u/adventurepaul

This Week's Top E-commerce News Stories 💥 May 18th, 2026

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). Although my news recaps aren't strictly about Shopify (some weeks Shopify is covered more than others), 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: Shopify released early data showing that shoppers arriving at its storefronts from AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude convert at nearly 50% higher rates and carry 14% higher average order values than those arriving from organic search. AI-referred orders on Shopify grew nearly 13x YoY in Q1 2026, while referral sessions from AI chatbots grew more than 8x in the same period, though organic search still refers more sessions to Shopify merchants than all tracked AI platforms combined. Shopify attributes the quality gap to “journey compression,” where AI search collapses the discovery and consideration phases of shopping into a single conversation, with more than half of AI-referred sessions starting on product detail pages compared to about 20% for organic search.

OpenAI added a new “product feed” campaign option to ChatGPT that lets merchants generate ads directly from their product catalogs rather than building them one by one, similar to Google Shopping or PMax campaigns. Retailers have been able to upload their product catalogs to ChatGPT since around September 2025 so that it could ingest their product data to surface in organic answers, but there was no option to connect that data to paid ads until now. Brands had to build each product ad one by one. Digiday notes that ads from product feed campaigns still appear in the same placement as other ChatGPT ads, below the organic answer and clearly labeled as sponsored. OpenAI appears to be testing the campaigns with ad partners like Criteo, and no public launch has been announced yet.

Amazon is sunsetting its Rufus shopping assistant and replacing him with Alexa for Shopping, an AI agent that merges Rufus with Alexa+ and taps into users' shopping history to answer questions, compare products side by side, create personal shopping guides, and schedule purchases when an item hits a target price. The tool will be inserted directly into Amazon's search results, with a chat window appearing when users browse for products, and can be summoned via a cursive A icon on Amazon's website and app or through Echo Show displays, with no Prime membership required. What users share with Alexa on their Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices will now inform their shopping experience on Amazon, and their Amazon browsing and purchases will flow back to Alexa across all their devices to create a more personalized experience over time. Alexa for Shopping also taps into Amazon's “Buy for Me” agentic feature to handle purchases from non-Amazon retailers, replacing Rufus as the engine powering those off-Amazon transactions.

President Trump visited Beijing on Wednesday for his first state visit to China since 2017, marking the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited China in nearly a decade. The President was accompanied by a ragtag group of CEOs and executives including Apple's Tim Cook, Tesla's Elon Musk, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, BlackRock's Larry Fink, Goldman Sachs' David Solomon, Citigroup's Jane Fraser, Boeing's Kelly Ortberg, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, and GE Aerospace's H. Lawrence Culp. After the trip, Trump announced that China agreed to purchase 200 Boeing aircraft and $17B/year in U.S. agriculture, to establish a new "Board of Trade" and "Board of Investment" to oversee future tariff and investment decisions, and to "address U.S. concerns" over its export controls on rare earth minterals. However, the two Presidents were unable to come to terms on Taiwan or Iran, nor did they discuss tariffs, computer chips, or de minimis. Though later Trump mentioned that Nvidia did not secure Chinese approval to sell its H200 AI chips in China, so sounds like it did get discussed at some point.

YouTube announced a slate of new media, creator, and advertising updates at its Brandcast 2026 event in New York City last week including Buy with Google Pay, which brings two-click checkout to Connected TVs, Custom Sponsorships, which uses AI to match brands with cultural moments, Affiliate Partnerships Boost, which lets brands amplify organic creator content (my favorite announcement), multimodal video creation that pulls Gemini, Nano Banana, and Veo into the ad creation process, and new Creator Shows, aiming to position YouTube as "the new Hollywood." CEO Neal Mohan declared “the YouTube Era,” framing Brandcast 2026 as a milestone where YouTube has officially overtaken traditional TV, with executives positioning the platform as a full-funnel destination where brand building and performance marketing can coexist on a single platform. YouTube generated $36.1B in global ad revenue in 2024 and grew it to approximately $40B+ in 2025, with total YouTube revenue (ads + subscriptions) surpassing $60B for the first time, according to Alphabet.

OpenAI is preparing possible legal action against Apple, including a potential breach of contract notice, over its two-year-old ChatGPT integration partnership, which failed to meet its expectations, according to Bloomberg sources. OpenAI believed that the companies' partnership would encourage more users to subscribe to ChatGPT, and expected a deeper integration across more Apple apps and prominent placement within Siri, but says none of that happened. The company claims that Apple designed the integration in a way that requires users to speak or type the word “ChatGPT” when entering a command into Siri in order to get results from OpenAI, and that responses have been more constrained than those available through ChatGPT's standalone app, appearing in a small window with limited information. To make matters worse, OpenAI is set to lose its unique role within Apple software when iOS 27 launches on June 8 with chatbots from Anthropic and Google joining the platform through its upcoming Extensions feature. Not to mention, the deal that Apple made with Google last year to power Siri with Gemini models, an arrangement that OpenAI was also bidding for.

TikTok announced a wave of new products this week, with many of the announcements coming out of its sixth annual TikTok World event in New York City, including updates across advertising, AI, in-app travel booking, gaming, and counterfeit protection. Highlights from the announcements include TikTok GO expanding to the U.S. and Japan, TopReach getting a new creative sequencing update that merges TopView and TopFeed into a single one-day-reach buy, a new tool called Branded Buzz that lets advertisers alert eligible TikTok One creators with specific campaign parameters and brand guidelines to receive video responses, and a new brand-controllled destination called Search Hubs that gives brands top-of-search real estate. Additionally, Symphony AI added new genreation tools, Smart+ Campaigns got AI upgrades, and TikTok opened its ads platform to outside AI agents via MCP server.

In other TikTok news... TikTok's ad-free subscription launched in the U.K. The £3.99 ($5.44) per month plan for users 18 and older lets subscribers skip ads and opt out of having their data used for advertising, while helping TikTok comply with GDPR and generate new subscription revenue. The move follows similar rollouts by Meta on Facebook and Instagram in the U.K. last year.

Amazon officially launched its 30-minute “Amazon Now” delivery service across dozens of U.S. cities, with thousands of items available, including fresh groceries, household essentials, healthcare items, baby and pet products, electronics, and alcohol. Amazon Now soft-launched in Seattle and Philadelphia in December 2025, before expanding to international markets at the start of 2026 and eventually making its debut in dozens of U.S. cities this month including Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Minneapolis, Orlando, Phoenix, Denver, and Oklahoma City. The service costs $3.99 per order for Prime members or $13.99 for non-members, plus a small basket fee of $1.99 (Prime) or $3.99 (non-Prime) for orders under $15, and is available in most areas 24 hours a day. The move puts Amazon in direct competition with Instacart, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Walmart's Express Delivery service. However, Amazon Now's $3.99 Prime fee is higher than what Instacart and DoorDash charge their paying members, who typically get free delivery on qualifying orders, but roughly on par with Walmart Express Delivery's surcharge, though Amazon's 30-minute delivery window beats Walmart's 1-hour promise.

BREAKING: Elon Musk lost his case against OpenAI. After just two hours of deliberation following three weeks of testimony and legal arguments, the nine-member jury and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected Elon Musk's claims that OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman violated a charitable trust and unjustly enriched themselves by converting the lab from a charity into a largely for-profit company, ruling that the statute of limitations had expired. The jury and judge agreed with OpenAI's lawyers that Musk already knew (or could have found out) about the actions he claims were unjust by the time he posted on X in 2020 that “OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.” Musk's lawyer Steven Molo said his team intends to appeal, arguing that the jury didn't decide whether a breach actually occurred and that the appeals court can decide whether the jury received proper instructions about the statute of limitations. NOTE: This news broke right after I sent this week's edition, which recapped testimonies from last week.

Affirm announced plans for Affirm Edge, a new product that enables banks and credit unions to offer Affirm's BNPL and installment loans directly inside their native apps. The product will be sold through tech resellers FIS and Fiserv, with Affirm originating and servicing the loans, while customers will be able to see their purchasing power and browse Affirm's marketplace without leaving their bank's app. The move targets a $140B addressable market based on 130M active US debit card users and puts Affirm in direct competition with lenders like equipifi, Amount, and Alliance Data, which offer similar embedded BNPL programs for financial institutions.

eBay rejected GameStop's $56B takeover offer, with eBay's board calling the unsolicited bid “neither credible nor attractive” due to uncertainty around the financing plan, operational risks, and GameStop's governance. Cohen had offered $125 a share (50% cash, 50% GameStop stock) representing a 20% premium, but investors responded skeptically given that GameStop's $10B market value is less than a fourth of eBay's, and the company planned to borrow $20B to finance the acquisition. The rejection leaves Cohen with the option to pursue a proxy fight to replace eBay board members, which he previously said he would do if the board turned down his offer.

Apple is exploring ways to better incorporate AI agents into its App Store without letting them bypass its rules around privacy, security, and most important to Apple — billing, according to The Information sources. Apple's rules are designed to prevent apps from bypassing its fees and distributing unvetted software, both of which AI agents can do by spinning up smaller apps on the spot to perform tasks after Apple has already approved the parent app. Sources shared that Apple is designing a system that adheres to its privacy and security standards while still embracing the agentic trend. No other details were provided about the solution, though they may be revealed at Apple's upcoming developer conference in June.

Amazon employees are “tokenmaxxing” to inflate their AI usage, creating extraneous AI agents on the company's internal MeshClaw tool to climb the leaderboard, as the company pressures them to maximize AI adoption. Employees claim Amazon has a target of 80% of developers using AI each week and tracks token consumption on an internal leaderboard, though an Amazon representative said no such company-wide metric or competitive leaderboard exists, only personal dashboards. Why is it that companies can't seem to afford the slightest bit of labor overages, but have no problem blowing up their AI token expenses? Amazon told employees that their tokenmaxxing would not be a factor in their performance reviews, however, multiple employees told the Financial Times that they worried managers watched it anyway, with one saying that there was “so much pressure” to use the tools.

The European Commission is planning to take action against “addictive design” features on TikTok and Instagram including endless scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications, with new regulation expected later this year, according to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The Commission is also investigating platforms that allow children to go down “rabbit holes” of harmful content like videos that promote eating disorders or self-harm, and has developed its own age verification app that can be integrated into member states' digital wallets and enforced by online platforms. Leyen said, “No more excuses – the technology for age-verification is available.” The crackdown follows the EU's recent finding that Meta breached the Digital Services Act by failing to keep children under 13 off its platforms.

Anthropic warned investors to avoid eight secondary marketplaces of the company's shares, telling investors that buying the stock won't work because the firms offering access to unauthorized shares are “in violation of our transfer restrictions.” Marketplaces mentioned include Hiive, Forge Global, Sydecar, Open Door Partners, Lionheart Ventures, UpMarket, Unicorns Exchange, and Pachamama. (Unrelated but interesting: Pachamama translates to “Mother Earth” in Quechua, a native language used in Ecuador, and I see the word quite often down here.) The company also warned investors against accepting unsolicited offers for shares or requests to pay using cryptocurrencies, adding that anyone sending an Anthropic stock certificate to the general public “is very likely engaged in fraud.” Just to clarify, Anthropic does allow secondary trading, but only through authorized channels like company-led tender offers or pre-approved direct sales.

Omnisend launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration that lets merchants tap the platform directly inside ChatGPT to analyze marketing performance, identify revenue opportunities, and create campaigns using plain-language prompts. Users can ask questions like “What drove my revenue over the last 7 days?” or prompt the tool to “Create a reactivation campaign for customers who haven't purchased in 30 days,” after connecting their Omnisend account within ChatGPT and approving access. The launch comes a few months after Klaviyo rolled out its own ChatGPT app in January that offers similar functionality.

Meta employees are circulating flyers in meeting rooms, on vending machines, and even on top of toilet paper dispensers at U.S. offices to protest the company's Agent Transformation Accelerator program, which installs software on employee computers to track mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes to train AI agents. (As a reminder that was my “Most Ridiculous Story” from Edition #275 a few weeks ago.) The flyers, which ask “Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?,” cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act and direct workers to an online petition to fight the surveillance. The petition website reads, “Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace.” Meanwhile, workers in the U.K. are organizing a unionization campaign with United Tech and Allied Workers to fight the power. The backlash around the surveillance program is intensified by Meta's planned May 20 layoffs, during which the company will cut 10% of its workforce.

Amazon denied a recent Reuters report that said the company was developing an AI-focused phone codenamed Transformer that is designed to sync with Alexa and serve as a portal to Amazon's digital services. The company said, “Do you think we're as fucking dumb as OpenAI?” Okay, not really, but they were probably thinking it. Amazon's devices and services head Panos Panay told the Financial Times that building a new smartphone is “just not the goal” and that there's “no clear path that makes sense.” Panay also said that there were “so many new form factors that are important that need to be focused on,” leading me to believe that Amazon is instead prioritizing the development of other devices to complement or replace the phone, including wearables like smart glasses, pins, or 1980s style headbands that feature dual-facing cameras, voice-activated AI, and bold, neon colors for that authentic vintage workout look.

Google published a new guide called “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search” that consolidates the company's advice on how site owners should approach AI Mode, AI Overviews, and other generative AI features within Google Search. The document covers SEO best practices, creating “non-commodity” content with a unique point of view, building a clear technical structure, and optimizing for local business and e-commerce details. Google also includes a section busting common myths about AI optimization, including that site owners do NOT need LLMS.txt files, special markup, “chunked” content, content rewritten for AI systems, inauthentic mentions, or an over-focus on structured data, essentially saying that good SEO is still good AI optimization. The guide has received pushback and criticism from SEO experts for spewing advice that benefits Google and not actually webmasters. It's also important to note that while Google has historically been (and still is) the authority on search optimization, since it essentially designed the category, it's one of many players in the AI space, and its advice doesn't necessarily reflect best practices for all AI platforms.

Revolut is offering each of its 10,000+ employees £1,000 to bring in new business customers, though exact details about how the bonus works weren't disclosed. The company plans to launch business banking alongside its retail product in every new market it enters in 2027, introduce credit products for businesses next year, and build a dedicated new business growth and onboarding department, as it targets an IPO valuation of $150B to $200B as soon as 2028. CEO Nik Storonsky declared business banking the company's top priority in a memo to staff on Friday and asked employees across all departments to push for sales and send pitches directly to him to “deliver on these aggressive targets.” Revolut Business accounted for just 16% of the company's £4.5B in revenue in 2025, despite having almost 800,000 business customers (up 33% from the prior year).

Google is testing a new reCAPTCHA system that replaces image-based verification tests with requiring the visitor to scan a QR code on their mobile phone to prove they are human. The new system, which has been in development since October 2025 and just now being spotted in the wild, works through Google Play Services on Android phones or through a dedicated reCAPTCHA app on iPhones. First off, I hate it. Secondly, how dare you Google? I can't stand the 2FA movement that has plagued desktop browsing for the past decade. It's bad enough that I need my phone to login to literally every service I use. Now I'll need it to simply view a webpage that I have no account with? Ridiculous! Aside from the cumbersome process, many folks have raised concerns about how the reCAPTCHA update effectively links your phone identity to your browsing activity regardless of what desktop device you're using. This is exactly what I meant when I posted on LinkedIn yesterday about Google inching towards closing the open web.

In lawsuits this week…

Anthropic's proposed $1.5B settlement with authors over pirated books used to train Claude hit a delay after a US District Judge declined to grant final approval and pressed lawyers for more detail on attorneys' fees and lead plaintiff payments.
Sezzle scored a partial win in its antitrust lawsuit against Shopify after a US District Court judge allowed its claims that Shopify abused its monopoly power to move forward, dismissing only a narrower claim that Shopify illegally forced merchants to bundle Shop Pay Installments with its platform.
Santa Clara County, California sued Meta over allegations that the company “knowingly facilitates and profits from billions of scam advertisements,” particularly against seniors and families on Facebook and Instagram, building its case on a report last year from Reuters.
TikTok will have to face Massachusetts' lawsuit alleging that the platform is intentionally designed to be addictive and harmful to young users after a state judge rejected the company's argument that it is shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settled the first lawsuit of its kind alleging that social media addiction has cost public schools massive amounts of money, brought by Kentucky's Breathitt County School District, with terms undisclosed. Meta is still facing trial in the same case, which is viewed as a bellwether for over 1,200 similar lawsuits filed by school districts nationwide.
Amazon is facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by consumers seeking refunds for hundreds of millions of dollars in higher prices passed on to them from Trump tariffs that the US Supreme Court ruled unlawful in February, with the suit accusing Amazon of failing to seek government refunds like other companies have in order to “curry favor with Trump.”
Shein accused Temu of copyright infringement “on an industrial scale” as a two-week trial opened at London's High Court, with Shein claiming Temu lifted thousands of images shot by its staff to market direct copies or near-identical matches of Shein's own products. The trial stems from a case Shein filed last year.
OpenAI is being sued by Vandana Joshi, the widow of a victim killed in the April 2025 Florida State University mass shooting, who claims ChatGPT contributed to the tragedy by advising the shooter on the optimal location, time of day, gun type, and ammunition to maximize casualties.
OpenAI is also being sued by the family of 19-year-old University of California, Merced sophomore Sam Nelson, who died of a drug overdose in May 2025, with the lawsuit alleging that ChatGPT recommended a dangerous combination of kratom, Xanax, and Benadryl without warning that the mix could be fatal.
Meta and Google must face a class-action lawsuit alleging Meta secretly tracked Android users' browsing activity through its analytics pixel and linked it to their Facebook and Instagram accounts between September 2024 and June 2025, with Google accused of negligence for designing Android in a way that allowed it.
Google's $50M settlement of a 2022 racial discrimination class action filed by Black employees received final court approval last week, with the suit alleging the company steered Black workers into lower-paid roles and deemed Black job candidates “not ‘Googly' enough.” Damn, what exactly does being “Googly enough” even mean in this context? White or Indian, apparently?
Amazon MGM Studios was sued by post-production vendor Joe Eckardt, owner of Unbreakable Post, who alleges he was blackballed from at least $1M worth of work after refusing to pay kickbacks to Frank Salinas, the head of unscripted post-production at the studio.

In layoffs this week…

Amazon cut a “small number” of roles in its Selling Partner Services organization this week, the team that works with millions of third-party merchants on onboarding, logistics, and account support. The reductions follow roughly 30,000 job cuts announced in waves last October and January, plus a small round of cuts in Amazon's robotics division in March.

In corporate shakeups this week…

DeepIntent, a healthcare-focused demand-side platform, named Ian Colley as its new CMO, succeeding Adam Kapel who left the company in 2024, after Colley departed The Trade Desk where he served as CMO for the past seven years.
Anthropic is hiring an “Applied AI Claude Evangelist” with an annual salary between $240,000 and $315,000 to work with startups, venture capitalists, and accelerators to help them adopt Anthropic's products. Forward Deployed Engineers, a role Palantir created in 2011 to combine solutions and integration engineering, have become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech, with job postings up 800% between January and September 2025.
Alentr, a contextual AI pricing governance platform, named Richard Jackson as its new Chief Revenue Officer, joining from BigCommerce where he led agency channel partnerships across Northern Europe.
Roblox named John Ciancutti as its first-ever Chief Growth Officer to lead its discovery team and international expansion, joining from Amazon where he led product and engineering for Amazon Music.

The Dutch central bank De Nederlandsche Bank announced it is moving its essential cloud services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to Schwarz Digits, the data services arm of the Lidl supermarket group, originally built to support the retailer's grocery business but now a secure data services provider to European businesses and governments. Nice pivot! Dutch Justice and Security Minister David van Weel called it “an important step in reducing our dependence on parties outside Europe and strengthening our digital resilience.” The move is part of a broader trend of European companies seeking to decouple their digital assets from American infrastructure, driven in part by the 2018 US Cloud Act, which can require American tech operators to hand over data to US authorities even when stored in Europe.

Meta offered to give rival AI chatbots free access to its WhatsApp Business API for one month while it discusses ways to resolve EU antitrust concerns, which could cost the company a fine of up to 10% of its annual global turnover if not resolved. In January, Meta banned all other AI assistants from sending messages through WhatsApp, and then later amended the new policy in March, after taking heat from the EU, to allow rivals to send messages for a fee. As the EU continues to push against the anticompetitive behavior, Meta is offering more allowances, including the free month offer, which EU regulators called a “step in the right direction.”

Walmart asked Flipkart to defer its IPO and any other external fundraising for the foreseeable future to instead focus on reaching EBITDA breakeven before the end of financial year 2027. The decision was made during Walmart CEO and President John Furner's first visit to Bengaluru since assuming the role in February, where he met with Flipkart's leadership team. Walmart currently owns 80% of Flipkart and 71.8% of PhonePe, an Indian digital payments platform that spun out of Flipkart in 2022, but is in no hurry to go public with either company. It first wants to bring some classic Walmart-style fiscal responsibility to the businesses before allowing the public markets to infuse the companies with fresh cash.

Amazon India expanded health and insurance coverage to nearly 90,000 delivery associates across its operations network, with mediclaim coverage increased up to ₹1.5 lakh, OPD expenses of up to ₹10,000 now covered, and group personal accident coverage expanded up to ₹10 lakh. The wellness benefits cover associates and up to three family members annually, including unlimited multilingual virtual doctor consultations, two free in-person OPD visits per family each year, and discounts on diagnostics, pharmacy, dental, and eye care. My first thought, of course, was: Why not offer the same in the U.S.? The answer, I'm guessing, is that although Amazon India uses the same DSP-based gig worker structure as the U.S., where drivers are technically employed by third-party delivery partners rather than Amazon, doing the same in the U.S. would undermine the legal structure that protects Amazon from being treated as a joint employer of DSP workers. The move is likely also for competitive reasons, as Amazon faces intense competition for drivers from quick commerce players like Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed an executive order to eliminate federal taxes on foreign purchases worth up to $50, reversing a highly unpopular tax in the country that he himself imposed in August 2023 after receiving pressure from Brazilian retailers who argued they couldn't compete with foreign platforms like Shein and Temu that were shipping cheap goods into the country without the same tax burden as domestic retailers. The move is one of many that Lula is taking to win support with voters, which also includes initiating a government-backed consumer debt renegotiation program that offers up to 90% discounts on renegotiated debts. Talk about “buying” an election! Yet at the same time, I reported last week that Brazil held firm at the WTO General Council meeting in Geneva in its opposition to a four-year extension on a global moratorium on e-commerce tariffs, arguing that the country is losing billions of dollars a year by not being able to tax digital purchases. So taxes on foreign goods or no taxes? Brazil can't seem to make up its mind.

🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was practically booed off stage during his commencement address at the University of Arizona on Friday after he began talking about AI and its impact on the workforce. As the shouts intensified, Schmidt said, “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear. There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.” He went on to call those fears “rational,” before saying, “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” Statements which I'm sure were not at all that reassuring to a generation entering a job environment that may prove to be worse than what Millennials walked into.

Plus 19 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Shein acquiring Everlane for $100M.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 1 day ago

▲ 8 r/ecommerce

E-commerce Industry News Recap 🔥 Week of May 18th, 2026

Hi r/ecommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Every week for the past 5 years I've posted a summary recap of the week's top stories on this subreddit, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition.

Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news...

In lawsuits this week…

Anthropic's proposed $1.5B settlement with authors over pirated books used to train Claude hit a delay after a US District Judge declined to grant final approval and pressed lawyers for more detail on attorneys' fees and lead plaintiff payments.
Sezzle scored a partial win in its antitrust lawsuit against Shopify after a US District Court judge allowed its claims that Shopify abused its monopoly power to move forward, dismissing only a narrower claim that Shopify illegally forced merchants to bundle Shop Pay Installments with its platform.
Santa Clara County, California sued Meta over allegations that the company “knowingly facilitates and profits from billions of scam advertisements,” particularly against seniors and families on Facebook and Instagram, building its case on a report last year from Reuters.
TikTok will have to face Massachusetts' lawsuit alleging that the platform is intentionally designed to be addictive and harmful to young users after a state judge rejected the company's argument that it is shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settled the first lawsuit of its kind alleging that social media addiction has cost public schools massive amounts of money, brought by Kentucky's Breathitt County School District, with terms undisclosed. Meta is still facing trial in the same case, which is viewed as a bellwether for over 1,200 similar lawsuits filed by school districts nationwide.
Amazon is facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by consumers seeking refunds for hundreds of millions of dollars in higher prices passed on to them from Trump tariffs that the US Supreme Court ruled unlawful in February, with the suit accusing Amazon of failing to seek government refunds like other companies have in order to “curry favor with Trump.”
Shein accused Temu of copyright infringement “on an industrial scale” as a two-week trial opened at London's High Court, with Shein claiming Temu lifted thousands of images shot by its staff to market direct copies or near-identical matches of Shein's own products. The trial stems from a case Shein filed last year.
OpenAI is being sued by Vandana Joshi, the widow of a victim killed in the April 2025 Florida State University mass shooting, who claims ChatGPT contributed to the tragedy by advising the shooter on the optimal location, time of day, gun type, and ammunition to maximize casualties.
OpenAI is also being sued by the family of 19-year-old University of California, Merced sophomore Sam Nelson, who died of a drug overdose in May 2025, with the lawsuit alleging that ChatGPT recommended a dangerous combination of kratom, Xanax, and Benadryl without warning that the mix could be fatal.
Meta and Google must face a class-action lawsuit alleging Meta secretly tracked Android users' browsing activity through its analytics pixel and linked it to their Facebook and Instagram accounts between September 2024 and June 2025, with Google accused of negligence for designing Android in a way that allowed it.
Google's $50M settlement of a 2022 racial discrimination class action filed by Black employees received final court approval last week, with the suit alleging the company steered Black workers into lower-paid roles and deemed Black job candidates “not ‘Googly' enough.” Damn, what exactly does being “Googly enough” even mean in this context? White or Indian, apparently?
Amazon MGM Studios was sued by post-production vendor Joe Eckardt, owner of Unbreakable Post, who alleges he was blackballed from at least $1M worth of work after refusing to pay kickbacks to Frank Salinas, the head of unscripted post-production at the studio.

In layoffs this week…

Amazon cut a “small number” of roles in its Selling Partner Services organization this week, the team that works with millions of third-party merchants on onboarding, logistics, and account support. The reductions follow roughly 30,000 job cuts announced in waves last October and January, plus a small round of cuts in Amazon's robotics division in March.

In corporate shakeups this week…

DeepIntent, a healthcare-focused demand-side platform, named Ian Colley as its new CMO, succeeding Adam Kapel who left the company in 2024, after Colley departed The Trade Desk where he served as CMO for the past seven years.
Anthropic is hiring an “Applied AI Claude Evangelist” with an annual salary between $240,000 and $315,000 to work with startups, venture capitalists, and accelerators to help them adopt Anthropic's products. Forward Deployed Engineers, a role Palantir created in 2011 to combine solutions and integration engineering, have become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech, with job postings up 800% between January and September 2025.
Alentr, a contextual AI pricing governance platform, named Richard Jackson as its new Chief Revenue Officer, joining from BigCommerce where he led agency channel partnerships across Northern Europe.
Roblox named John Ciancutti as its first-ever Chief Growth Officer to lead its discovery team and international expansion, joining from Amazon where he led product and engineering for Amazon Music.

Plus 19 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Shein acquiring Everlane for $100M.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 1 day ago

▲ 22 r/shopify

This Week's Top E-commerce News Stories 💥 May 11th, 2026

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), 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: Anthropic's new Mythos AI model helped Firefox ship 423 bug fixes in April 2026, compared to just 31 fixes a year earlier. Mozilla researchers said the model is finding sandbox vulnerabilities at a higher rate than human researchers, with Mythos uncovering some bugs that had been dormant in the code for over a decade.

Last month I reported that the World Trade Organization's 28-year global moratorium on e-commerce tariffs expired without renewal at the organization's 14th ministerial conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon, after Brazil and Turkey blocked an extension. The WTO General Council met in Geneva to try and break the deadlock, but Brazil held firm in its opposition to a four-year extension, though Turkey finally dropped its objection. Brazil's argument is essentially: why should developing countries subsidize U.S. tech while taxing their own homegrown solutions? Although I'm an American, I tend to agree with them. With full consensus still not reached, 19 countries including the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, Norway, and Argentina launched a plurilateral pact among themselves not to impose duties on electronic transmissions for an unspecified period, which took effect May 8. The agreement invited other countries to join the pact.

Amazon launched Amazon Supply Chain Services, a new service that opens its full portfolio of freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping capabilities to all businesses, regardless of whether they sell on Amazon Marketplace. The move to tie together all of its supply-chain services in one place puts Amazon in direct competition with international transportation and warehousing giants like DSV, DHL Group, and Kuehne + Nagel International, and positions the company to take a chunk of the $1.3 trillion global market for third-party logistics services. Amazon is seeking to attract industries far beyond retail into its logistics ecosystem such as healthcare, automotive, and manufacturing. For example, Procter & Gamble is using Amazon's freight network to ship raw materials to production facilities, and 3M is moving products from manufacturing sites to distribution centers worldwide. The markets reacted to the news with UPS and FedEx share prices dropping 10% and 9% respectively, plus double-digit declines for GXO Logistics and Forward Air.

OpenAI expanded its ChatGPT ads platform with a new new Ads Manager allows businesses to register as advertisers, set budgets, bids, and pacing, launch and manage campaigns, and view performance in the portal. Previously, advertisers had to work directly with OpenAI's sales team or go through agency partners like Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, or WPP to buy and manage ChatGPT ads, with limited reporting or insights available to advertisers. Additionally, OpenAI added CPC bidding to its offering, whereas the company previously only offered ads on a CPM basis during the pilot. Two days after the Ads Manager and CPC news, OpenAI announced that it would expand its ChatGPT ads pilot to the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea in the coming weeks. Entonces, prepárate para anuncios en español pronto. Y también… konnichiwa!

Shopify launched new ChatGPT and Claude connector apps that let merchants manage their entire store from within either AI assistant, including the ability to do things like look up orders, update product prices, and ask how new collections are selling. The launch follows last month's release of the Shopify AI Toolkit, which lets developers manage a store through agents like Claude Code and Cursor, while these new connectors are designed for merchants working in ChatGPT or Claude on their phones. Through the connector apps, merchants can perform tasks like uploading a product photo and asking the AI assistants to add the product to their store, requesting custom reporting on demand, or quickly applying discounts across a particular collection. Really cool stuff, but I'm personally hesitant to connect either AI assistant to my live Shopify store yet. I'll be testing the waters on a development store to begin with, which you should probably do too. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Shopify has also has begun quietly rolling out native llms.txt files to stores without an official announcement yet, as spotted by Anton Ekström. The file, which is accessible at yourstore-com/llms.txt, includes store metadata like currency and contact details, direct links to product listings and search, agent instructions via dedicated endpoints, and UCP support and MCP endpoints for programmatic commerce. Funny enough, the file also contains a direct advertisement for Shopify and a call to action to create your own store! LOL, who are they advertising that to? The LLMs?

Meta is building a consumer version of the AI agent OpenClaw and a new agentic shopping tool, according to The Information sources. Meta tried to acquire OpenClaw earlier this year, but its creator, Peter Steinberger, ended up being acqui-hired by OpenAI instead, so this is apparently the company's response. The goal of the OpenClaw-inspired agent, which the company is internally calling “Hatch,” is to be able to perform a range of tasks for users such as ordering food on DoorDash, buying gifts on Etsy, scrolling Reddit, finding restaurants on Yelp, or managing e-mail in Outlook. Meta has already built a “sandboxed” web environment where the agent can be tested on simulations of real websites, with the goal of doing live internal testing by the end of June. Th company also plans to integrate the agentic shopping tool into Instagram and is targeting a launch before Q4 this year, according to sources. A kind of funny detail about this news story is that Hatch is currently being powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 models, instead of a Meta AI model, but the company plans to power the agent with Meta's Muse Spark when it actually launches.

Google released a wave of AI-driven updates to Search, Shopping, and Ads last week ahead of its Marketing Live event on May 20, where the company is expected to announce even more. Recent updates include: 1) Five changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews to make links more visible and clickable to users. 2) Three updates to AI Max that lets Google generate ad copy from GMC feed attributes and run ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as a feature that lets advertisers describe campaign preferences in natural language. 3) A new GMC feature that lets advertisers populate product listings by running a one-time AI scan of their website, bypassing the need to prepare a structured product feed before launching Shopping campaigns. 4) Three new AI-powered bidding and budgeting innovations including a smart bidding exploration expansion that's designed to help Pmax and Shopping campaigns capture more "long tail" queries.

More witnesses have taken the stand in the Elon Musk vs Sam Altman trial, which has revealed shocking new information about OpenAI including: 1) President Greg Brockman confirmed the company is exploring an IPO, and his stake will be worth near $30B despite not having made a financial investment in the company. 2) OpenAI expects to burn $50B in computing power before the end of the year. 3) Sam Altman lied about the safety standards for a new AI model, falsely telling his former CTO that OpenAI's legal team had determined it did not need to go through the company's deployment safety board. 5) Microsoft did not actually want to invest in OpenAI, but feared they would go to Amazon instead and "shit-talk us." Ooo Weee this case is getting juicy! Stay tuned for more.

CEOs across retail, restaurants, and packaged goods have stepped out of their ivory towers to affirmatively declare that consumers are “running out of money” and cutting back on discretionary spending, as gas prices hit $4.56/gal on average, the highest levels since July 2022. Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane said consumers are “literally running out of money at the end of the month,” with negative cash flows in lower-income brackets where shoppers are dipping into savings. McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski took a break from consuming his product to say that confidence among shoppers is worsening, citing “heightened anxiety” and gas prices that disproportionately impact low-income households. Planet Fitness CEO Colleen Keating forgot to wipe down her machine before saying, “the consumer and economic backdrop have shifted,” noting that the gym paused the national rollout of a price increase to its top-tier membership. Bloomberg reports that the average American's savings rate dropped in March to the lowest in three years, and that low-income consumers have already cut back on gasoline consumption and discretionary spending.

A crowdfunding effort to buy and revive Spirit Airlines is picking up steam, with more than 371k travelers pledging more than $337M to acquire the now-defunct airline. Hunter Peterson, a content creator who started the letsbuyspiritair-com website, said that “this started as a joke and this is rapidly going out of control in the best possible way,” and is now seeking developers, public relations professionals, aviation lawyers, and airline executives to help advance the plan. The effort is unlikely to succeed because Spirit is already going through formal liquidation and its assets will be allocated by the bankruptcy court, but as an avid traveler, I support the campaign entirely and made a pledge myself. Though it probably won't lead to the purchase of Spirit, perhaps the campaign will kickstart the launch of a new homegrown traveler-led airline. Let's start with one plane and one route and see where it goes! btw, despite the rumors, Elon Musk is NOT swooping in to buy the airline and change its name to SpiritX.

Klaviyo expanded its integration with Anthropic to bring new agentic marketing workflows to Claude's products, allowing marketers to ask Claude to generate performance summaries, identify customer segments, analyze marketing flows, or propose new campaigns using natural language without having to export data or rebuild dashboards. The updated Klaviyo MCP Connector lets marketers describe an outcome in Claude Cowork like “audit my flows,” “build weekly reports,” or “draft re-engagement campaigns,” with Claude pulling Klaviyo data, generating copy, and saving formatted files to the right folders in a single session. Klaviyo co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Bialecki said that “marketing teams are drowning in reporting and repetitive production work” and that the integration turns Claude into “an agentic surface for Klaviyo.”

AWS launched Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments in preview, a new set of features that lets AI agents instantly access and pay for what they use, including web content, APIs, MCP servers, and other agents. For example, an AI agent could pay for paywalled articles while doing research, buy access to a tool it needs to complete a coding task, or book a flight or hotel on behalf of a user. The capabilities were built in partnership with Coinbase and Stripe, who provide the wallet infrastructure and payment rails, with developers able to choose between a Coinbase wallet or a Stripe Privy wallet. The first use case enabled in preview is micropayments using the x402 protocol, an open HTTP-native payment standard for instant stablecoin transactions, with end users able to fund wallets using a debit card and set spending limits per session.

DoorDash launched a new set of AI tools that speeds up the onboarding process for new merchants by automatically pulling photos, store hours, and menu items from their website, as well as a feature that lets merchants spin up a website based on existing DoorDash content. The platform also added photo-editing tools including AI Retouch, which replaces backgrounds, sharpens images, and optimizes lighting, and AI Replate, which manipulates dish photos to look professionally plated. Lastly, DoorDash revamped its video library, now letting merchants tag dishes in videos so that customers can order them directly.

Amazon Business is bringing same-day delivery of fresh, perishable groceries to business customers in more than 2,300 U.S. cities and towns, allowing organizations to add items like fresh produce, dairy, meat and seafood, baked goods, frozen foods, and pantry staples to their existing Amazon Business orders. If you thought that staff stealing office supplies was costly, wait until they can purchase their household groceries on your dime! LOL. Business Prime members get free same-day delivery on grocery orders over $25 in most areas, with a $2.99 fee for orders below the minimum, while customers without a Prime membership pay a $12.99 fee regardless of order size, and orders are delivered within set delivery windows businesses choose at checkout. The move puts Amazon Business in more direct competition with Costco, Walmart, and Instacart, which all already offer B2B grocery delivery.

Etsy launched a beta version of a shopping app in ChatGPT that allows users to search and compare products on its marketplace within the chatbot and then complete purchases on Etsy. For example, a user can write, “@Etsy help me find a Mother's Day gift under $200 for a Jewish mom with red hair and glasses who loves to write stories,” and the Etsy app will provide relevant listings that the user can browse from within the chat or click into to go to Etsy and learn more. The launch follows Etsy's previous integration with ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature, which launched in September 2025 with Etsy as the first partner, but was later shut down in March 2026 because OpenAI didn't know the first thing about e-commerce. Etsy is also beta testing a conversational Gifting Assistant on its own website, powered by OpenAI, which offers a guided, conversational way to discover items on its platform.

Prime Video launched Clips, a scrollable TikTok-esque short-form video feed that lets users browse snippets of movies and shows within the app. The feature first launched with NBA highlights during the 2025-26 season and has now expanded to include moments from movies and series across the platform, with users able to click over to watch, rent, or buy the full title, save it to a watchlist, or share the clip with friends. Meh, I already get enough spoilers for The Boys on TikTok. If I'm on Prime Video, I'll just watch the full episode. Prime Video joins Netflix, Disney+, Peacock, and Tubi in adding a vertical video feed to their streaming apps, with Netflix's feature also called “Clips.”

Google will no longer support FAQ rich results as of May 7, 2026, and users will no longer see them within search results moving forward. Additionally, Google Search Console will no longer report on FAQ structured data starting in June. Google provided no reason for the change, but noted that webmasters are welcome to leave their current FAQ structured data on their websites, as other search engines may still use it. However, my guess is that 1) people started abusing the schema type so much after it was introduced in 2019 that it became worthless, and 2) Google is moving away from displaying your word-for-word answers to questions in favor of regurgitating your answers with its AI. Most AI Overview answers now contain answers that consolidate information from multiple sources, making the rich snippet an archaic form of answering questions.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Fortune that the company is working with “pretty much all” of the major AI companies, including OpenAI and Meta, on top-secret hardware devices designed to replace the smartphone. Amon described future devices as “things you wear” like glasses, jewelry, pins, and pendants, all designed to center digital life around an autonomous AI agent rather than a phone, calling this concept the “ecosystem of you.” Oh man, the makers of the Humane pin are going to be so pissed! Seriously though, for the foreseeable future, all these devices are going to do is complement your smartphone, not replace it. Any conversation about “replacing your smartphone” that happens in the next 5-10 years is strictly from hype men pushing their next “game changing” device. Smartphones sold themselves because they're amazing and genuinely useful — no hype needed. As a general rule of thumb, if it needs to be hyped, it's not a smartphone killer.

A group of Democratic senators led by Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal are probing Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion about how they incorporate data from BNPL loans into consumer credit reports. The senators asked the agencies to detail how they treat BNPL loans versus longer-term installment products, how they handle purchases involving returns, and their standards for reporting multiple loans with the same lender. Many BNPL companies have resisted reporting to the bureaus, claiming the information would be harmful to consumer credit scores. However, a recent study by FICO of loans issued by Affirm showed that the opposite was true. The senators wrote in their letter that “the credit reporting industry has been very secretive about its scoring models, which presents major, potential consumer protection issues.” Next they should look into how the cost of BNPL is being subsidized by the rest of us non-BNPL using consumers, which is contributing to the rising cost of goods!

Canada just got its first CAD-backed stablecoin issued by a regulated financial institution and approved by the Alberta Treasury Board and Finance. The new CADD stablecoin, which was launched by Tetra Trust Company, is live on Base, Ethereum, and Tempo and is backed by Shopify, Wealthsimple, Urbana, which holds a majority stake, and several other major institutions and fintechs. Tetra positioned CADD for institutional use cases including 24/7 cross-border settlement, real-time corporate treasury transfers, programmable marketplace payouts, and direct fintech-to-fintech settlement without the delays of moving money across legacy rails dependent on batch infrastructure first deployed in the 1980s. So rather than update those “legacy” rails, Canada has officially hopped on the stablecoin bandwagon, which is one of the dumbest bandwagons to hit the financial system since NFTs. Bless their Canadian hearts.

A U.S.-flagged ship called the Alliance Fairfax, operated by a Maersk subsidiary, transited the Strait of Hormuz last Monday under U.S. military protection, with U.S. forces shooting down cruise missiles and drones and destroying six Iranian speedboats that threatened the vessel. The ship became one of only several hundred to have crossed the strait during the past month since the U.S. began its blockade, which is about how many used to cross the strait daily before the war. There are currently more than 1,600 ships stranded with roughly 20,000 seafarers on board, with most ships unwilling to pass due to the risks of making an attempt. So is this what winning looks like?

Google rebranded its Fitbit app as Google Health and launched a new AI health coach as a subscription service, which uses Gemini AI to serve as a combination fitness coach, sleep expert, and health and wellness advisor. Alongside the rebrand, the company launched the Fitbit Air, a new screenless tracker bracelet that offers up to a week of battery life and includes 24/7 heart rate tracking, heart rhythm monitoring with AFib alerts, sleep tracking, and automatic workout detection. The device is available for pre-order starting at $99.99 and includes a three-month trial of Google Health Premium. The Google Health app will be globally available on May 19 as part of a Google Health Premium subscription (previously Fitbit Premium), costing $9.99 per month or $99 per year, with the coach accessible to select Fitbit and Pixel Watch users first, while Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will have access to Google Health Premium at no extra cost.

In lawsuits this week…

An award-winning Canadian fiddler named Ashley MacIsaac filed a civil claim against Google seeking $1.5M in damages after its AI Overview falsely identified him as a convicted sex offender, which resulted in one of his concerts being canceled by a promoter. I guess Google's AI confused “fiddler” with “diddler.” The suit argues that “Google should not have lesser liability because the defamatory statements were published by software that Google created and controls.”
Elon Musk agreed to pay a $1.5M civil penalty to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing him of failing to properly disclose stock he was amassing in Twitter ahead of his $44B acquisition of the company in 2022 — a penalty he probably audibly laughed at behind closed doors. The SEC sued Musk in January 2025, alleging that his undisclosed stock purchases cost other Twitter shareholders at least $150M because they sold shares at lower prices without knowing Musk was amassing shares in the company.
Perplexity is pushing federal appellate judges to reverse an order banning its AI browser, Comet, from accessing Amazon. The ban was handed down by a judge in March, who ruled that Amazon provided “strong evidence” that Perplexity was accessing users' password-protected accounts without Amazon's permission, claims that Perplexity says are “fundamentally misfit” for the federal anti-hacking law Amazon is accusing it of violating. For more details on the case, read my previous coverage of Amazon's lawsuit filing in November, its temporary federal injunction win in March, and the subsequent suspension of that order.
Meta asked a Los Angeles judge to throw out a jury's $4.2M verdict that found the company liable for a woman's depression in a landmark trial over whether Meta and Google's platforms harmed young users with their addictive design. In its filing, Meta argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields it from the claims and that evidence presented at trial tied the plaintiff's mental health challenges to the content she viewed rather than to design features like autoplay and infinite scroll. Google said it also plans to appeal, and has asked the court to either set aside the $1.8M verdict against it or order a new trial.
Trivago, a German-based online travel platform majority-owned by Expedia Group that lets users compare prices across hundreds of booking sites, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for allegedly engaging in anticompetitive conduct for more than a decade by unfairly promoting its own hotel metasearch offering. The company is seeking financial compensation covering the period from Jan 2014 through December 2025, as well as asking the court to order the disclosure of traffic and revenue data that it says is controlled by Google and relevant to the case, plus a declaratory judgment that would establish Google's liability for potential damages beginning in January 2026 and thereafter.

In layoffs (and not layoffs) this week…

Shopify laid off at least 30 people in April as part of a reorganization of its operations team, affecting staff in Canada and the U.S. working in operations and customer support, according to multiple sources who spoke to The Logic. One former employee, Amélie Sirois, claimed in a blog post that they were told “technological advancements” were partly behind the cuts, having previously written that she spent 90% of her work day using AI.
Meanwhile, Affirm CEO Max Levchin told analysts on the company's most recent earnings call that the BNPL firm is “not planning AI-related layoffs, full stop,” even though it was regularly using the technology for software engineering. Does reporting on a company NOT making AI-related layoffs mean that the new norm has become the opposite, and going against the norm is newsworthy?

In corporate shakeups this week…

OpenAI lost two more senior staffers last week including its head of private equity, Paul Zimmerman, who was hired by Google to lead its efforts to sell AI to private equity firms, and James Dyett, the company's head of sales, who is leaving to work for Thrive Capital, a major OpenAI backer.
The Trade Desk Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Jacobson is leaving the company to join OpenAI as VP of partnerships (Monetization), where she'll lead OpenAI's advertising, distribution, and platform partnerships, the latest in a series of high-profile exits at The Trade Desk.
Chewy named Yunyan Wang, a 12-year Amazon veteran who most recently served as VP of Commerce & Supply Chain Services, as its new CTO.
XRP Evernorth, the Ripple-backed treasury company prepping a Nasdaq listing, named OpenAI Foundation CFO Robert Kaiden and Antalpha COO Derar Islim as independent directors, giving the company a mix of AI finance leadership and crypto infrastructure expertise ahead of its public market debut.
Fast Simon, a platform-agnostic e-commerce search and discovery provider, named Shaun Lin as director of partnerships, tasking him with expanding the company's agency and technology partner network across the U.S. and Australia.

Amazon is officially allowing all corporate employees to use Claude Code and OpenAI Codex in addition to its in-house Kiro tool, following internal complaints over the company's previous restriction on external coding tools. Both tools will run on Amazon Bedrock and be managed through AWS, which keeps usage within its own cloud environment and maintains tighter control over data security and compliance, according to a note to staff viewed by Business Insider. An Amazon spokesperson said that 83% of internal teams are still primarily using Kiro, but hey, give them time to adapt their workflow to Claude and I'm sure that'll change.

Snap's $400M deal with Perplexity to integrate the company's AI search engine directly into Snapchat is dead, with the two companies having “amicably” ended the relationship in Q1, according to Snap's latest earnings report. The partnership was first announced last November, with Snap expecting to start seeing revenue in early 2026. However, the feature never made it past early testing because the two sides had “yet to mutually agree on a path to a broader roll out.” Remember back when Perplexity news was exciting and an “alternative AI search” was novel? Flash forward a few years since its launch, and I predict that Perplexity will be the first heavily-funded AI firm to fall in the near future, or at best get acquired for a fraction of its all-time high valuation.

Google shut down Project Mariner, an experimental agent first revealed in December 2024 that was designed to perform tasks across the web on a user's behalf. The Project Mariner landing page now states that the project was shut down on May 4, 2026 and “its technology voyaged to other Google products,” including Gemini Agent, which can archive emails or book hotels, and AI Mode, Google's AI-powered search feature. Earlier this year, Google also launched an “auto-browse” feature in Chrome that can perform multi-step tasks like researching flight costs, a response to agentic web browsing tools offered by OpenAI, Perplexity, and OpenClaw.

OpenAI was found by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to be “not compliant with” Canadian federal and provincial privacy laws in the training of its AI models. The investigation identified multiple issues including that OpenAI “gathered vast amounts of personal information without adequate safeguards,” failed to acquire consent to collect and use that information, and did not give ChatGPT users a way to access, correct, or delete data that was used in training. The company has agreed to make multiple changes to comply with Canadian privacy laws, including retiring earlier non-compliant models, deploying a filtering tool to detect and mask personal information in training datasets, and adding new notices to the signed-out version of ChatGPT within the next three to six months. Wow, what a penalty!

Revolut, the UK-based fintech with more than 1M customers in Australia, shut down its PayTo service in Australia following an “unexplained incident,” according to a report from PayDay News, with regulators and Revolut's banking partners all declining to say what happened. PayTo, which lets Australian users authorize and manage recurring payments like subscriptions and bill payments in real time, had only been live on Revolut for about two months before getting shut down. The move follows a $187,800 AUD fine from AUSTRAC in September 2025 for late anti-money laundering reporting, and broader fraud concerns at Revolut, which topped UK fraud complaints in 2023 with nearly 10,000 reports.

Amazon launched the UK's first retailer drone delivery service in Darlington, County Durham, with the MK30 drone delivering packages under 5 lbs within a 7.5-mile radius of Amazon's fulfillment center. The service can carry out a maximum of ten flights an hour or up to 100 deliveries a day on weekdays, with eligible customers needing a garden or yard to receive deliveries dropped from a height of 12 feet. Current UK delivery time is two hours, compared to a 36-minute average in the US, where Amazon already operates drone deliveries in five states. Darlington was chosen because it has a mix of residential areas, major roads, and an airport all close to each other, according to the company.

🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… Christian Smalls, the former Amazon warehouse worker who in 2022 led a successful effort to unionize a warehouse on Staten Island, was arrested at the Met Gala after jumping a police barricade carrying a protest sign that called out Amazon for refusing to negotiate with its Staten Island warehouse union and accused the company of “investing in genocide” in Israel. Smalls said in a phone interview that he had hoped to “shine a bright light on Jeff Bezos,” one of the event's sponsors, and on Amazon's unethical business practices. He then spent 24 hours in custody before accepting an offer from prosecutors to consider dismissing the charges if he is not arrested again for six months. Is there a Kalshi or Polymarket bet on whether he is arrested again during the next six months? If so, I'd put money on “yes.” That man is going to end up in prison while Jeff Bezos flies around in a spaceship. The Amazon Labor Union, which Smalls once led but left in 2024 amid internal divisions, disavowed his actions, saying that it doesn’t condone “lone-wolf direct actions which aim to center one individual as the focus of what must be a collective struggle.”

Plus 13 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including ReFiBuy raising $13.6M in an oversubscribed seed round.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 9 days ago

▲ 10 r/ecommerce

E-commerce Industry News Recap 🔥 Week of May 11th, 2026

Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news...

In lawsuits this week…

An award-winning Canadian fiddler named Ashley MacIsaac filed a civil claim against Google seeking $1.5M in damages after its AI Overview falsely identified him as a convicted sex offender, which resulted in one of his concerts being canceled by a promoter. I guess Google's AI confused “fiddler” with “diddler.” The suit argues that “Google should not have lesser liability because the defamatory statements were published by software that Google created and controls.”
Elon Musk agreed to pay a $1.5M civil penalty to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing him of failing to properly disclose stock he was amassing in Twitter ahead of his $44B acquisition of the company in 2022 — a penalty he probably audibly laughed at behind closed doors. The SEC sued Musk in January 2025, alleging that his undisclosed stock purchases cost other Twitter shareholders at least $150M because they sold shares at lower prices without knowing Musk was amassing shares in the company.
Perplexity is pushing federal appellate judges to reverse an order banning its AI browser, Comet, from accessing Amazon. The ban was handed down by a judge in March, who ruled that Amazon provided “strong evidence” that Perplexity was accessing users' password-protected accounts without Amazon's permission, claims that Perplexity says are “fundamentally misfit” for the federal anti-hacking law Amazon is accusing it of violating. For more details on the case, read my previous coverage of Amazon's lawsuit filing in November, its temporary federal injunction win in March, and the subsequent suspension of that order.
Meta asked a Los Angeles judge to throw out a jury's $4.2M verdict that found the company liable for a woman's depression in a landmark trial over whether Meta and Google's platforms harmed young users with their addictive design. In its filing, Meta argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields it from the claims and that evidence presented at trial tied the plaintiff's mental health challenges to the content she viewed rather than to design features like autoplay and infinite scroll. Google said it also plans to appeal, and has asked the court to either set aside the $1.8M verdict against it or order a new trial.
Trivago, a German-based online travel platform majority-owned by Expedia Group that lets users compare prices across hundreds of booking sites, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for allegedly engaging in anticompetitive conduct for more than a decade by unfairly promoting its own hotel metasearch offering. The company is seeking financial compensation covering the period from Jan 2014 through December 2025, as well as asking the court to order the disclosure of traffic and revenue data that it says is controlled by Google and relevant to the case, plus a declaratory judgment that would establish Google's liability for potential damages beginning in January 2026 and thereafter.

In layoffs (and not layoffs) this week…

Shopify laid off at least 30 people in April as part of a reorganization of its operations team, affecting staff in Canada and the U.S. working in operations and customer support, according to multiple sources who spoke to The Logic. One former employee, Amélie Sirois, claimed in a blog post that they were told “technological advancements” were partly behind the cuts, having previously written that she spent 90% of her work day using AI.
Meanwhile, Affirm CEO Max Levchin told analysts on the company's most recent earnings call that the BNPL firm is “not planning AI-related layoffs, full stop,” even though it was regularly using the technology for software engineering. Does reporting on a company NOT making AI-related layoffs mean that the new norm has become the opposite, and going against the norm is newsworthy?

In corporate shakeups this week…

OpenAI lost two more senior staffers last week including its head of private equity, Paul Zimmerman, who was hired by Google to lead its efforts to sell AI to private equity firms, and James Dyett, the company's head of sales, who is leaving to work for Thrive Capital, a major OpenAI backer.
The Trade Desk Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Jacobson is leaving the company to join OpenAI as VP of partnerships (Monetization), where she'll lead OpenAI's advertising, distribution, and platform partnerships, the latest in a series of high-profile exits at The Trade Desk.
Chewy named Yunyan Wang, a 12-year Amazon veteran who most recently served as VP of Commerce & Supply Chain Services, as its new CTO.
XRP Evernorth, the Ripple-backed treasury company prepping a Nasdaq listing, named OpenAI Foundation CFO Robert Kaiden and Antalpha COO Derar Islim as independent directors, giving the company a mix of AI finance leadership and crypto infrastructure expertise ahead of its public market debut.
Fast Simon, a platform-agnostic e-commerce search and discovery provider, named Shaun Lin as director of partnerships, tasking him with expanding the company's agency and technology partner network across the U.S. and Australia.

Plus 13 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including ReFiBuy raising $13.6M in an oversubscribed seed round.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 9 days ago

▲ 2 r/shopify

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.

Let's dive into this week's top stories...

STAT OF THE WEEK: 45.8% of Alphabet's record $62.6B profit in Q1 2026 came from Alphabet updating the value of the equity it owns in private companies, primarily Anthropic, of which Alphabet holds a 14% stake and growing. Amazon disclosed pre-tax gains of $16.8B from its investment in Anthropic, more than half of its profit for the quarter. Amazon told Fortune the markup was triggered by Anthropic's Series G funding round and the conversion of some convertible notes into preferred stock, with the company's $8B investment now worth more than $70B.

GameStop made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $56B, or $125 per share, in cash and stock, a roughly 20% premium to its closing price on Friday and a 46% premium to eBay’s unaffected closing price on February 4, 2026 before the rumors of the offer had circulated. The offer is backed by a $20B debt commitment from TD Bank to help make a deal possible. eBay confirmed that it received the unsolicited proposal and would review with its board and financial advisers, and added that its due diligence would take into consideration “the ability of GameStop to deliver a binding, actionable proposal.” GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen told the Wall Street Journal that putting his videogame retailer and eBay under one roof could create opportunities to cut costs and improve earnings, given that the two companies have some overlap already, including a focus on selling collectibles and trading cards. He also noted how GameStop's 1,600 U.S. retail locations would give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce.

Commerce announced a slate of product updates at Commerce Live 2026 spanning core platform improvements, B2B tools, payments, and new agentic commerce capabilities. Highlights from the announcements include 1) PayPal Store Sync Integration, which lets merchants connect their product catalogs, inventory, and order management to AI shopping surfaces like Copilot, Meta, and Perplexity, 2) BigCommerce Companion, an AI assistant that supports merchant operations like a, umm, sidekick... 3) Conversational Search, an AI shopping chatbot for merchant stores, 4) B2B & B2C Unification, combining both platform experiences into a single storefront API layer, and 5) Expanded B2B Capabilities, including new tools for order automation, event-driven webhooks, and advanced pricing logic through cascading price lists. Plus a handful of other updates surrounding AI, agentic commerce, and product data management, which was a recurring theme at the event.

Shopify is seeking regulatory approvals across the U.S. to act as a money transmitter and provider of prepaid access, according to government records viewed by The Information. The company has already obtained licenses in 18 states and Puerto Rico while applications are under review in remaining states including California and New York. The licenses would let Shopify hold and move merchant funds itself rather than rely on partners like Stripe or PayPal, giving it more control over how money moves through its platform and the potential to generate more revenue from the transactions it processes for merchants. This could lead to the company offering new capabilities like merchant-to-merchant payments or even its own end-to-end payment processing, adding more margin to its payments business. Technically, the licenses could also allow Shopify to let customers hold money in their Shop Pay accounts like a digital wallet, instead of Shop Pay just serving as a payment method, which would put Shop Pay in competition with Venmo, Cash App, and other consumer payment apps.

Jack Dorsey is rebooting Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter acquired in 2012 and shuttered in 2017. The new version is called “Divine” and brings back 500,000 videos from nearly 100,000 original Vine creators. I know it sounds like a lot of content, but at six seconds per video, that's only like 833 hours, or roughly 34 days of continuous watch, which is nothing for modern-day doomscrollers. Relaunching a new video app with archived content from more than a decade ago without the consent of the original creators — is kind of fucked up! Many of those creators are in their 30s and 40s now and probably had some questionable material on the original app that's suddenly about to resurface. Imagine if Tom rebooted Myspace and republished your original profile from a public archive. (Though he never would because Tom is the GOAT.) The resurfacing of old content by a new entity that was never given the rights to the original content feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Stripe announced 288 new products and features at its annual Stripe Sessions conference including 1) Streaming Payments, an AI business model combining Metronome and Tempo that allows businesses to get paid the instant value is delivered, 2) Checkout Studio, a new way to configure, analyze, and optimize checkout pages with an AI assistant, 3) Treasury Rewards, balances will now earn Stripe credit sthat can be applied toward processing fees, 4) Free Instant Transfers, between U.S. businesses on Stripe, and 5) Link Agent Wallet, enabling users to grant agents permission to pay via LInk with spending approvals and purchase visibility. Other announcements include partnerships with Meta and Google for AI product discovery, a Stripe card with 2% cashback, a Stripe Console that lets customers ask business questions conversationally, and more.

OpenAI updated its privacy policy in the U.S. on April 30 to formalize data-sharing arrangements with advertisers and marketing partners, explicitly acknowledging that it receives purchase data from advertisers to measure ad effectiveness and shares user information with partners for third-party targeting. The updated policy marks a shift from OpenAI's prior stance that it would never sell user data, though a company spokesperson told Adweek that “nothing about our policy of not sharing people's conversations or other private user content with advertisers has changed” and that it only shares limited identifiers like cookie IDs or device IDs. It's worth noting that cookie IDs and device IDs can be matched against data broker databases to identify individuals by name, address, and detailed behavioral history. The CCPA and GDPR both classify these identifiers as personal data. So while cookie IDs and device IDs sound relatively anonymous, they're exactly what ad tech companies use to build full personal profiles.

OpenAI also updated the code on its ChatGPT conversion tracking pixel to add a consent management system and a country data field, indicating that it is building the technical groundwork to run advertising in the EU. The update lets advertisers ask users for permission before tracking and stops tracking when permission is withdrawn, features required under EU privacy law that are not needed in the U.S. where tracking operates on an opt-out basis. Then again, maybe the company is voluntarily updating its U.S. code to support consent because it's the right thing to do? I wouldn't put my money on it… ChatGPT's ad pilot is extending beyond the U.S. to include Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the coming weeks, and Digiday reported last week that the company is looking for executives for its ads team in London and Tokyo.

China ordered Meta to unwind its acquisition of Manus — though no one is exactly sure at this moment how that would work or whether the order can actually be enforced. Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao have been barred from leaving China since March while China's National Development and Reform Commission has been investigating the deal over potential violations of China's technology export control laws, and now the commission has ordered the deal to be unwound. That's got to suck, right? To become an instant billionaire and then have China be like “nuh uh, uh!” and ban you from leaving the country. A Meta spokesperson said that the transaction "complied fully with applicable law," so what's China's argument? China's government believes that even though Manus relocated to Singapore in mid-2025, its intellectual property and technical team were developed in China with state support, making the AI agent subject to Chinese export control and foreign investment laws.

Elon Musk spent more than seven hours on the witness stand across three days last week in his federal lawsuit against OpenAI, which accuses CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman of betraying the company's original nonprofit mission when they converted it into a for-profit venture. Musk, who donated $38M of OpenAI's earliest funding before leaving the board in 2018 over a power struggle with Altman, is seeking $150B in damages and an order forcing OpenAI to unwind its for-profit conversion, as well as the removal of Altman and Brockman from their leadership positions. During the trial, Musk's lead attorney Steven Molo argued that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity,” comparing today's OpenAI to “a museum store that has taken over the museum.” OpenAI's lead counsel William Savitt countered that Musk filed the lawsuit out of “sour grapes” because he didn't get his way at OpenAI, pointing out that Musk himself proposed taking OpenAI for-profit and folding it into Tesla in early discussions.

Amazon's built-in price tracking tool now allows customers to see how much a product's price has changed over the past year, up from 30 and 90 days, with the expansion now available in the U.S., U.K., and India. Users can access the feature by opening the Amazon app, selecting the “Price history” button next to an item's price, or by asking Amazon's AI assistant Rufus. The expansion comes just weeks ahead of Amazon's annual Prime Day event, which will give customers a better idea of whether they're actually getting a deal or simply seeing a marked down version of an inflated price.

Shopify is launching Managed Payment Methods, a feature that will automatically enable and display local payment methods at checkout for stores using Shopify Payments, with no additional fees beyond standard Shopify Payments rates and no third-party integration required. The feature will dynamically determine which payment methods appear and in what order using signals like buyer location, purchase history, and local payment trends, with the goal of showing each shopper their most preferred and most likely-to-convert payment option — though something tells me that Shop Pay will be prominently featured in most circumstances. Shopify is planning to automatically enable Managed Payment Methods on May 27 and is advising merchants to review any existing payment method sorting customizations before that date as they may break. Merchants can disable individual methods or the entire feature in Settings under Payments.

Shopify quietly launched a free tool that lets merchants enter any store URL and receive a scored assessment of how ready their site is for AI shopping agents like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, with no login required. The tool runs 31 checks across five categories including AI discoverability, product schema, transaction readiness, trust signals, and operational maturity, flagging issues like missing JSON-LD structured markup for product reviews, shipping policies that exist on the site but aren't exposed in structured data, and absent LLM.txt files that AI agents use to navigate storefronts. Merchants who score poorly can use the tool's impact-effort matrix to identify which fixes will have the greatest effect on their AI discoverability. At the time of publication, the tool was not functioning.

TikTok launched a new “Campus Hub” featuring dedicated college group chats of up to 300 verified classmates and personalized feeds that surface content posted by students and content related to their university. The hub builds on TikTok's campus verification feature, which it launched last August through a partnership with student verification platform UNiDAYS and lets users add their college to their TikTok profile and browse fellow students. Instagram rolled out a nearly identical feature last year that also allows students in the U.S. to add their college to their profile banner and browse a list of students at their school. I'm old enough to remember when Facebook was exclusive to college students and you had to have a .edu e-mail address to create a profile. That was about the same time period when Kanye West was still performing at college campuses.

Chinese companies cannot legally fire employees to replace them with cost-saving AI, according to a court ruling in the country. The court decided that a tech firm had illegally fired one of its workers after he refused to take a demotion when his job was automated by AI and that the termination “did not fall under negative circumstances such as business downsizing or operational difficulties.” In a separate statement, the court said that companies cannot unilaterally lay off employees or cut salaries due to technological progress. The decision is a win for Chinese workers, but it also puts startups at a significant advantage over legacy players, given that they can launch with an AI-first approach and a smaller workforce from day one. As always, there are positive and negative consequences to every policy.

Google is open to putting ads in its Gemini app, according to Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler who said on a recent earnings call, “Our focus right now is on AI Mode, but it's fair to say that we really believe a format that works well in AI mode would transfer successfully to Gemini app.” Wait, so the ad company is open to putting ads in its products? Say it ain't so! Google has also previously featured ads in AI Overviews within its Search results, but the standalone Gemini experience has so far remained ad-free, and Google's VP of global ads told Business Insider in January that there were “no plans” for ads in Gemini. Plans change, I guess.

Whatnot, the U.S.-based livestream shopping app that hosts auction-style video shows, launched a direct integration with Shopify that lets merchants automatically sync products, inventory, and orders between the two platforms instead of duplicating catalogs or manually tracking stock. Product descriptions, pricing, condition, inventory, and other data can be managed within the Shopify admin, while live shows are run through Whatnot. Orders made during the livestream are then sent back to Shopify where the merchant can manage fulfillment alongside their orders from other channels. Sellers on Whatnot saw $8B in sales last year, more than double 2024, and the company says that one in eight sellers now operate full-time on the platform.

Amazon launched “Join the Chat,” an interactive feature that allows customers to ask AI hosts questions via text or voice while listening to an audio summary of a product, to which the host answers in real time and then picks back up where they left off. At any point in the podcast episode, the listener can ask a question like, “Is this coffee maker good for beginners?” or “Will these boxers make my balls itch?,” and the host will incorporate the question into the conversation using information from the product's details and customer reviews, while taking into consideration what's already been covered so that they can respond with new, relevant information. The feature is part of Amazon's “Hear the Highlights” service, which offers short-form audio product summaries from AI-generated hosts.

Meta is exploring CTV ad expansion, holding a series of exploratory meetings with supply-side players including Magnite and FreeWheel and TV manufacturers, according to Digiday sources. While no product has been formally announced and the plans remain fluid, the conversations allude to the idea that Meta is seeking ways to extend its advertising demand into third-party CTV inventory, allowing advertisers to use Meta's targeting and optimization tools to reach users on streaming inventory beyond its own apps. The push would target Meta's SMB advertiser base, which has historically been priced out of TV advertising, and would put Meta in direct competition with Amazon Prime Video and YouTube in the CTV space.

YouTube entered into an exclusive partnership with SiriusXM Media to sell its “audio-first” advertising inventory in the U.S., covering impressions generated when users listen to content on the platform rather than watch it. Last year, YouTube approached SiriusXM with data on how much listening-only streaming was happening on its platform and concluded that it didn't have the expertise to monetize those streams in-house, which eventually led to the partnership. Audio accounts for around 30% of media time but attracts only 4% of ad spend, which is a gap the partnership aims to close.

Amazon's Prime Air MK30 delivery drones, which have been operating in select U.S. cities since late 2024, are dropping packages from 10 feet in the air rather than gently lowering the items, resulting in damaged products. One customer recorded a video of a drone dropping a package containing glass bottles of syrup, which exploded on impact, while other videos show drone propellers blowing previously delivered packages into the street. Amazon said incidents like these are rare and that it has invested in purpose-built packaging engineered to protect items during flight and delivery. Didn't we all do this in 8th grade science class with an egg drop? I'm willing to license my impact-resistant popsicle-stick delivery box to Amazon if they're in need.

Look under your seats… everyone's getting an Oprah Winfrey podcast! You get a podcast! And you get a podcast! Oprah agreed to a multiyear licensing deal with Amazon that will bring her podcast to Prime Video, Amazon Music, Fire TV channels, and Audible starting in July, when it expands from one to two episodes a week as part of the agreement. The deal also covers specials tied to Oprah's Favorite Things and Oprah's Book Club, plus all 25 seasons of The Oprah Winfrey Show, though Oprah and Amazon have not yet determined how to repurpose the talk show, and new podcast episodes will continue appearing on YouTube and other platforms. Variety reported that Oprah's Book Club will tie into Audible, Kindle, Goodreads, and the Amazon storefront, and that Winfrey and Amazon will split sales and ad revenue.

Amazon's retail division is monitoring AI tool adoption across more than 2,100 engineering teams, tracking weekly deployments per engineer, monthly active users, net promoter scores, and a metric called “Value Deriving Event” that measures how frequently engineers generate outputs or provide feedback using AI tools, according to an internal document viewed by Business Insider. Wow, that's a very Meta-esque thing to do! Amazon's goal is for 80% of its retail engineering teams to adopt AI-native practices, with about 60% already there as of February and some teams expected to boost output tenfold this year. The rollout has created internal friction within the division, with engineers flagging concerns about top-down mandates, complicated onboarding, overlapping tools, and unclear success metrics, prompting Amazon to shift toward “collaborative AI practices” and automated reporting rather than requiring use of specific tools.

Sezzle, the Minneapolis-based BNPL provider, is considering adding a checking account, a secured credit card, post-purchase split payments, and an AI shopping assistant to its mobile app. The moves are part of CEO Charlie Youakim's plan to build a “super app” that gives customers a more complete financial services platform, building on Sezzle's earlier expansion into mobile phone plans and subscriptions, both launched since mid-2025. Sezzle is also exploring an industrial loan company charter, likely through Utah, though Youakim acknowledged approval is unlikely this year. The company's stock has climbed roughly 59% over the past year, making Youakim, who holds a 43% stake, a billionaire.

Block published its first proof-of-reserves report disclosing total bitcoin holdings of 28,355 BTC worth approximately $2.2B as of the end of March 2026, confirmed by third-party auditors. Of the total, 19,357 BTC worth roughly $1.5B were held on behalf of customers through Cash App and Square, while corporate treasury holdings totaled 8,997 BTC worth approximately $692M. Block said it adopted the proof-of-reserves approach because users “shouldn't have to trust that their bitcoin is there, they should be able to verify it,” using on-chain signatures that allow anyone to independently confirm the company's holdings.

Ask-com, the search engine originally founded as Ask Jeeves, officially shut down after 25 years, as of May 1st. The search engine was launched in 1997 by Berkeley students a year before Google debuted to the masses, and was one of the most popular search engines at the time before Google completely took over. Ask Jeeves was acquired by American holding company IAC in July 2005 in an all-stock deal valued at $1.85B, and the “Jeeves” name was dropped in February 2006 when the search engine was rebranded to just Ask-com. Honestly, I'm surprised they kept it running as long as they did, as it must've gotten dozens of searches each day. IAC will continue to run its other digital publications including People, Investopedia, Allrecipes, Travel + Leisure, and others.

Amazon executives have held internal discussions about rebooting Donald Trump's old reality show “The Apprentice” with the President's oldest son Donald Trump Jr. as the host, according to Wall Street Journal sources. Discussions are in early stages and Amazon has not yet approached the Trump family, which would likely jump at the opportunity. Amazon inherited the show's back catalog of 14 seasons through its 2022 acquisition of MGM, so it could launch both the original and the reboot on Amazon Prime Video at the same time if it wanted, as well as use clips from the old show at will. If this does actually happen, I vote they put Barron Trump in the host chair instead. That, I might actually watch!

In lawsuits this week…

Temu was hit with a class action lawsuit in California accusing the company of using false subject lines, misleading header information, and spoofed domains to push shoppers into opening commercial e-mails. The complaint estimates that Temu is responsible for more than 10,000 spam e-mails to Californians each year, which is probably a wild underestimate! LOL.
The families of victims of a February school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia filed seven lawsuits against OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, alleging that the company's inaction regarding the shooter's use of ChatGPT allowed the incident to happen. The 18-year-old shooter had her ChatGPT account flagged and banned in 2025 for misusing the product for “violent activities,” but OpenAI later determined the account “did not pose an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others” and therefore did not report the activity to law enforcement.
Meta threatened in a court filing to block access to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in the state of New Mexico if the court orders the child safety reforms sought by Attorney General Raúl Torrez in the remedies phase of his lawsuit, which begins Monday and is expected to last three weeks. The threat follows a March jury verdict ordering Meta to pay $375M in civil penalties after finding the company misled consumers about platform safety and enabled harms including child sexual exploitation, with Torrez calling the withdrawal threat a “PR stunt,” though Meta defends that the reforms are unfeasible.
Sherri Hill, Inc., a designer of prom, pageant, and formal gowns, filed a federal lawsuit against Medon, SheIsMe, and related entities that operate the KissProm-com and SheIsMe-com websites for allegedly using copyrighted Sherri Hill photographs and design elements without authorization in advertising and selling formal dresses on e-commerce platforms, with certain images altered and displayed without permission. The company is seeking injunctive relief, damages, and other remedies.

Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees that the company's planned layoffs are tied to rising AI capital expenditures and declined to rule out further cuts beyond a planned round this month that will eliminate about 10% of its workforce. Zuckerberg said during a company town hall meeting, “We basically have two major cost centers in the company: compute infrastructure and people-oriented things. If we’re investing more in one area to serve our community, then that means we have less capital to allocate to the other. So that means we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat.” Sounds like it was a very motivating speech…

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the company is hiring 1,000 new grads and interns to build its Agentforce and Headless 360 agentic AI platforms, while AWS CEO Matt Garman said Amazon will hire 11,000 software development interns in 2026, even as AI reshapes both companies. The announcements were meant to push back on predictions that AI will obliterate entry-level work, but given recent layoffs at both companies, this looks more like a way to replace higher-paid engineers with entry-level roles. Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate roles between October 2025 and January 2026, the largest layoffs in its history, while Salesforce laid off about 1,000 employees in February 2026 with cuts hitting the Agentforce team itself, which Benioff now says he's hiring 1,000 grads to build.

Microsoft and OpenAI came to an agreement to end Microsoft's exclusive right to sell OpenAI's AI models, clearing the way for the AI firm to pursue deals with cloud computing rivals including Amazon Web Services, which it had already announced a deal with. In exchange for dropping exclusivity, Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share on OpenAI products it resells, though OpenAI will continue paying Microsoft a revenue share on its own product sales through 2030 regardless of whether OpenAI achieves artificial general intelligence, removing a provision in the prior deal that would have ended payments upon reaching that milestone. Additionally, Microsoft remains OpenAI's primary cloud provider and will receive first access to new OpenAI products on Azure. Honestly, it feels like a fair deal, and Microsoft wins either way, as it holds a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI.

The U.S. Defense Department announced AI procurement contracts with seven tech firms including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, SpaceX, and the startup Reflection AI, which raised $2B in funding last year. Noticeably absent from the list is Anthropic, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated as a supply chain risk in March after the company declined to let the Pentagon use Claude for “all lawful” purposes, though Axios has previously reported the Defense Department is using Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview model despite the ban. The contracts cover AI products for use in classified Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 environments and will be made available through the Pentagon's internal GenAI-mil portal, which has been adopted by more than 1.3M Defense Department personnel since launching last year.

Speaking of Anthropic… The company more than doubled its public estimate of average daily Claude Code spending from $6 to $13 per developer, noting that costs stay below $30 per active day for 90% of users. Anthropic head of growth Amol Avasare wrote on X that “engagement per subscriber is way up” and that the company's subscription plans “weren't built for this,” following last week's user outcry when Claude Code briefly appeared to no longer be listed as available for Pro subscribers. Classic play, right? Get 'em hooked, then up the price.

🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… An Amazon driver was caught on camera squatting and pissing between two vehicles parked on a customer's driveway in California after she delivered his packages. The homeowner said he was “surprised” by what he saw in the footage, which he likely watched dozens of times with his blinds tightly shut. He said that he “probably would have let her” use his bathroom if she had asked since she's “working crazy hours with no restroom nearby,” but instead, he shared the footage with his local news station, which will likely get the driver fired. Sure, no one wants human piss on their driveway (myself included), but I can only imagine that the driver was facing an emergency situation and had to act fast. A little compassion could've gone a long way here before submitting the footage to the news.

Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Recharge acquiring Skio.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 16 days ago

▲ 16 r/ecommerce

Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news...

In lawsuits this week…

Temu was hit with a class action lawsuit in California accusing the company of using false subject lines, misleading header information, and spoofed domains to push shoppers into opening commercial e-mails. The complaint estimates that Temu is responsible for more than 10,000 spam e-mails to Californians each year, which is probably a wild underestimate! LOL.
The families of victims of a February school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia filed seven lawsuits against OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, alleging that the company's inaction regarding the shooter's use of ChatGPT allowed the incident to happen. The 18-year-old shooter had her ChatGPT account flagged and banned in 2025 for misusing the product for “violent activities,” but OpenAI later determined the account “did not pose an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others” and therefore did not report the activity to law enforcement.
Meta threatened in a court filing to block access to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in the state of New Mexico if the court orders the child safety reforms sought by Attorney General Raúl Torrez in the remedies phase of his lawsuit, which begins Monday and is expected to last three weeks. The threat follows a March jury verdict ordering Meta to pay $375M in civil penalties after finding the company misled consumers about platform safety and enabled harms including child sexual exploitation, with Torrez calling the withdrawal threat a “PR stunt,” though Meta defends that the reforms are unfeasible.
Sherri Hill, Inc., a designer of prom, pageant, and formal gowns, filed a federal lawsuit against Medon, SheIsMe, and related entities that operate the KissProm-com and SheIsMe-com websites for allegedly using copyrighted Sherri Hill photographs and design elements without authorization in advertising and selling formal dresses on e-commerce platforms, with certain images altered and displayed without permission. The company is seeking injunctive relief, damages, and other remedies.

Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Recharge acquiring Skio.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 16 days ago

▲ 16 r/shopify

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.

btw - I'm at Commerce Live this week in Chicago. If you're here too, please don't hesitate to say hello if you see me.

Now let's dive into this week's top stories...

STAT OF THE WEEK: USPS processed more than 10.7M packages with counterfeit or unpaid postage labels in the 12 months ending February 2026, according to a Postal Service OIG management alert. Between November 2025 and February 2026 alone, that volume surged an additional 8M packages, marking a 609% increase in just four months and costing USPS an estimated $46.3M in lost revenue.

Last week I reported that unsealed court records revealed what most Amazon sellers already knew and have been saying for years — that Amazon punished sellers if their prices were lower on other websites. Well since then, more documents have been released that are even more damning, including e-mails that explicitly show Amazon colluding with other companies to raise the prices of pet treats, khaki pants, eyedrops, and other products sold online. The Guardian reports that in one case, Amazon raised prices on a set of dog treats and worked with a pet treat manufacturer to convince Chewy to follow its increases as a means to protect its market share while simultaneously charging consumers higher prices. Amazon e-mailed the manufacturer a list of products with price increases, instructing them, “As you noted, Chewy should be aware of this update and follow suit accordingly.” Two days later, the manufacturer confirmed that the price had gone up on both sites, ending their message with a 😊 emoji.

Walmart is testing a program to store third-party marketplace merchandise in the backrooms of select supercenters, allowing the items to be delivered at the same speeds as locally stocked groceries and apparel. Typically, items sold by third-party sellers on its marketplace are stored and shipped from Walmart fulfillment centers, which have not offered the same delivery speed advantages as items coming from its 4,600 local retail stores. The pilot is currently underway in several stores in Dallas, TX. The strategy also ties into two other projects that Walmart has been working on in recent years, including: 1) Redesigning its stores with larger e-commerce fulfillment spaces, widened aisles, enhanced signage, and expanded self-checkout zones, among other things. 2) Automating its supply chains, such as with AI-powered warehouses that sort items before they are shipped to a store, allowing pallets of products to go straight from the truck to the shelf for restocking.

BigCommerce will soon be adding an Open Payment Provider fee ranging from 0.6% to 2%, depending on which plan you're on, to merchants using payment processors not on its embedded provider list, which includes Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Klarna, Sezzle, Afterpay, and others, effective June 1, 2026. The company has renamed its plans, while simultaneously lowering the GMV ceilings associated with each plan, which means some merchants who fit comfortably inside their plan limits may now be forced into a more expensive tier, even if their volume remains the same. For example, the Core plan, which was previously called Standard and allowed up to $50k in annual GMV, now only allows up to $30k. For years, BigCommerce has touted the fact that it doesn't charge transaction fees, unlike its biggest rival Shopify, but now it has quietly backpedaled on that promise.

Uber riders are accusing the company of charging higher fares when an American Express card is selected in the app. A viral video with over 2.5M views shows an UberX ride in Atlanta priced at $33.05 when the rider selected an Amex card, then dropping to $20.33 after she switched to a Visa card. Similar claims have since circulated across Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, FlyerTalk, and on credit card forums, where users say fares rise when Amex cards, Uber Cash, Uber One memberships, gift card balances, or business profiles are attached to their accounts. Uber adamantly denies the allegations, but doesn't explain the user reports.

eBay is launching a new “streaming as a service” pilot program that connects sellers with livestream hosts, allowing them to participate in Live commerce without having to host the sessions themselves. eBay Live has been available in the U.S. for almost four years and in the U.K. for two years, but the company has just recently begun expanding into new categories, geographies, and streaming offerings to better compete against platforms like Whatnot and TikTok. Details about the service, including how much it will cost, have not been provided yet. Nor did eBay specify whether it would exclusively be matching sellers with “human” hosts, leaving the door open for digital avatars to do livestreaming.

Two weeks ago, I reported that Rezolve AI was attempting a public and hostile takeover of Commerce, the parent company of BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift. After submitting two crappy offers to Commerce's board and having both rejected, Rezolve began attempting to bypass the board by publishing a letter directly to shareholders. Following those developments, Commerce's board adopted a “poison pill” — formally called a stockholder rights plan — to block Rezolve from accumulating enough shares to force a deal. The plan is triggered if any entity acquires 10% or more of the company's outstanding shares, at which point existing shareholders get the right to buy additional shares at half price, massively diluting the acquirer. Rezolve fired back immediately, calling the poison pill a “white flag” and a “desperate” attempt by a failing board to entrench itself, and then hosted an investor call that was open to both sets of shareholders, during which it made the case that deploying its Brain Suite platform across Commerce's 60,000+ merchants would create “an instantly profitable global giant.”

Chinese regulators plan to restrict domestic tech and AI firms from accepting U.S. investments without government approval, as part of Beijing's response to Meta's acquisition of Manus in December 2025. Government agencies have told several private firms in recent weeks that they should reject capital of U.S. origin in funding rounds unless explicitly approved, according to Bloomberg sources. Moonshot AI, StepFun, and ByteDance were among the companies that received these instructions, which sources said are to prevent U.S. investors from taking stakes in sensitive sectors where national security is a priority. The restrictions are tit for tat with rules that the U.S. has towards investing in Chinese tech. For example, Washington, under the Biden administration, restricted U.S. investment in Chinese semiconductor, quantum computing, and AI companies to prevent American capital from advancing China's military capabilities or giving its tech sector a competitive edge over U.S. rivals.

Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council, an industry body developing an open standard that governs how AI agents handle the full shopping journey across any platform and payment processor. The five companies join founding members Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair in helping to shape the future of the protocol. Amazon's membership has stirred conversation this past week, with folks wondering if the company's participation in the council indicates that opening its platform to third-party AI shopping agents could be on the horizon, which would be a shift from its current stance of actively blocking external bots and even suing AI companies that attempt to scrape its product listings. Will OpenAI be joining the council anytime soon?

Amazon launched “scheduled actions” for its Rufus AI shopping assistant, allowing the bot to almost automatically restock personal care items, select monthly book purchases based on buying history, or buy a product when it drops below a set price. Rufus currently stops short of automatically completing the purchase and instead notifies users when it has added something to their carts, which feels like a good first step with agentic commerce. As a customer, I'd like to confirm that I actually need replenishment or that I like the book selection before I'm charged. CEO Andy Jassy told investors in February that 300M Amazon customers used Rufus in 2025 and that those who did were 60% more likely to complete a purchase afterwards.

Consumers are increasingly using emojis to search for products across apparel, footwear, and accessories, according to a study by Fast Simon. Emoji-based searches grew 42% in 2025, with top searches evolving from standard apparel icons like 👟 and 👗 to more expressive combinations like ☕ + 🏃 for active morning routines, 🐺 + 🤍🖤 for fan merchandise, and hybrid searches pairing visual icons with text like “$200” combined with 👠. Fast Simon CEO Zohar Gilad says the shift means retailers must now use AI to interpret the emotional and contextual intent behind emoji searches rather than just indexing keywords, as shoppers increasingly use emojis to signal how they feel and what subculture they belong to.

Amazon One Medical launched a GLP-1 management program that integrates obesity treatment into routine care and combines virtual and in-person visits, prescription management, and pharmacy fulfillment into a program designed to treat weight management as a long-term chronic condition rather than a one-off prescription, with insured pricing starting at $25 per month. Amazon's prices for injectable treatments are roughly in line with current market rates, but the company believes that its same-day delivery and convenience through its existing logistics networks will give it an edge in the competitive industry. Shares of Hims & Hers Health, Viking Therapeutics, Amgen, and Septerna, which offer competing services, fell on Tuesday after the news dropped.

WooCommerce updated its Google for WooCommerce extension to let merchants tag products from their catalog directly in YouTube videos and Shorts, turning them into shoppable cards that appear while viewers watch and in the channel's Shopping tab, with the product feed syncing automatically through Google Merchant Center to keep titles, descriptions, prices, and inventory current. The update also added AI-powered ad creative generation for Performance Max campaigns, pulling product images and descriptions from the same Merchant Center feed to generate ad variations across video thumbnails, display banners, and text headlines, as well as support for service businesses running campaigns without a product catalog. Shopify merchants have had similar YouTube Shopping functionality available for some time through the Google & YouTube app, which allows eligible Shopify Plus and Advanced merchants in the U.S. to sync their product catalogs and tag products in videos, Shorts, and live streams.

Etsy is raising its Regulatory Operating Fee across several markets effective June 22, 2026, with France seeing the steepest increase from 0.47% to 1.14%, Italy rising from 0.32% to 0.80%, Spain from 0.72% to 0.88%, and the UK from 0.32% to 0.48%, while Hungary will see a new fee of 1.97% introduced for the first time. Etsy says the changes are necessary to keep its pricing aligned with local regulatory requirements, but sellers have limited transparency into how the fees are calculated or where the money goes. Amazon and eBay employ similar regulatory fee pass-through practices in some markets, and Meta began doing the same for advertisers in six European countries earlier this year, passing on digital services taxes it had previously absorbed since 2019.

Google introduced three agentic safety features in Ads Advisor that automate policy compliance and account security tasks that previously required manual effort, including proactive scanning for policy violations with a clear path to resolution, real-time policy reviews as campaigns are created and edited, and daily security monitoring that flags issues like dormant users and suspicious domains. The certification process is also being automated, with Google saying Ads Advisor will soon be able to grant instant certifications or guide one-click applications based on a company's industry, location, and need, turning what previously took weeks of paperwork into near-instant approvals. The features are part of Google's broader push to reduce administrative burden on advertisers so they can focus on campaign performance rather than compliance management.

Google Ads introduced AI-Qualified Call Conversions that use AI to evaluate call recordings for signals of genuine purchase intent, such as a customer inquiring about specific services, scheduling a consultation, or showing readiness to buy. The feature replaces the previous system that classified conversions primarily based on call duration alone, addressing a longstanding limitation where long calls could still represent wrong numbers or robocalls rather than actual leads. The new tiered system prioritizes call recording analysis first, falls back to call duration if recording is unavailable, and uses ad interaction data only as a last resort when a Google forwarding number isn't available.

Cash App launched managed accounts for children ages 6-12 that offer 3.25% interest on savings, providing parents a dedicated place on the platform to send allowances, set aside savings, and track spending for their children. Parents maintain full control over account activity, can schedule recurring payments to their kids, and can approve transfers from up to five trusted contacts such as siblings or grandparents. The accounts do not include access to Bitcoin, though sponsored teen accounts for users 13 and older can include crypto access with parental consent. Cash App currently serves more than 5M teens monthly, and this is the first time that it's offered a product for kids below the age of 13. Personally, I love the idea of teaching kids about financial literacy, but there's no way that Mia is getting her own phone at that age, so I don't really see the point of putting money for her in an account that's only accessible on my phone and only earns 3.25%. Each to their own though, so you do what you want with your iPad kids.

TikTok expanded its partnerships with Integral Ad Science, a digital advertising verification company that measures brand safety and ad fraud, and Zefr, a platform that helps brands ensure their ads appear alongside appropriate content, as part of the company's efforts to establish itself as a trustworthy partner for advertisers in the U.S. Integral Ad Science will expand its Total Media Quality coverage and Zefr will extend its brand safety, invalid traffic, and other measurements to four additional TikTok ad products, including search, creation tools for brand and Smart+ traffic, TikTok Lite, and GMV Max. The expanded partnerships come as TikTok is expected to command 4.8% of global digital advertising revenue in 2026.

Meta is launching a beta version of its new AI Business Assistant to advertisers and agencies of all sizes across global major markets and languages, following the successful launch with small businesses in the U.S. last October. The assistant, which lives directly within Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, and Business Support Home, allows businesses to resolve common account issues, optimize campaign performance, and offer real-time guidance based on an account's business data. Early beta results showed businesses using the assistant resolved account issues at a 20% higher rate and saw a 12% decrease in ad cost per result after applying its opportunity score recommendations.

Meta is also launching an Instagram spinoff app called Instants that allows users to share disappearing photos, exactly like on Snapchat. The slogan for the app is “real life, real quick,” with the app encouraging raw, unedited content sharing of temporary photos. Instants is essentially a revamped version of Shots, a feature that Meta experimented with on Instagram last year. The new app marks Meta's infinith attempt at creating a direct Snapchat clone app or feature, which includes Poke, a Snapchat clone app it launched in 2013 and shut down 17 months later, Slingshot, which it tried out in 2014 and shuttered 6 months later, and Quick Updates on Facebook, a feature Meta experimented with in 2016 that no-one remembers.

Visa and TikTok launched a co-branded Creator Card in the UK that gives TikTok Live creators faster access to their earnings, which typically arrive in irregular bursts from virtual gifts that are converted into diamonds and then exchanged for real income, creating cash flow gaps that can make it difficult to cover everyday costs or reinvest in their businesses. The card and accompanying business account are designed to help creators separate personal and business finances and spend earnings immediately rather than waiting for funds to settle. A Visa survey of creators across multiple social platforms found that 86% of creator-run businesses are self-funded and 49% experience late payments, which are cash flow challenges the card aims to address. Makes sense! You can't pay your bills with virtual diamonds.

Sam's Club launched an enhanced Express delivery tier that gets members from checkout to doorstep in one hour or less at a flat $10 for Plus members and $22 for Club members, with no purchase minimum and the same prices as in-club shopping. The delivery option is an upgrade from its existing three hour or less Express delivery, which costs $5 for Plus members and $17 for Club members, and is still available. Since rolling out across all 600+ clubs on April 2, nearly 65,000 Express deliveries have been fulfilled with an average delivery time of 55 minutes, and the 10 fastest deliveries all completed in under 12 minutes. Did these people live across the street from a Sam's Club or something? The launch comes as Sam's Club reported 23% YoY e-commerce sales growth in its most recent quarter.

WhatsApp is rolling out a paid tier called WhatsApp Plus that gives subscribers access to premium stickers with special effects, personalized app themes and icons, the ability to pin up to 20 chats, and custom ringtones for specific contacts, with no impact on free features like messaging, voice calls, or end-to-end encryption. People still keep their ringer on? My phones have been on permanent vibrate since like 2010. Anyway, pricing has not been officially announced but WABetaInfo found subscription costs currently ranging from less than $1 to around $3 depending on the market, sometimes with one-month trials being offered. As you might remember, WhatsApp was originally supposed to cost $0.99 per year, a fee that founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton planned to implement to avoid ever having to sell customer data or serve ads, but the fee was only implemented briefly in some markets starting in 2013 and was dropped a few years later following Meta's acquisition of the company in 2014 for $19B.

Netflix is getting ready to launch a TikTok-style vertical video feed within its app this month that helps users discover shows, movies, and video podcasts, following successful tests of the feature since last year. Disney+ recently launched a similar vertical video feature called Verts in March. Netflix is also expanding its use of AI-powered recommendation systems that co-CEO Gregory Peters said can “iterate and improve more quickly” and add support for different content types more efficiently. Other CEO Ted Sarandos said the company's recent acquisition of Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking company InterPositive is accelerating its generative AI capabilities for creators, and that it expects to generate $3B in ad revenue this year by using AI to improve ad formats and customization. Co-CEOs Peters and Sarandos can often be found in interviews speaking in unison like Bridgette and Paula Powers.

Ready for some classic old man advice? Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told Gen Z that “if you aren't willing to start at the bottom and pay your dues, it's unlikely that you're going to ever be successful,” saying on Capital Group's Power of Advice podcast that expecting a great job straight out of college is the wrong mindset and that building a reputation for reliability and hard work from the ground up is what separates people who move up from those who stall out. Of course, you've got to afford to pay those dues, which is where having rich parents can certainly help! Jassy, who spent years bouncing between sportscasting, coaching, paralegal work, and investment banking before landing at Amazon after his Harvard MBA, said his own winding path taught him that trying many different things to discover what you love is a career advantage, not a liability. Though he did recognize on the podcast that his advice is easier said than done in today's job market, so he's not completely out of touch.

More than 40,000 U.S. retail stores will close over the next five years, as e-commerce, now accounting for more than 20% of total U.S. retail sales and projected to reach 27% by 2030, and AI-enabled shopping continues to siphon sales away from physical locations, according to UBS analysts. Department stores and specialty retailers are most at risk, while Walmart, Costco, and Target are expected to keep expanding. Tariffs and net-negative immigration policies could drive even further closures if they remain in place, with UBS estimating retail sales could drop about 0.5% annually as retailers absorb roughly $100B in increased costs and lower-income households cut spending. The U.S. already had 5,000 fewer stores in Q3 2025 compared to Q3 2024, with the country now at fewer than three stores per 1,000 people, down about 12% from 2003.

In lawsuits this week…

Google agreed to a $50M class action settlement resolving claims that it discriminated against Black employees by failing to hire them, assigning them to lower job levels, paying them less, and failing to promote them in a racially hostile work environment. Google did not admit any wrongdoing under the settlement, but agreed to analyze employee pay for racial differences, maintain employee reporting channels, and provide information about salary ranges.
Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire founder of the Tron blockchain, is suing World Liberty Financial, a crypto project co-founded by President Trump, accusing the company of extortion and an “illegal scheme” to seize his tokens. Sun also claimed in his complaint that “World Liberty is on the verge of collapse” and questioned whether it holds enough reserves to back its USD1 stablecoin.
Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that represents consumer interests, filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by allowing scam ads to proliferate on its platform because it had a financial incentive to do so, citing internal documents suggesting Meta was generating roughly $16B per year, or roughly 10% of its annual revenue, from the scam ads. Meta denied the $16B revenue figure and said that the allegations “misrepresent the reality of our work.” Meta notes that 159M scam ads were pulled from its platforms in the past year, a defense it is expected to lean on heavily in the case.
UMG, Capitol Records, and Concord filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Quince, a direct-to-consumer fashion startup, alleging the company and its influencer partners used music by artists including Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Fleetwood Mac, and ABBA as soundtracks in promotional videos without obtaining licenses. The complaint lists 67 sound recordings and 71 musical compositions as an “illustrative, non-exhaustive” list of infringed works and alleges willful and deliberate infringement, noting that Quince was first notified of the violations in September 2024.
Elon Musk dropped his fraud claims against OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, narrowing the scope of his lawsuit to just 2 of the 26 claims he made in his Nov 2024 complaint. Musk alleges that OpenAI abandoned its founding mission as a nonprofit to benefit humanity and is seeking as much as $134B in damages that he asked to be directed to OpenAI's charitable arm, the restoration of the firm's status as a nonprofit research organization, and the removal of Altman and Brockman from their roles at OpenAI – the last of which would likely benefit humanity on its own.
Capital One customers are suing Meta, Google, and other parties over the “outrageous, illegal and widespread practice” of knowingly and secretly installing third-party tracking tools on its websites, allowing other businesses to collect customers' personal and financial information. The plaintiffs claim that the third-party tracking tools collect vast amounts of sensitive consumer data, which resulted in them being bombarded with ads after applying for a credit card, and that Capital One does not adequately disclose these practices or obtain consent, as required by federal and state laws.
A former MrBeast executive is suing the media company over alleged wrongful termination after returning from parental leave, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment, including claims that she was demoted after filing a formal harassment complaint and had to be on a work call while in the delivery room. Beast Industries called the lawsuit “clout-chasing” built on “deliberate misrepresentations,” saying it has Slack messages, company documents, and witness testimony to refute the claims.

In layoffs this week…

Meta confirmed plans to lay off approximately 8,000 employees on May 20th, representing 10% of its 79,000-person workforce, while also closing 6,000 open roles it had intended to fill. Reuters reported last month that Meta could cut at least 20% of its total headcount this year, but a Meta spokesperson called the report “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” I guess they aren't so theoretical after all?
Microsoft will offer voluntary buyouts to 7% of its 125,000 employees in the U.S., marking a first for the 51-year-old company, according to sources. The one-time retirement program will be available to workers at the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher, with eligible employees receiving details on May 7th.
Amazon is planning to lay off approximately 616 employees at its Homestead logistics facility beginning in early July through the end of September, while the warehouse is temporarily closed for a building conversion. More than 300 affected employees have already accepted transfers to other facilities. Amazon plans to reopen the facility in mid-to-late 2028 and expects to employ approximately 1,000 people there when it does.
Sama, a Nairobi-based outsourcing firm that handled AI training and content moderation work for Meta, abruptly laid off more than 1,000 Kenyan workers with just six days notice after Meta ended the contract. The termination follows Meta's decision last month to pause its work with Sama after allegations that workers were asked to view private footage captured by Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, including users filming themselves in bathrooms and during business time.
Nike is cutting 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, as part of its turnaround plan to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.” The move follows January layoffs during which Nike slashed some corporate staff and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at its distribution centers.

In corporate shakeups this week…

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that he will step down as the company's CEO in September after holding the position for nearly 15 years, during which he grew the company's market value more than tenfold to $4 trillion. The top spot will be filled by John Ternus, the 50-year-old head of Apple's hardware engineering who joined the company in 2001, making Ternus the eighth CEO in Apple's history.
Best Buy appointed Jason Bonfig, the company's current Chief Customer, Product, and Fulfillment Officer as its next CEO, succeeding Corie Barry, who held the position for seven years. Bonfig's appointment marks the sixth CEO in the company's 60-year history.
Truth Social is temporarily replacing its CEO Devin Nunes, a former California congressman, with Kevin McGurn, a digital media executive who previously worked at NBC Universal, Hulu, and DoubleClick, as it searches for a permanent replacement. The company's stock has plunged more than 67% since its recent peak in November 2024, wiping out more than $6B in market value. However, to be fair, I'd call it more a “correction” than anything else, as Truth Social was never worth $10B and is still overvalued.
Lululemon named Heidi O'Neill, who most recently served as Nike's president of consumer, product, and brand, as its new CEO, succeeding Calvin McDonald, who has held the position since 2018.
Goldman Sachs named Akila Raman as global head of its private and alternatives capital markets business where she will lead capital raising, structuring and distribution within the asset class. Raman joined Goldman in 2004 and became partner in 2018.
OpenAI hired Emmanuel Marill, a former Airbnb executive, as its first managing director to oversee operations in Europe, West Asia, and Africa. Marill will be tasked with the expansion of ChatGPT's parent company in key markets, similar to his former role at Airbnb.

🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… Meta is installing a keystroke and screenshot tracking software on employee computers to train its AI models, with no ability to opt-out. The program, called Model Capability Initiative, will be installed on computers of U.S.-based employees and contractors and will track keystrokes, mouse clicks and movements, and capture screenshots of work-related apps and websites including Gmail, GChat, and its internal AI assistant Metamate, as part of an effort to train AI agents how humans actually use computers. Meta said the data will not be used in performance reviews or visible to managers, but this is coming from the same company that denied that it would be performing mass layoffs only a month ago, right before laying off 10% of its workforce. Mass internal surveillance… mass layoffs… a company that is actively aiming to replace employees with AI — who the fuck would want to work at Meta anymore?

Plus 17 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Google announcing plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 23 days ago

▲ 1 r/ShopifyeCommerce

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.

btw - I'm at Commerce Live this week in Chicago. If you're here too, please don't hesitate to say hello if you see me.

Now let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news...

In lawsuits this week…

Google agreed to a $50M class action settlement resolving claims that it discriminated against Black employees by failing to hire them, assigning them to lower job levels, paying them less, and failing to promote them in a racially hostile work environment. Google did not admit any wrongdoing under the settlement, but agreed to analyze employee pay for racial differences, maintain employee reporting channels, and provide information about salary ranges.
Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire founder of the Tron blockchain, is suing World Liberty Financial, a crypto project co-founded by President Trump, accusing the company of extortion and an “illegal scheme” to seize his tokens. Sun also claimed in his complaint that “World Liberty is on the verge of collapse” and questioned whether it holds enough reserves to back its USD1 stablecoin.
Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that represents consumer interests, filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by allowing scam ads to proliferate on its platform because it had a financial incentive to do so, citing internal documents suggesting Meta was generating roughly $16B per year, or roughly 10% of its annual revenue, from the scam ads. Meta denied the $16B revenue figure and said that the allegations “misrepresent the reality of our work.” Meta notes that 159M scam ads were pulled from its platforms in the past year, a defense it is expected to lean on heavily in the case.
UMG, Capitol Records, and Concord filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Quince, a direct-to-consumer fashion startup, alleging the company and its influencer partners used music by artists including Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Fleetwood Mac, and ABBA as soundtracks in promotional videos without obtaining licenses. The complaint lists 67 sound recordings and 71 musical compositions as an “illustrative, non-exhaustive” list of infringed works and alleges willful and deliberate infringement, noting that Quince was first notified of the violations in September 2024.
Elon Musk dropped his fraud claims against OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, narrowing the scope of his lawsuit to just 2 of the 26 claims he made in his Nov 2024 complaint. Musk alleges that OpenAI abandoned its founding mission as a nonprofit to benefit humanity and is seeking as much as $134B in damages that he asked to be directed to OpenAI's charitable arm, the restoration of the firm's status as a nonprofit research organization, and the removal of Altman and Brockman from their roles at OpenAI – the last of which would likely benefit humanity on its own.
Capital One customers are suing Meta, Google, and other parties over the “outrageous, illegal and widespread practice” of knowingly and secretly installing third-party tracking tools on its websites, allowing other businesses to collect customers' personal and financial information. The plaintiffs claim that the third-party tracking tools collect vast amounts of sensitive consumer data, which resulted in them being bombarded with ads after applying for a credit card, and that Capital One does not adequately disclose these practices or obtain consent, as required by federal and state laws.
A former MrBeast executive is suing the media company over alleged wrongful termination after returning from parental leave, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment, including claims that she was demoted after filing a formal harassment complaint and had to be on a work call while in the delivery room. Beast Industries called the lawsuit “clout-chasing” built on “deliberate misrepresentations,” saying it has Slack messages, company documents, and witness testimony to refute the claims.

In layoffs this week…

Meta confirmed plans to lay off approximately 8,000 employees on May 20th, representing 10% of its 79,000-person workforce, while also closing 6,000 open roles it had intended to fill. Reuters reported last month that Meta could cut at least 20% of its total headcount this year, but a Meta spokesperson called the report “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” I guess they aren't so theoretical after all?
Microsoft will offer voluntary buyouts to 7% of its 125,000 employees in the U.S., marking a first for the 51-year-old company, according to sources. The one-time retirement program will be available to workers at the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher, with eligible employees receiving details on May 7th.
Amazon is planning to lay off approximately 616 employees at its Homestead logistics facility beginning in early July through the end of September, while the warehouse is temporarily closed for a building conversion. More than 300 affected employees have already accepted transfers to other facilities. Amazon plans to reopen the facility in mid-to-late 2028 and expects to employ approximately 1,000 people there when it does.
Sama, a Nairobi-based outsourcing firm that handled AI training and content moderation work for Meta, abruptly laid off more than 1,000 Kenyan workers with just six days notice after Meta ended the contract. The termination follows Meta's decision last month to pause its work with Sama after allegations that workers were asked to view private footage captured by Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, including users filming themselves in bathrooms and during business time.
Nike is cutting 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, as part of its turnaround plan to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.” The move follows January layoffs during which Nike slashed some corporate staff and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at its distribution centers.

In corporate shakeups this week…

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that he will step down as the company's CEO in September after holding the position for nearly 15 years, during which he grew the company's market value more than tenfold to $4 trillion. The top spot will be filled by John Ternus, the 50-year-old head of Apple's hardware engineering who joined the company in 2001, making Ternus the eighth CEO in Apple's history.
Best Buy appointed Jason Bonfig, the company's current Chief Customer, Product, and Fulfillment Officer as its next CEO, succeeding Corie Barry, who held the position for seven years. Bonfig's appointment marks the sixth CEO in the company's 60-year history.
Truth Social is temporarily replacing its CEO Devin Nunes, a former California congressman, with Kevin McGurn, a digital media executive who previously worked at NBC Universal, Hulu, and DoubleClick, as it searches for a permanent replacement. The company's stock has plunged more than 67% since its recent peak in November 2024, wiping out more than $6B in market value. However, to be fair, I'd call it more a “correction” than anything else, as Truth Social was never worth $10B and is still overvalued.
Lululemon named Heidi O'Neill, who most recently served as Nike's president of consumer, product, and brand, as its new CEO, succeeding Calvin McDonald, who has held the position since 2018.
Goldman Sachs named Akila Raman as global head of its private and alternatives capital markets business where she will lead capital raising, structuring and distribution within the asset class. Raman joined Goldman in 2004 and became partner in 2018.
OpenAI hired Emmanuel Marill, a former Airbnb executive, as its first managing director to oversee operations in Europe, West Asia, and Africa. Marill will be tasked with the expansion of ChatGPT's parent company in key markets, similar to his former role at Airbnb.

Plus 17 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Google announcing plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic.

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.

u/adventurepaul — 23 days ago

▲ 12 r/ecommerce

btw - I'm at Commerce Live this week in Chicago. If you're here too, please don't hesitate to say hello if you see me.

Now let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news...

In lawsuits this week…

Google agreed to a $50M class action settlement resolving claims that it discriminated against Black employees by failing to hire them, assigning them to lower job levels, paying them less, and failing to promote them in a racially hostile work environment. Google did not admit any wrongdoing under the settlement, but agreed to analyze employee pay for racial differences, maintain employee reporting channels, and provide information about salary ranges.
Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire founder of the Tron blockchain, is suing World Liberty Financial, a crypto project co-founded by President Trump, accusing the company of extortion and an “illegal scheme” to seize his tokens. Sun also claimed in his complaint that “World Liberty is on the verge of collapse” and questioned whether it holds enough reserves to back its USD1 stablecoin.
Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that represents consumer interests, filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by allowing scam ads to proliferate on its platform because it had a financial incentive to do so, citing internal documents suggesting Meta was generating roughly $16B per year, or roughly 10% of its annual revenue, from the scam ads. Meta denied the $16B revenue figure and said that the allegations “misrepresent the reality of our work.” Meta notes that 159M scam ads were pulled from its platforms in the past year, a defense it is expected to lean on heavily in the case.
UMG, Capitol Records, and Concord filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Quince, a direct-to-consumer fashion startup, alleging the company and its influencer partners used music by artists including Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Fleetwood Mac, and ABBA as soundtracks in promotional videos without obtaining licenses. The complaint lists 67 sound recordings and 71 musical compositions as an “illustrative, non-exhaustive” list of infringed works and alleges willful and deliberate infringement, noting that Quince was first notified of the violations in September 2024.
Elon Musk dropped his fraud claims against OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, narrowing the scope of his lawsuit to just 2 of the 26 claims he made in his Nov 2024 complaint. Musk alleges that OpenAI abandoned its founding mission as a nonprofit to benefit humanity and is seeking as much as $134B in damages that he asked to be directed to OpenAI's charitable arm, the restoration of the firm's status as a nonprofit research organization, and the removal of Altman and Brockman from their roles at OpenAI – the last of which would likely benefit humanity on its own.
Capital One customers are suing Meta, Google, and other parties over the “outrageous, illegal and widespread practice” of knowingly and secretly installing third-party tracking tools on its websites, allowing other businesses to collect customers' personal and financial information. The plaintiffs claim that the third-party tracking tools collect vast amounts of sensitive consumer data, which resulted in them being bombarded with ads after applying for a credit card, and that Capital One does not adequately disclose these practices or obtain consent, as required by federal and state laws.
A former MrBeast executive is suing the media company over alleged wrongful termination after returning from parental leave, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment, including claims that she was demoted after filing a formal harassment complaint and had to be on a work call while in the delivery room. Beast Industries called the lawsuit “clout-chasing” built on “deliberate misrepresentations,” saying it has Slack messages, company documents, and witness testimony to refute the claims.

In layoffs this week…

Meta confirmed plans to lay off approximately 8,000 employees on May 20th, representing 10% of its 79,000-person workforce, while also closing 6,000 open roles it had intended to fill. Reuters reported last month that Meta could cut at least 20% of its total headcount this year, but a Meta spokesperson called the report “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” I guess they aren't so theoretical after all?
Microsoft will offer voluntary buyouts to 7% of its 125,000 employees in the U.S., marking a first for the 51-year-old company, according to sources. The one-time retirement program will be available to workers at the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher, with eligible employees receiving details on May 7th.
Amazon is planning to lay off approximately 616 employees at its Homestead logistics facility beginning in early July through the end of September, while the warehouse is temporarily closed for a building conversion. More than 300 affected employees have already accepted transfers to other facilities. Amazon plans to reopen the facility in mid-to-late 2028 and expects to employ approximately 1,000 people there when it does.
Sama, a Nairobi-based outsourcing firm that handled AI training and content moderation work for Meta, abruptly laid off more than 1,000 Kenyan workers with just six days notice after Meta ended the contract. The termination follows Meta's decision last month to pause its work with Sama after allegations that workers were asked to view private footage captured by Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, including users filming themselves in bathrooms and during business time.
Nike is cutting 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, as part of its turnaround plan to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.” The move follows January layoffs during which Nike slashed some corporate staff and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at its distribution centers.

In corporate shakeups this week…

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that he will step down as the company's CEO in September after holding the position for nearly 15 years, during which he grew the company's market value more than tenfold to $4 trillion. The top spot will be filled by John Ternus, the 50-year-old head of Apple's hardware engineering who joined the company in 2001, making Ternus the eighth CEO in Apple's history.
Best Buy appointed Jason Bonfig, the company's current Chief Customer, Product, and Fulfillment Officer as its next CEO, succeeding Corie Barry, who held the position for seven years. Bonfig's appointment marks the sixth CEO in the company's 60-year history.
Truth Social is temporarily replacing its CEO Devin Nunes, a former California congressman, with Kevin McGurn, a digital media executive who previously worked at NBC Universal, Hulu, and DoubleClick, as it searches for a permanent replacement. The company's stock has plunged more than 67% since its recent peak in November 2024, wiping out more than $6B in market value. However, to be fair, I'd call it more a “correction” than anything else, as Truth Social was never worth $10B and is still overvalued.
Lululemon named Heidi O'Neill, who most recently served as Nike's president of consumer, product, and brand, as its new CEO, succeeding Calvin McDonald, who has held the position since 2018.
Goldman Sachs named Akila Raman as global head of its private and alternatives capital markets business where she will lead capital raising, structuring and distribution within the asset class. Raman joined Goldman in 2004 and became partner in 2018.
OpenAI hired Emmanuel Marill, a former Airbnb executive, as its first managing director to oversee operations in Europe, West Asia, and Africa. Marill will be tasked with the expansion of ChatGPT's parent company in key markets, similar to his former role at Airbnb.

Plus 17 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Google announcing plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic.

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.

reddit.com

u/adventurepaul — 23 days ago