r/ecommerce

Been running our thing for a couple years now and at some point we started getting more customer disputes. That's eating up a lot of time, so we looked at hiring someone part time to just handle those back and forths with customers, refund requests, chargebacks, that whole mess.

We’re talking maybe 10 to 15 disputes a month. Even at part time rates we’d probably be paying someone around 2k a month minimum just to manage that. Our average dispute value is around 200 bucks. When you really sit down and do the math, it just doesn’t feel right. You’re basically paying more to manage the problem than the problem itself is costing you.

And it’s not even just the cost. You still have to train them, trust them with customer communication, make sure they’re doing things properly, and stay involved when something more serious comes up. It doesn’t fully remove the problem, it just shifts it a bit.

Then I started wondering if theres something we're missing. Curious what other founders do when this becomes a thing, do you hire for it ?

Currently doing anywhere from $500 - $1.5k in revenue a day with my new store. Slowly building my brand up.

I’ve had multiple 7-fig (and one 8-fig) brands throughout the years so I got a bit of knowledge in various industries.

Mostly looking to connect with people who already have their brand running (don’t really mind what level you’re at in terms of revenue/success).

I spent the weekend nerding out on returns data because I kept hearing founders quote "10% return rate" like it's an industry baseline. It's not. And the cost per return is the part nobody actually models.

Here's the 2026 picture (from NRF, Statista, and Eightx data):

• Average ecommerce return rate: ~20.8% (up from 11% in 2020)
• Apparel: 25%, with some fashion sub-segments hitting 40–50%
• Footwear: ~18%
• Furniture/home: 15–20%
• Electronics: 11–15%
• Beauty: 4–12%
• Jewelry (private-label): ~4%

Now the part that broke my brain. Cost per return ranges from $10 to $65 per item depending on category (shipping back, inspection, restocking, depreciation). Furniture is the worst. reverse logistics on a couch can exceed the unit margin.

That's why some brands have quietly moved to "keep it" refunds under a certain price point.

The reason this matters: a 25% return rate doesn't shave 25% off your contribution margin. It shaves closer to 70% once you fold in processing, lost shipping, depreciation, and the chunk of returned inventory you can't resell at full price (only 48% gets back on the shelf at sticker).

What I found really jarring: 45% of all returns are caused by sizing, fit, or color. Another 14% by "inaccurate description." Together that's 59% of returns that are essentially a product-page problem, not a product problem.

Most of the brand owners I've talked to are running 6-8 flat photos per SKU and a single lifestyle shot. The customer is making a buying decision with less information than they'd get holding the thing for 4 seconds in a store. Then we act surprised when 1 in 4 ships back.

Curious what return rates the operators here are actually seeing. And if you've moved the needle on the "59% category" — what actually worked? Better photography? Video? Size guides? AR? I keep hearing different things from different categories.

My shopify store doing decent numbers but customer service is killing me. 100+ emails a day, order questions, shipping complaints, return requests. I'm spending 5+ hours daily just on inbox stuff and it's pulling me away from everything that actually grows the business.

I want to hire a virtual assistant to take over customer support but I'm nervous about handing someone access to my store and email. I've heard enough horror stories about bad hires or people who just disappear after you've trained them for weeks.

How do you actually do this right. Do you go platform or agency. How do you handle the access and permissions side. How long did it take your VA to actually be able to run tickets independently without you checking everything. and what do you do if they're not performing, is there a backup or do you start from scratch.

I just want to understand the actual process from someone who's done it.

I run a tiny ecommerce agency with just me and a designer, and lately I’ve been getting really frustrated with the platforms we use.

Shopify feels like I build everything and then disappear. Clients take over right away, the partner fees barely add up to anything meaningful, and most of the credit ends up going to Shopify. Webflow is fine for landing pages, but it starts hitting limits once you need to manage larger product catalogs or more complex ecommerce workflows.

On top of building the actual stores, I also have to help clients manage suppliers through sourceready, track product info, and make sure inventory and pricing stay accurate. That part creates a lot of extra work, and most platforms don’t really help much with it. It’s not just about the website. A lot of the real work is keeping product data organized and consistent, especially when every client sources products differently.

I’m starting to wonder if building my own platform from scratch would be cheaper long term, or if there’s a better tool out there that I haven’t found yet.

Has anyone here tried alternatives that actually let agencies control the brand, build recurring revenue, and not feel like you’re just building on someone else’s platform every time?

As I have been with ShipBob for about a year, tired of the lost inventory and slow support. I am looking into ShipMonk but reviews seem just as mixed. Doing around 400 orders a month, DTC Shopify, skincare products nothing complicated. Anyone switched from either and actually happy with where they landed?

Hi everyone! I’ve found some suppliers in China, but I need advice on two things. First, once production is done and the supplier creates the packing list, how can I find a reliable 3rd-party agent in China to handle quality control before shipping? Second, some suppliers refuse to do DDP and their DAP quotes are way too expensive. Should I just hire my own independent Freight Forwarder to pick up the goods from the supplier's warehouse and handle the whole DDP shipping/customs process for me? Any recommendations or tips on how to handle this setup would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I mostly see people talk about Alibaba in ecommerce communities, but recently I’ve noticed more suppliers showing up on Made-in-china. too.

Curious if anyone here actually uses it regularly and whether the experience has been any different lately.”

I see a lot of "I made $10k my first month selling printables!" posts. Here's what 14 months actually looked like for me.

Month 1: $0 (7 products listed)

Month 2: $14 (someone bought a budget template)

Month 3: $31

Month 4: $67

Month 5: $89

Month 6: $143

Month 7: $201

Month 8: $178 (slump don't know why)

Month 9: $267

Month 10: $334

Month 11: $412

Month 12: $389

Month 13: $501

Month 14: $623

Total: \\\\\\\~$3,349 over 14 months. Average $239/month.

I now have 34 products. The top 5 products make up about 70% of revenue. The other 29 barely sell.

Is this "passive"? Sort of. I spend maybe 3-4 hours a month updating listings, making new products, and answering questions. For $600/month that's fine. For "quit your job" money it's not there yet.

What I'd do differently: I wasted time making products I thought were cool instead of researching what people were actually searching for. Keyword research first, design second. I learned this around month 6 and growth accelerated.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's thinking about starting.

Im currently developing a brand in the card binder and sleeve space. My catalog is going to be extensive, with different styles and colors. The problem I am having is with my first order. Ive found the right supplier, the samples were perfect, now theyre asking for 100 MOQ per color, which adds up to quite a bit with the 5 colors I would have liked to stock. All in all, id end up with 2000 total units across the binder section without a sale on a first order.

The sleeves and other items are a little easier to swallow, much cheaper in bulk and space/weight wise would be easier to manage.

At a crossroads, anxiety is ramping up. What are your thoughts on how to proceed?

Asking about consulting firms at the $2M revenue stage. Most marketing for advisory is built for fortune 500 budgets or sub $500k solo operations, the middle band where my business sits feels weirdly underserved. Anyone here use a consulting firm, business advisor, or fractional cfo at this revenue level and find it useful?

Wondering whether to go with a business advisor who looks at the whole company, a fractional cfo who only touches the financial side, or eos as a system the team adopts. Don't want to spend in the wrong direction.

For context, digital products business mostly through our own store with a couple of marketplaces on top, six employees, revenue is up but profit is stuck and I cant isolate whether its acquisition cost, pricing, or me being in the way of everything.

I have been researching the online casino space recently and the pricing range is honestly way wider than I expected. Some people make it sound like you can launch with a relatively small budget while others talk about needing six or seven figures before you even think about going live.

between licensing, payment processing, platform costs, game integration, compliance, support staff, and marketing it feels difficult to figure out what the actual realistic starting point is for a smaller operator trying to enter the space seriously.

For people who have worked in or around this industry, what does a realistic budget actually look like in 2026 if someone wanted to launch something legitimate and not just a short term cash grab?

Hello, I ordered a package from Ireland to the United States knowing I will have to pay import fees and taxes. I have been getting flooded with emails and texts from AnPost (Irish shipping company) with a link to payment on their website, saying they will send my item back to the seller if I don’t pay by tomorrow, but wouldn’t I be paying the USPS for customs and not AnPost from Ireland? isn’t it the destination country that gets paid? Are the emails a phishing scam because they include a link to payment? Am I paranoid or just stupid? The small business I ordered from was no help at all 🙄

Hi all,

(Apologies in advance if this isn’t the right place to ask)

I’m based in India where there is zero official distribution for Beyblade X. Despite no official presence, there's a highly active local market completely driven by independent resellers.

From looking into it, it seems like almost all the smaller local sellers just bulk-buy consumer retail listings off places like Mercari or Amazon JP,and use proxy services (like Buyee or ZenMarket) to bring them over.

This got me curious ,is it possible for smaller businesses to order from distributors based in HK or Japan at wholesale prices?What kind of scale would that need? How would one even contact such distributors?

Appreciate all help!

Hey guys, looking for a quick sanity check from anyone scaling high-volume autoship models.

We launched a high end skincare brand late last year. Scaling front-end traffic via organic/micro-influencers has been great, but our retention is a total leaky bucket. We crawled our way to $40k MRR, but our churn is hovering around 14% and completely wiping out our growth.

When I dig into the data, it’s a mix of two things:

1. The Depletion Gap: Customers aren't finishing their 30-day serums or topicals before the next billing cycle hits. They get a bottleneck of unused product on their vanity, feel guilty, and hit cancel.
2. Brutal involuntary churn: A ridiculous amount of active subscribers drop off purely due to failed renewals, card expirations, or random bank declines.

Skincare is supposed to be the absolute gold standard for subscriptions because of the built in customer runs out routine logic, but right now the operational backend is eating us alive.

For those past 6 figures how are you fixing the depletion bottleneck? And what are you doing about renewal failures besides standard, annoying Shopify email dunning flows?

Hi everyone,

I am currently looking for reliable OEM/ODM manufacturers or top-tier suppliers based in China (ideally in Guangdong/Shenzhen) that specialize in high-quality Aramid Fiber (Kevlar) phone cases, similar to Pitaka's standard.

We are looking for a supplier that can offer:

- Precise molds for the latest iPhone, Samsung, and top Android models.

- Magsafe compatibility.

Thanks in advance for any leads or recommendations!

Maybe this is a weird observation, but lately a lot of stores are starting to feel... identical.

Same style product images. Same ad hooks. Same AI-written descriptions.
Same “here’s the problem, here’s the solution” copy.

And honestly, it makes sense. AI now helps with almost everything:

• product photos
• landing pages
• ad creatives
• emails
• support
• even full store setup

So launching a brand is becoming easier than ever. But I think the hard part is shifting.

Before, the difficult thing was building the store. Now the difficult thing is making people actually trust or remember your brand.

Because customers are getting exposed to so many low-effort stores that all sound polished in the exact same way.

I don’t think AI is bad for eCommerce at all. I use these tools too. I just think the brands that win over the next few years will probably be the ones that still feel human somewhere:

• real positioning
• real customer experience
• real understanding of the product
• real community
• real voice

Not just better prompts. Curious if anyone else running a store is noticing this too?

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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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🏆 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.

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

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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.

I have one shopping and 1 search campaign running for my products. I am tracking heatmaps with Microsoft Clarity when visitors who land on page.

I have a strong feeling that google is scamming me! Visitors who land on my page and spend only 1-2 seconds doing nothing. No scroll no movements. It’s like click and exit. If it happened few times I would understand but it’s happening at a rate I would say I am being spammed and google is charging me for this. I am wondering if they are bots?
I feel awful and am thinking to quit ads altogether!

Is this normal guys? I have a bad feeling here and looking for advice 😭

In my local market, people don't really use emails much and instead use WhatsApp as the defacto way to communicate with literally everything. My company is burning money everyday on Facebook to reach to our existing customers. Has anyone used WhatsApp to reach their existing customers? A sales rep of a WhatsApp marketing solution told me that Meta is strict on WhatsApp marketing and some may not receive the message.

Thanks in advance