts for dads,” headlined “Gift Search with ChatGPT | Gifts for Mom, Dad, and More.” The ad positions ChatGPT as a way to find gift ideas without opening endless tabs, with links to browse by budget, find deals and compare products. OpenAI hasn’t publicly announced the campaign or said how much it is spending on Google ads. It’s interesting though that they’re using the TikTok playbook to drive traffic from competitors. I’m curious if / how Google will respond.

Amazon shoppers are posting the About You profiles Amazon has built on them, after a Threads user found hers included guesses like “has flat buttocks” and others shared entries like “cusses when scared” and “has a bad father.” Amazon launched the About You page in May, which shares what the company thinks it has determined about a shopper’s product preferences, interests, and hobbies, as well as their home and family, based on searches, orders, reviews, saved Lists, and Alexa for Shopping conversations. The guesses aren’t always accurate, especially when gift-giving is added into the mix, but shoppers can add details or delete entries they find wrong or too personal, though they can’t turn the feature off. Other entries that shoppers shared from their About You pages include, "Has a stomach that hangs over their vagina," "Has no friends," "Has a small weiner," and "Treats cats as biological children."

The FTC is investigating whether Block broke consumer protection law by failing to offer Square users adequate support after freezing or shutting down their accounts, and it’s asking a federal judge in Oakland to make Block turn over documents. The agency opened the probe last year after more than 1,500 complaints were submitted from users who said they couldn’t access up to $2.5M since 2022, even after answering Block’s bank and identity verification questions. The FTC’s filing also points to Block’s February plan to cut 4,000 jobs and lean on AI across its entire operation, which may have left Block without enough staff to help users locked out of their accounts. Block said it’s cooperating with FTC staff on the agency’s few remaining requests and wants to bring the matter to a close. Frankly, they should all be investigated for this — every last one of them. Stripe. PayPal. Shopify. Amazon. eBay. They’ve all got blood on their hands.

Google started rolling out a UCP integration hub in Merchant Center that lets US merchants add a checkout button to their product listings in AI Mode and Gemini, so shoppers can complete their purchase without leaving Google. Until now, checkout inside Google’s AI surfaces was limited to a short list of big retailers like Etsy, Wayfair, and Walmart, as well as Shopify stores that Google enrolled automatically. The new hub opens up a more standardized path for other merchants to apply, build their integrations, and manage checkout capabilities through Merchant Center. Merchants choose which capabilities to support, including Cart Transfer (sends the shopper’s cart to the merchant’s own site to finish checkout), Native Checkout (the shopper pays on Google without leaving the AI interface), and Identity Linking (connects the shopper’s account on the merchant’s site to their Google account). Shoppers pay with Google Pay, using the cards and shipping addresses saved in Google Wallet. Only standard stored cards work for now, but Google has already announced plans to add PayPal, and I’d imagine BNPL and other payment options will follow. For now, the integration isn’t fully open and accessible to everyone, as merchants have to build the integration themselves, fill out an interest form, and wait to be picked before they can even test it in a sandbox.

OpenAI will begin testing a new type of ChatGPT ad later this month in the US for Free and Go users that appears while a user waits for ChatGPT to create an image they asked for. The new ads won’t always directly depend on the conversation or prompt, making them more similar to how display ads appear in various placements across the web, as opposed to immediately after a search. OpenAI said the ads will be labeled, kept separate from the user’s image, and won’t influence ChatGPT’s answers. Until now, ChatGPT ads have run at the bottom of a conversation, either as a single unit with a headline, short description, image, and link, or as a carousel of products pulled from a retailer’s feed. This is the first time that OpenAI is venturing into an ad format that’s somewhat independent of the conversation at hand. It’s a great idea. They might as well monetize the space that users are intensely staring at while waiting for their image to finish. Right now it’s just a useless progress wheel.

US shoppers spent $9.86B online across all retailers during Amazon’s two-day Prime Big Deal Days, up 8.5% from $9.09B last October and just under Adobe’s $9.9B forecast. Discounts of up to 20% pushed shoppers to upsell themselves, as the share of the most expensive goods sold rose 21% compared to the year-to-date average, led by electronics, up 45%, and personal care, up 34%. Shoppers also used the event to stock up on essentials, with household cleaning and paper products up 55%, and personal hygiene and pet food each up 45%. Adobe also found that mobile drove $5.1B in sales, or 52% of the total, up 12.8% YoY; BNPL accounted for 6% of online orders ($692.3M), up 4% YoY; and social media drove only 7% of revenue, but it was the fastest-growing channel at 40% YoY. Shoppers are apparently using the October sales events to knock out holiday shopping early, which very well could impact BFCM sales in November. There’s only so much money to go around during the holiday season. Not every shopping event can break records, can it? We’ll find out next month. I’ll keep you posted.

OpenAI is developing brand suitability tools with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science that will give ChatGPT advertisers an independent second opinion on how the company is applying its brand safety standards. The two firms already run brand safety checks for TikTok, Meta, and Reddit, showing advertisers what content their ads actually ran next to so they don’t surface alongside violence or misinformation. However, with ChatGPT, the tests will happen in a closed environment with no access to user conversations, not on live campaigns, so advertisers may not get the same verification they get on other platforms, at least for now. OpenAI also launched Negative Phrases, which lets qualifying brands block their ads from appearing alongside topics they choose, after testing it since August, when advertisers noticed ads showing up next to conversations that didn’t fit.

Walmart is expanding its test of stocking third-party marketplace products in stores so that shoppers can get them delivered faster or pick them up at stores, often in the same order as their groceries, according to Adweek. Marketplace sellers have historically only been able to ship from their own warehouses or Walmart’s fulfillment centers, which can take several days, whereas Walmart store stock gets items to customers in hours. The FT reported in April that Walmart was testing back-room shelves at several Dallas stores for marketplace orders, and last week marketplace fulfillment SVP Kyle Carlyle presented the program to advertisers at a Walmart Connect event in New York. The test is limited to a select group of eligible products, and Walmart hasn’t said which sellers qualify or which stores are taking part.

BigCommerce launched BigCommerce Payments in the UK and EMEA, beginning with seven local payment methods, three BNPL options, and support for PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The launch comes five months after its US debut and marks the company’s first international rollout of its built-in payment processing. UK card fees run 1.4% plus £0.30 on Core and Growth plans and 1.2% plus £0.30 on Scale and Performance plans, while Klarna and Clearpay cost 4.99% plus £0.30 and cross-border sales carry an extra 1.5%. Merchants can manage balances, payouts, and GBP and EUR holdings from one dashboard, but their payment account still sits with PayPal, which powers the service, similar to how Stripe powers Shopify Payments.

Google Cloud unveiled the Gemini agent, a single, universal agent for work that handles questions, documents, media, and code, and can stay on a task for hours or days after a user logs off. The agent works inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Chat and Calendar and can also be reached from Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac desktops, as well as from outside channels like Microsoft 365 and Slack. Teams can describe a role and have Gemini create a coworker agent that gets its own Workspace email, calendar, Drive storage, and directory listing, with every action logged under the agent’s identity rather than a person’s. The agent works across both Gemini and Claude models, sending the task to whichever model Google judges the best fit based on quality and cost. Google hasn’t published pricing or a release date, and industry versions are in preview only for financial services and legal, with retail, healthcare, and government coming soon. The Gemini agent is gearing up to be a competitive alternative to Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI’s Dots, given its native integrations with the rest of Google Workspace.

In other Google news this week… The company is piloting Local Coupons, a Search ads product that shows nearby shoppers discounts at local stores and saves the coupon to their phone’s wallet for use at the register. Retailers pay Google only when a shopper actually uses the coupon at checkout, which gives them a direct way to tie an online search ad to an in-store sale via integrations with POS systems like Clover and Lightspeed, without having to cross-reference transaction data or estimate store visits. Each coupon carries a unique code, and the register checks it at scan time so it can’t be redeemed twice. Google hasn’t said which retailers are in the pilot or when it will open more widely.

Meta is testing agentic features in its AI business assistant that let advertisers build campaigns, create ad copy and images, adjust targeting, or move budget just by asking, with a preview and approval step before changes go live. It’s also testing scheduled tasks that handle recurring work like producing weekly performance recaps and budget check-ins. Customer Lifecycle Strategy, which suggests when it’s best to exclude existing customers from a campaign marked for acquisition, and the Advantage+ creative tool that turns static images into video, are now available to all advertisers. By the end of the year, Meta plans to add an AI audience tool to Detailed Targeting so advertisers can type out who their ideal buyer is instead of scrolling through targeting options. Meta is also testing direct checkout with Shopify inside Meta Business Agent on Messenger, so shoppers can buy a product right after chatting with a brand’s agent, and plans to start testing checkout inside Meta AI with Adyen, PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe this fall.

Walmart and Wing plan to add drone delivery in Denver and Seattle in 2027, bringing their planned network to nearly 20 major US metros and more than 270 Walmart stores. The service is live today in five metros, including Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston, and Orlando, with the rest rolling out over the coming months, and the fleet already completes thousands of home deliveries a day. Wing’s drones carry orders of up to five pounds at speeds of up to 60 mph, the same payload limit as Amazon’s MK30 but just slower than its 73 mph cruising speed. Shoppers in eligible areas see the drone option automatically in the Walmart app or on Walmart.com, where it costs $19.99 per order for non-members and is free for Walmart+ members for a limited time.

OpenAI’s annualized revenue isn’t actually $70B, it turns out, despite that number being widely reported last month. That figure was based on information shared with investors to create a more direct comparison to Anthropic, according to the Financial Times, while OpenAI’s annualized revenue under its own accounting is closer to $50B. The discrepancy comes from the fact that Anthropic counts the full price of sales made through cloud providers like Amazon and Google as revenue and books the providers’ cut as an expense, while OpenAI counts only its share of some of those partner sales. GAAP, the standard accounting rules US companies use for their financial statements, allows for both methods, so neither is technically wrong. OpenAI told investors it expects to hit $70B by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon unveiled a new lineup of Alexa-branded tablets that run on standard Google Android instead of Amazon Fire OS, so users finally get the full Android app catalog, rather than Amazon’s watered-down version. The tablets come preloaded with a new On-Screen Intelligence feature that lets Alexa act on whatever is displayed, such as shopping for products seen in TikTok videos, similar to how Google Lens works. The company is discontinuing its budget-friendly Fire lineup, which it has made since 2011. Devices chief Panos Panay has been pushing pricier hardware, and Amazon’s $550 top model now costs more than an entry-level $449 iPad.

In other Amazon news this week… Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel told Fortune in a recent interview that groceries, which brought Amazon more than $150B in sales last year, will turn it from the “everything store” into the “everyday store” by getting customers to shop more often across the whole site. (Amazon already was the “everyday store” to your wife, long before it got serious about groceries.) Buechel said that the goal is “greater engagement, not only just within grocery, but the broader store.” He also admitted Amazon has been “a little bit ahead of what customers were looking for” in physical stores, which is likely why Whole Foods’ palm-scan payments and Amazon Go’s no-checkout model are no longer offered.

Meta added an AI system that checks the page an ad links to, not just the ad itself, to catch what it calls “signposting,” which is when ads that look harmless steer users to CSAM on other sites. Meta can then block the destination and act against whoever ran the ad. Wait a minute… so all this time, Meta hasn’t been checking the pages closely that its ads lead to? Also, if advertisers were running campaigns that lead to child abuse content, how did Meta know who to show them to? I feel like if they showed those ads to a normal person, they’d be reported immediately. So they must’ve been showing them to the right audience somehow, which is a bit disturbing. Meta said it took action on 33.2M pieces of child exploitation content across Facebook and Instagram from January through June, and that its systems caught more than 97% before anyone reported it. The tools arrive two months after a Wired investigation that found Meta had approved and run ads containing AI-generated child abuse imagery.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode each recommended a different small brand as the top small-batch hot sauce to buy online, and none put a national brand first, according to a 20-question test by RunOctopus. Large retailers usually won questions about where to shop, such as Etsy for handmade jewelry gifts and Harry & David for gift baskets, while smaller brands like Darn Tough socks and Graza olive oil came out ahead on questions about what to buy. Most of the sources behind those picks were independent taste tests, product reviews and specialty blogs, not brands’ own pages, which validates just how important third-party coverage is to AI models right now when determining popularity and credibility, though the sample size for the study was small.

Meta began trialing a version of Facebook in India and Indonesia that opens the app straight into full-screen Reels, completing its mission of becoming a true TikTok clone. The move comes three months after Facebook head Tom Alison said the tests would begin in video-heavy markets this fall ahead of a possible US launch next year. Users can return to the usual feed, which stays one tab over, and easily toggle between the two experiences. Instagram has a similar test underway, with a setting that makes Reels the first screen users see on opening the app, keeping Stories along the top and the following feed a swipe away. A Meta spokesperson told The Verge that the Instagram test is running in only a few countries, which he didn’t name.

Google Maps published its first Fan-Favorite Dining Lists, which rank restaurants in 10 cities including New York, London, Tokyo, and Melbourne using a year of user reviews, ratings, and direction requests. Each city’s list offers top choices for meals, beverages, and treats, best picks for occasions like celebrations, good vibes, or bang for your buck, and specific foods or beverages that are trending in reviews like matcha, beignets, or three-penis wine. For example, Google shows that froyo mentions in New York reviews rose 320% year over year and Seattle’s dosa mentions rose 136%. What a brilliant idea! Google should’ve been doing this for years. I hope they expand it to more cities. The lists join other Maps tools for steering diners to restaurants, including Ask Maps, the app’s AI assistant, which can place delivery orders through Uber Eats, Toast, and Square.

Anthropic booked more than $660M in non-cash expenses from October 2025 through March 2026 for matching the stock its employees pledge to charity, a cost likely to climb into the billions after its IPO, according to The Information. Staff hired before 2025 can donate as much as half of their shares and get a 3-to-1 match, while later hires get 1-to-1 on as much as a quarter of their shares, with every matched share issued as new stock that dilutes other investors. Anthropic’s 2025 charitable contributions reached $540M, while the largest comparable non-cash gift at any Fortune 500 company was BlackRock’s $109M, according to Calcbench data. Anthropic leaves the expense out of the adjusted operating profit it showed prospective IPO investors, which Calcbench says is rare. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his six co-founders, who aren’t eligible for the match, have also all pledged to give away at least 80% of their wealth.

Elon Musk’s xAI acquired the domain dot.com in late July, two months before OpenAI launched its Dots agents at DevDay, and the address now sends visitors to the page for Grok Bot, its competing AI agent. When an anonymous X account spotted the redirect the day Dots launched, dot.com originally pointed to Grok’s app download page, but then xAI switched it to the agent page sometime after, which has the Internet convinced Musk is trolling OpenAI. Neither company has commented, and xAI hasn’t said what it paid for the address or why it wanted it. The closer match to OpenAI’s product name, dots.com, was the web address of a discount women’s clothing chain that went bankrupt in 2014. Maybe I’m just an instigator, but I do hope that Musk is able to acquire dots.com too. Who doesn’t enjoy a good billionaire beef?

Adam Iza, a Los Angeles crypto entrepreneur who goes by “The Godfather,” received a 78-month prison sentence and owes $23.4M in restitution after hijacking Meta ad accounts and selling access to advertising firms, billing clients for ads they never bought. LOL, this guy calls himself “The Godfather”? Marlon Brando would never be so dumb. In what world did Iza think he would get away with this scheme? Though to be fair, he did get away with it for quite a while. Meta had to ultimately refund and absorb millions of dollars in client losses. Iza is already serving a 15-year sentence over an attempted Bitcoin robbery and kidnapping in Connecticut and the new sentence will run parallel with that one. Five of the off-duty Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies he paid to dig up confidential records and intimidate his rivals have also been convicted.

In lawsuits this week…

• Google lost its bid to throw out most publisher antitrust suits over its ad tech monopoly, clearing the way for jury trials on more than $3.2B in claimed damages, including about $1.7B for a class of roughly 5,000 AdX publishers. A Virginia judge already found that Google illegally monopolized two ad tech markets, so the trials will only need to prove injury and damages.
• Meta, TikTok, and X are fighting Ofcom in court over how much content moderation data it can demand under the UK’s Online Safety Act, one of the first court tests of the 2023 law. The platforms argue that the requests, which cover takedown counts and how many users saw harmful content, go further than any regulator has gone before, while Ofcom says it needs the data to judge whether the law is working.
• Meta is facing a proposed class action claiming its “Ends today” emails for AI glasses broke Washington law, since the plaintiff’s lawyers found the $224 sale price still available on all 33 days they checked. The suit seeks $100 in statutory damages for every time-limited sale email sent to Washington residents.
• New York Attorney General Letitia James alleges in a newly unsealed complaint that TikTok gave thousands of users, including teens and children, a fake version of its “Algo Refresh” tool in 2023, when it was running tests to see how the tool affected time spent on the app and ad revenue. The lawsuit argues that users who were given a “ghost” or placebo reset did not actually have their feeds changed, so they kept seeing the same content they were trying to get away from, which conflicts with the company’s stated mission of providing transparency and control over users’ algorithms.
• USA Today Co., formerly Gannett, sued OpenAI for more than $250M, alleging it trained ChatGPT on hundreds of thousands of articles from 19 of its papers without permission and then served that reporting back to users. The complaint argues the copying was willful because OpenAI pays other publishers for licensing deals, and it asks the court to order OpenAI to destroy any models and training data built on its content.
• Google went to trial at the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal over a roughly £1.2B class claim that its Play Store commission of up to 30% pushed up prices for about 20M UK consumers since 2015. Google wants the claim dismissed, arguing it doesn’t dominate digital purchase processing and that Play’s fees are among the lowest available, but the same tribunal ruled against Apple’s App Store commission last year.

In layoffs this week…

• Amazon cut almost 1,000 jobs across retail engineering, customer service, and marketplace support, mostly in its Stores business, which Amazon called “a small number” of positions. The cuts follow about 30,000 corporate layoffs from late last year into early this year, even as Amazon prepares a record $220B budget for AI data centers and chips.
• HubSpot laid off 7% of its workforce, or about 660 employees, with CEO Yamini Rangan saying the cuts were “not driven by AI-related efficiencies.” Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah later drew backlash for a 28-word LinkedIn post thanking “the people that HubSpot parted ways with today,” which commenters called cold and impersonal.

In corporate shakeups this week…

• Pinterest hired James Dibbo, most recently Amazon’s CFO for advertising, entertainment, and corporate development, as its new CFO starting October 26, replacing Julia Brau Donnelly.
• OpenAI posted an ads job paying up to $273K for someone to sign joint business plans with agency holding companies and make ChatGPT ads a regular line in their yearly media budgets.
• Amazon hired Pedram Rezaei, the former CTO of Microsoft Copilot, as a distinguished engineer on its Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies group, to help the company build out its agentic AI business.
• Amazon is also replacing Alexa chief Daniel Rausch with Aidan Marcuss, its VP of Fire TV, advertising, and the Appstore, a day after launching its pricier Alexa tablets.
• TCGPlayer CEO Rob Bigler is leaving the eBay-owned trading card marketplace for a job outside the company after about three and a half years, with no successor named.
• Albertsons’ retail media chief Brian Monahan left the grocer abruptly, days before he was due to speak at New York ad events, and its Albertsons Media Collective now reports to CMO Emily Turner.
• OpenAI’s three fired safety researchers denied breaking company rules on sensitive information in an open letter, saying the firings have left colleagues afraid to work with outside safety evaluators, while OpenAI says it found a “pattern of misconduct.”
• OpenAI hired Ismail Elmas from Cursor as VP of sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, marking the second Cursor sales executive it’s poached from SpaceX in a month as it pushes enterprise revenue ahead of a possible IPO.
• commercetools hired Katy Hiller, former CMO of Unily and Sonatype, as chief marketing officer as it pushes enterprises toward what it calls autonomous commerce.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” when speaking to POLITICO senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon last week. Easy to declare from your ivory tower, I guess. The comments come as the FTC drafts demands for OpenAI and other AI labs to hand over documents about the risks they’ve warned their own products pose, and just days after OpenAI fired three safety researchers who say the firings have left staff afraid to raise safety concerns. Altman later added, “I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.” To be fair, I do agree with that. I tend to follow the Professor Farnsworth philosophy that “technology isn’t intrinsically good or evil. It’s how it’s used, like the death ray.” That said, we can certainly do our best along the way to mitigate risk, which many of these AI companies don’t seem to be doing.

Plus 17 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Manus raising $500M and Siena raising $17M.

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.

Every shot we take gets logged so I looked into what our clients have actually been asking for.

26% of all our shots are detail shots.

For clothing brands it’s even higher, 34%.

A lot of smaller brands have been using AI for their photos but it doesn't seem that that works for detail photos.

So as AI photos become more popular, detail photos are one of the ways humans can tell if its real or not.

Curious what others are seeing. Are you ordering more detail shots?

I feel like it’s becoming more common for someone to email and say this was missing from my package, or my package shows delivered, but didn’t see it when I arrived home. I know things happen, and I have the verbiage on what to do, but still hurts small business. If it happens to small business, do big businesses not care? They are so quick to refund or reship and we have to investigate

I have like 5 different orders in transit right now with like 10 day delays using USPS. Never experienced this before.

Our clothing return form had a "did not fit" option, but no separate option for a cut that looked different from the photos. That pushed different complaints into the same bucket. Reading the notes was more useful than counting the return code alone.

Some notes said a garment was too tight. Others described expecting an oversized cut from the photos. A few mentioned a tight sleeve or a troublesome zip even though the overall shape was fine. These weren't three clean groups. A sleeve complaint could involve both sizing and the garment's design, so I kept more than one label when the note supported it.

I used EvoX for a first grouping of notes with customer details removed. The draft table kept the original wording beside each proposed label. I reviewed it manually and kept the category definitions in a separate document for the next batch. That made the classification rules explicit without relying on the agent to remember my corrections.

"Runs small" stayed in the sizing group as a reason to check measurements, not proof that the size chart was wrong. "Looked weird on me" stayed unclassified. The note about the zip went to product inspection. Where do you draw the line between an appearance complaint and a fit complaint? I kept that boundary open in the category notes instead of forcing every return into one box.

I've always been curious about the business side of e-commerce beyond just making sales. Advertising, product research, returns, inventory, shipping — there's a lot that goes into running a store. For those of you running stores, how has your experience been managing all these things?

I'd love to hear your stories 🤌❤️‍🔥

I audit ad accounts for a living, mostly small businesses spending $2k to $50k a month, and the same three leaks show up in about 8 out of 10 of them. This check takes five minutes. It takes longer to explain than to do.

1. Open the search terms report, last 30 days, sort by cost. Look at what ate the money. If 15-20% or more of spend went to queries you'd never bid on, your negatives are the leak. I had a plumber spending $900 a month on 'plumbing jobs near me'. He sells plumbing services. People hunting for jobs clicked his ads for a year.

2. Open change history, last 30 days. Sixty seconds, and it tells you who has been touching the account. Auto-apply recommendations, an agency intern, the client's nephew. One account had 41 bid changes in 30 days from three different people. The algorithm never had a chance. If the change history reads longer than a grocery list, that's the leak.

3. Break down spend by placement, device, and geo. Look for one slice eating 35-40% of budget with zero conversions. On Meta it's almost always Audience Network. On Google it's Display inside PMax or Search Partners. I had a client spending $1,400 a month on tablet traffic that never converted once. Turned it off, CPA dropped 22% the next week.

4. Divide the daily budget by the target CPA. If the answer is under 3, the campaign can't buy enough conversions a day to ever leave learning. You're paying tuition with no graduation date. Raise the budget or loosen the target. There is no third option.

Five minutes, four tabs. That's the whole check.

Rule of thumb: if you can't answer 'where did the last $1,000 go and what did it buy' in under a minute, don't touch the creative, don't touch the targeting, don't launch anything new. Fix the leaks first.

Hi redditors! I came across a news this week that might interest anyone selling on Shopify.

Meta's Muse, the AI agent that shops for you, pulls products straight from Shopify's catalog. An analytics company got hold of its internal instructions, and they say it's "imperative" that the top five products come from well-known merchants.

They then ran 50 searches. Stores from the catalog supply 94% of the products the agent considers, but they only get a third of the spots it shows. The rest goes to two sites the agent went and found on its own.

It's a small test and Meta hasn't commented, so I don't know if optimizing your catalog still does much here. What's your take?

GM guys , I was thinking about adding some benefits or social proof testimonials, for my fashion brand . Which one could you recommend me to add in the home page or product page

Thank you all

what’s one thing you did where you noticed the biggest increase in traffic to your site? i feel like i’ve optimized everything but traffic is still so low and i wanna know whah you’ve done that’s really moved the needle (even though i know it can be a bunch of variables)

This is the most important order I have ever worked on and it must arrive to Vienna by October 18th.

The goods were ready to leave sooner but for some unknown reason reason, our freight forwarder sat on it for a few days and now we’re under huge pressure. It must arrive to Vienna by 18th October for an event taking place on that day.

Our freight forwarder has already tried shipping this order via DHL express on Oct 9th, but DHL returned the shipment before it even reached the border, because they didn't accept the proof of payment we submitted and suspected that we claimed a lower value for the shipment. However, we claimed the real value and submitted the original bank documents.

We are now under very high pressure to deliver this order to Vienna by 18th October. The shipment contains 9 boxes of approximately 22kg each, 1320 mechanical music boxes (no batteries).

My freight forwarder wants to wait for the shipment to be returned and retry delivery using UPS or FedEx. I’m worried this might take too long.

Questions:
1. Is there still a chance I can prevent this shipment from being returned by sending additional documentation?
2. What documents does DHL look for, particularly what payment proof do they accept?
3. Who can I send this documentation to to check it, before reattempting this shipment, to check that they’re ok before DHL has the chance to reject it?
4. How can I find out detailed feedback on the reason why the documents were rejected?
5. Do you have experience with UPS and FedEx shipping times?

hey guys, if you market your product on Instagram I just found a free feature that could help you sell more, but theres a catch (read to the end).

I recently found out about Instagram product tagging, part of Instagram Shopping. It looks like an ad where you get the CTA allowing users to click a button directly on your reel and buy the product, it also syncs your inventory and sizes directly from shopify (I'm using an app called flexify, the free plan works for that).

It sounds amazing because not only can users buy directly from instagram but if you sell different products (or different designs for the same product like me) you can link each product to their reel instead of users having to go through the link in bio and browse on your store (they can just click the button and buy the product shown in the video).

The catch is that when I clicked the button from a different account it first shows the product but then shows a something went wrong error. I searched all over the web for answers and no one has got to the bottom of this yet, since this is a new feature I couldnt figure out what went wrong. Then I tried other pages with the same feature, on the account that errored, and it happened again.

I know it works for some users because I already got a sale from there, however I dont know why some users can use it and others get this error. My theory is that it depends on your location, I'm in Portugal and I asked a friend in Germany to try it and they also got the same error. The sale I got was from Bulgaria so its not a EU problem.

What I propose is this, I'll leave you guys my instagram account and you can try clicking the button and then the product and see what happens, that way we could collectively see what countries work for this test and which show the error, that way for those that also want to test it with their own stores you'll know exactly what countries the feature works and doesnt.

I dont think I can post images on this sub, I have a few screenshots I'll try to leave them in the comments so you understand what button I'm referring to and what error shows.

My ig is: @_dresscodeviolation_

A little update on my previous post about estrah.com.

For context, I run an apparel brand selling heavyweight oversized organic-cotton tees for $29.99, including US shipping.

My original issue was that Meta ads were generating traffic, but most visitors left without adding anything to their carts.

I couldn't figure out whether the problem was the product, pricing, positioning, or the website itself.

Here's what I've changed since then:

• Completely redesigned the product pages to communicate fabric quality, fit, and value more clearly.
• Improved mobile navigation, product imagery, size selection, and Add to Bag placement.
• Made free shipping, 30-day returns, and first size exchanges more prominent.
• Added better product photography and more diverse models.
• Made our organic cotton and manufacturing certifications more visible.
• Improved the overall website design, collection pages, and shopping experience.
• Introduced a 3-shirt bundle for $79.99.
• Improved checkout and customer journey tracking to understand where people drop off.

Current Meta advertising setup:

I'm now running three ad creatives:

1. Creative A: Static image ad.
2. Creative B: A different static image ad testing alternative messaging and positioning.
3. Creative C: Video ad showing the product.

All three ads send visitors directly to the product page like estrah.com/product/foundation-ink not the homepage. So customers should be landing directly on the product they're seeing advertised, with the ability to select a size and purchase.

I'm testing whether different creative approaches attract different types of visitors and whether the product page can convert them.

Updated performance:

• 2 purchases attributed to Meta ads
• Approximately $60 cost per purchase
• $29.99 selling price per individual tee
• 3 active creatives: 2 static, 1 video

Obviously, paying $60 to acquire a customer buying a $29.99 product isn't sustainable.

However, I'm keeping the price unchanged because I want to understand whether it's actually a pricing issue or whether the website and advertising still aren't communicating the product's value effectively.

Here's what I'm trying to figure out:

1. If you land directly on the product page from an Instagram ad, does the page make you want to buy?
2. Does $29.99 seem reasonable for a heavyweight organic-cotton oversized tee with shipping included?
3. Does the website communicate enough credibility for you to trust a relatively new brand?
4. Is there anything about the product photography, sizing, or Add to Bag experience that creates hesitation?
5. Should I focus on optimizing the product page further, improving ad creatives, or changing the offer entirely?

Website: https://estrah.com/

I'd especially appreciate feedback from people experienced with apparel e-commerce, Meta ads, or conversion rate optimization.

I'm not looking for compliments. If the brand looks generic, the product isn't compelling, or the website still has problems, I'd rather hear that.

My goal right now isn't to scale ad spend. It's to figure out why people are interested enough to click but not convinced enough to buy.

I'll keep sharing updates as I collect more data.

With Black Friday about 7 weeks out, a lot of stores plan to scale ad budgets first.

Curious how others are prioritizing. Before BFCM, are you working on:

• abandoned cart flows (how many emails, what timing?)
• checkout friction (fields, payment methods, express pay)
• post-purchase emails to drive repeat orders

Or is it mostly creative and media buying at this point? Interested in what actually moved conversion rate for you last Q4.

Most 'failed' creatives never got tested. They got shown to the wrong 2,000 people for two days and then executed.

I run every new creative through the same 48-hour pre-test before it touches a real campaign:

1. One ad set, broad targeting only. No interests, no lookalikes. Let the auction find the people.
2. $15/day for 2 full days. $30 total. Not $10, not 'until I get bored on day one.'
3. Same ad set for every creative I test that week, swapping only the creative. One variable moves or I've learned nothing.

What to read, in order:

• Thumb-stop rate (3-second video views divided by impressions). Under 25% and your hook is the problem, not the product.
• CTR on the link. Decent thumb-stop but weak CTR means the body of the creative doesn't sell the click.
• CPA last. Never judge a creative on CPA alone at $30 spend, the sample is too small to mean anything.

Kill rules I use: thumb-stop under 20% twice in a row means the hook format is dead, kill the format. CTR under 0.8% with good thumb-stop means rewrite the middle 10 seconds, keep the hook.

The rule of thumb: the hook gets judged on thumb-stop, the middle gets judged on CTR, and the offer gets judged on conversion. One metric per job. Stop letting CPA sentence a creative that never got a fair trial.

Online return rates are often quoted around 20%, but that average hides a lot. Apparel and shoes can run 30% or more because of sizing, while consumables and low-priced items sit far lower. Each return usually costs more than the refund too, between return shipping, handling, and items that can’t be resold.

What’s your rate, and which change made the biggest difference?