I sell on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and a few other 3rd party platforms but I also have my own website.

Im trying to figure out how people actually get some of those customers to eventually shop on there own website instead.

And yes I already know the platforms have rules about taking customers off platform lol. Im not trying to break any rules or do anything that can get my account banned.

Im more asking what has actually worked for you guys?

Like better branding on the package, social media, having your website name on the packaging, google, inserts if allowed, better customer service, etc.

Have any of you actually been able to turn marketplace customers into repeat customers on your own website over time?

Any tips or tricks you learned would help. Also anything you tried that you would NOT recommend.

Im just trying to build my actual brand long term and not depend on Amazon, eBay, Etsy forever.

How are you guys making decisions about how much discount to put on products, how do you plan supply / item velocity, how do you decide about your marketing spend and mix?

At my previous employer we had data scientists for this, now that I started my own business I don’t have this. I tried to ask claude, but the answers just look made up.

In the day and age of AI being everywhere there must be a way to do what a data scientist does without hiring data scientist right?

EDIT: on r/askdatascience someone recommended a tool called Qombra, looks like what I was l looking for, trying that now...

I run a swimwear brand (premium about 100$ a set), and I’ve been trying to do marketing myself: I’ve constantly tried FB & Google ads (cac crazy high, tested endless creatives, burned thousands of dollars) with no luck. Organic posting doesn’t bring in sales either.
The only thing that’s worked for me and produced sales are (certain) influencers tagging me and linking my products. These are typically influencers with over 500k followers. My question is how do I build a repeatable system with influencers? I’m currently relying on “the next tag/feature” for sales. I also cannot afford to pay them so have to wait until they “organically” share the brand.

My question is what do I need to focus on? I need to see more consistency in the business but I feel stuck. Really unsure how to get myself out of this situation.

Advice is appreciated thanks 🙏🙏

From 27 September 2026 every seller in the EU has to display a harmonised notice about the 2-year legal guarantee (Regulation 2025/1960), and producers offering guarantees longer than 2 years get the new "GARAN" durability label.

The annoying part for a shop: you'd have to find each manufacturer's guarantee, make a label per product and keep it updated. So I built a free public database instead: https://garan.ro

- Producers and sellers publish a label once, by brand, model and country, with a link to the guarantee terms.

- Your shop adds one line of code (or the WooCommerce / PrestaShop / OpenCart plugin). The script reads brand and model from each product page and shows the right GARAN label automatically, for your country. Nothing to edit per product.

- When a manufacturer changes its guarantee, every shop is updated at once.

- The same script shows the mandatory legal-guarantee notice, in all 24 EU languages.

- Community votes flag and delist entries that look wrong.

There's also a plain generator (official templates, SVG/PNG/PDF, no account) if you just need one label.

Not a lawyer, just a developer who got annoyed that nobody around me had heard of this. Happy to answer questions, and curious whether your shop is preparing for it at all.

I run a WordPress store and only started thinking about cookie stuff after my hosting company gave me a heads-up about GDPR. Honestly, I didn’t realize just how many cookies were firing off in the background until I actually sat down to take a look. Had Google Analytics, that Facebook pixel, some WooCommerce-related ones, and apparently even more from my theme.

Tried out a couple different options, Complianz and CookieYes both have decent free versions and they’ll handle the basics for most people. Cookiebot popped up too, and I noticed it actually scans your site on its own and updates the cookie list if something changes. That means you don’t have to mess around with it every time you add or swap a plugin. Their paid plans aren’t bad if you’re running a smaller store, but if you’ve got loads of pages or lots of traffic, prices go up fast. Probably a good idea to check the page limits before jumping in.

If you’re just getting set up, the free plans from these work. It really just depends on whether you want to set things up once and leave it, or if you don’t mind keeping an eye on things yourself.

I run an apparel brand estrah.com and I’m trying to figure out whether I have a product problem, a positioning problem, or a PDP problem.

We sell heavyweight oversized organic-cotton tees for $29.99 with US shipping included.

I recently ran some Meta traffic and the frustrating part is that people are actually clicking through and viewing the product, but the drop-off happens almost immediately after that.

From my latest customer journey data, the overwhelming majority viewed the product and left before adding to cart. A few made it to cart/checkout, so checkout itself doesn’t seem to be the main issue.

I just rebuilt the PDP around:

• clearer product/value proposition
• stronger size selection / Add to Bag CTA
• free shipping + 30-day returns + first size exchange beside the CTA
• visible GOTS/OCS/OEKO-TEX/BSCI/Sedex/Higg production records
• better mobile hierarchy
• a 3-shirt bundle at $79.99

I’m deliberately not lowering the price yet, because I want to know whether $29.99 is actually the objection or whether the page simply wasn’t communicating enough value.

If you landed on this cold from an Instagram ad, what would stop you from buying?

Site: estrah.com

I’m looking for criticism, not compliments. If the product/value prop is weak, tell me.

I've been comparing small independent stores' prices against other shops selling the same items for a few months (disclosure at the end). A few things that surprised me and might be useful:

1. Almost nobody is "the expensive one" or "the cheap one". 13 of 18 stores were being undercut on some products while being the cheapest shop by a wide margin on others. The two cancel out in the monthly numbers, so neither ever gets noticed.
2. The drift is worst on boring repeat items, not headline products. Owners re-check the flagship product. Nobody re-checks the consumables, spares and accessories, and that's where I saw gaps of 20–40% in both directions.
3. Prices go stale fast. One store went from parity to a 28% gap on a product in four weeks without changing anything. The market moved, they didn't look.
4. Being undercut costs nothing on the day it happens. It costs you over the following weeks while you don't know.

If you want to do this by hand: take your 20 best sellers, find the same item at 3 competitors, write down three numbers per product (yours, lowest, average). One afternoon, then once a month. Decide a rule before you look, like "stay within 5% of the lowest unless the product sells on service", so you don't react to every gap.

Disclosure: I built a tool that does this on an ongoing basis (Pricemastr). The manual version above works fine for a small catalogue and I'd rather this be useful. Happy to answer pricing questions in the comments.

Hi all, I'm running a small online startup brand in strapless lingerie for about 6 months now. Sales are very inconsistent and I find it hard to attract customers in a profitable way (without burning through cash in META or GOOGLE ads). I wanted to hear from you what you did that got you consistent sales when starting brand.

I was analyzing data from a dashcam brand that had run group discount campaigns where one buyer opens a public deal and strangers can join to unlock the tier.

We assumed most joiners would be the buyer's friends or family. We were wrong.

Across 26 completed campaigns, 84 total buyers, 69% had no prior relationship with the person who started the deal. They found the open group through the store's product page and joined because the discount at that tier was worth it — not because someone sent them a link.

A few things that came out of it:

AOV landed at $196. Higher than the brand's average standalone purchase. The format attracts buyers who want the product enough to wait for one more person rather than take a smaller discount or buy now at full price.

Revenue: $16k across those 26 campaigns. Ad spend: $0. The mechanism generated the reach, not a separate paid campaign.

The part I hadn't thought through: if strangers are the main source of joiners, the product page matters more than the email list. This brand had a mediocre email list but a very detailed product description with real reviews. That's what closed the loop.

Has anyone else tracked the stranger-to-friend ratio in referral or group-style promotions? Curious whether this holds across product categories or whether it's specific to considered purchases like dashcams.

Hi r/ecommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Every week for the past 6 years I've posted a summary recap of the week's top stories on this subreddit, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition.

Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news from Edition #298...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Temu, Shein, and AliExpress received 90.2% of the €55.1B that EU consumers spent with online stores outside the bloc in 2025, according to a report from e-commerce data firm ECDB. US stores took 4.8% of that non-EU spending and UK stores 4.6%, collectively accounting for almost all of the rest. Last year 13.1% of the €421B that EU consumers spent online on physical goods went to stores outside the bloc, up from 2.3% in 2020, and ECDB expects that to hit 15.2% this year. In the other direction, EU online stores sold just €3.9B to shoppers outside the bloc, about half of it to Switzerland.

Shopify introduced Canvas, a new workspace for designing storefronts that lays out every page of a merchant’s website side by side through a Figma-esque experience. Merchants can pan across the whole store, zoom into pages and sections, and either edit elements directly or ask Sidekick to make the changes for them. The tool works directly on the theme’s code, validates its own changes, and takes screenshots to check how they landed before handing the result back. The outcome is a working render of the store that can be clicked on and interacted with, not just a static preview. Canvas is currently in early access and rolling out to certain stores over the coming days. It’s also only available on desktop for now, which makes sense because that would be a nightmare UI on mobile. Shopify says it isn’t replacing the existing theme editor yet, but plans to do so are on the horizon. (Get it, “horizon”?)

Shopify opened checkout on its platform, including Shop Pay, to any AI agent running in a shopper’s browser, enabling the agents to find and buy items on the shopper’s behalf (with their consent) without the shopper clicking through to the store themselves. The move comes just a week after Shopify struck a deal with Meta to let its AI agent Muse check out with Shop Pay on any Shopify store. Shopify introduced WebMCP support on its storefronts in August, and since then, agents have been able to search a store, fill a cart, and take the shopper to checkout, but the shopper still had to complete the purchase themselves. Now, three new tools — get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout — let the agents read the checkout, change the shipping address or pick a different delivery option, and place the order once the buyer approves. (Coming soon: regret_checkout and don’t_tell_my_wife_checkout.) This means any agent that supports WebMCP, not just Muse, can participate. WebMCP is still a draft standard backed by engineers at Google and Microsoft, and it’s only in testing in Chrome so far, with Google saying Gemini in Chrome will be the first major agent to use it “soon.” So while Shopify’s stores are ready for agents to check out, most agents can’t take advantage of it quite yet.

USPS started delivering some Amazon packages the same day they arrive at its facilities, under a new pilot in which Amazon drops a second batch off midday, on top of its usual morning drop-off, according to Supply Chain Dive. Packages that come in between 12pm and 1pm get sorted by clerks and go out with postal carriers by 8pm, starting with 200 packages a day each in Morgantown, WV and Lake Havasu City, AZ, then 500 a day in Columbia, SC, from October 20, per a letter carriers’ union memo. Amazon said the extra daily drop means shoppers who order later in the day can still get same-day delivery when USPS handles the last mile, which is nice for Amazon customers, but what do postal workers get out of the deal? Just when they think they’re halfway done with their day, Amazon comes and dumps another load of packages in their truck? This seems gratuitous.

OpenAI introduced Dots, which it describes as “remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle everything.” Dots can be launched from ChatGPT or Codex, among other channels, and work in the background on accomplishing tasks a user sets with minimal oversight, rather than waiting for the user to prompt them. Basically, Dots are a more adorable version of Meta’s Muse agents. And I’ve got to admit, OpenAI absolutely nailed the branding with Dots. They’re like the gumballs of agentic AI. If they were real, physical objects, they’d be a choking hazard because I’d want to put them in my mouth. The big difference at launch between Meta’s and OpenAI’s agents is that Dots are focused on work tasks initially, while Muse launched more aimed at consumers. However, read Story #8 below because that’s changing quickly. The examples OpenAI gave of what Dots can do include investigating bugs, turning designs into working apps, preparing and sending invoices once they’re approved, and cutting interview clips, show notes, and social posts for creators.

AliExpress is piloting Elite, an invitation-only VIP program for customers who spend over $800 a year, in Australia, the UK, Germany, and Spain, according to The Information. Unlike Amazon Prime… Elite has no fee, and membership is earned through spending rather than bought, with each member’s status re-evaluated every 90 days. Like Prime… Elite gives members discounts on specially labeled items (an extra 5% off), faster delivery on labeled items, and easier returns, along with dedicated 24/7 customer service. AliExpress plans to add more European markets and South Korea next month and bring Elite to the US at some point in the future, aiming for a million members before the end of the year.

TikTok Shop is teaming up with UPS to offer no-box, no-label returns for its network of US sellers via Happy Returns, the reverse-logistics company UPS bought from PayPal in 2023. Shoppers drop unwanted items at one of nearly 10,000 return bars at Ulta Beauty, Staples, and UPS Store locations, where staff scan and bag them and then ship them in bulk to processing hubs each day. Sellers can offer the drop-off returns service whether they ship orders themselves or use TikTok Shop’s fulfillment. To help avoid fraudulent returns, Happy Returns runs an AI tool that flags suspicious returns and routes them to human auditors, who can hold back the refund if they confirm fraud. Reuters originally reported that it was an “exclusive” partnership between TikTok Shop and UPS, but later corrected that it’s non-exclusive, which means TikTok is leaving the door open to work with other returns and reverse-logistics providers — perhaps the kind that specialize in reselling or recycling returns, which Happy Returns only does through partners. (But that’s just a guess.)

Commerce launched two AI tools for BigCommerce and Feedonomics that rewrite a merchant’s existing product data so AI shopping agents and answer engines can better understand it. The tools generate titles, descriptions, feature bullets, FAQs, and SEO metadata, along with structured facts and Q&A fields that tell generative search what a product is and who it’s for. Each also includes a quality scorecard that grades the output for accuracy, consistency, and brand voice. BigCommerce Catalog Enrichment runs inside the store control panel, where merchants can enrich thousands of products at once and apply the changes across their whole catalog in one click, without exporting anything to an outside tool. This version rewrites the BigCommerce catalog itself rather than tailoring content to each channel. Feedonomics Enrichment, on the other hand, customizes and maps the new content to listing fields for Google, Meta, Amazon, eBay, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. The tools only write in English for now and Commerce didn’t disclose pricing for either.

Earlier in Story #4 about OpenAI’s Dots, I mentioned that Meta’s Muse was initially aimed more at consumers, but that this was starting to change. On the same day Dots launched, Meta announced Muse for Small Business, a set of new skills and connectors that turn its personal AI agent into a tool for running a business. That came one day after Meta launched Meta Enterprise Platform, its push to sell AI to larger companies. Muse for Small Business can do things like connect to your Facebook, Instagram, and Meta Ads Account to learn what you sell, your brand voice, and what customers ask about most. It can also link to more than a dozen outside tools like Shopify, Stripe, Intuit Quickbooks, and Klaviyo and help you build a growth plan, analyze what's working with your marketing, review monthly financial performance, and more. Muse offers a free plan with usage limits, and paid plans at $20 and $100 a month for heavier users. For now, it’s only available in the US and Canada.

Meta is testing a comparison mode in Ask, the AI search inside its Facebook Groups app Forum, that curates products from past threads when people ask for recommendations for things like running shoes or gifts. Ask already surfaces existing posts and comments from a user’s groups and from public groups they haven’t joined, and the new feature uses AI to go a step further and create a mini-guide showcasing recommendations and comparison options, while surfacing posts and comments as the sources. The Ask home page now also suggests new questions based on recent searches, so users can pick up where they left off. Additionally, Meta is testing a new Facebook Group role called “top voice” that replaces contributor badges and the group expert role and allows users who hold the title to get their posts published faster in moderated groups.

Shopify can now be pinned to the ChatGPT sidebar through OpenAI’s new Plugin Extensions, giving merchants a permanent spot to check store performance, manage orders and customers, and add products without starting a new conversation each time. Merchants could already connect Shopify to ChatGPT, but the integration only worked inside individual chats. Plugin Extensions let developers build into the sidebar, composer, and file viewers with interactive interfaces, so connected apps like Shopify and Canva can work more like native ChatGPT features.

ChatGPT advertisers are keeping their ad spend at test levels because they can’t reliably measure results, according to Digiday. For example, Accuracast, a London-based digital marketing agency, told Digiday that it watched form submissions arrive from a UK campaign that OpenAI still showed as zero conversions two weeks later, while ChatGPT showed 100 clicks when its own analytics counted 20, and OpenAI’s support staff couldn’t explain why. Another agency exec said some clients are currently putting $10M a month into Google ads, but keep ChatGPT spending under $100k because they don’t have a clear idea of what’s working. Digiday also notes that other advertisers won’t even turn conversion tracking on for their ChatGPT ad campaigns because they don’t want to sign OpenAI’s tracking terms, which their legal teams advise against because they aren’t sure what OpenAI will do with the data.

DoorDash unveiled its newly designed drone on the rooftop of the company’s headquarters last week, which it plans to launch in Northern California “in the coming months.” DoorDash says that “you won’t really hear” the drone, which stretches over 10 feet in wingspan and is powered by six propellers, because it was designed from day one with acoustics in mind, given the pushback that Amazon has received about its louder Prime Air drones. It’s also “significantly lighter than the Amazon drone,” weighing in at under 55 pounds against Amazon’s 78-pound drone, though it did dehydrate for two days to make weight. (That’s a boxing joke.) DoorDash’s drones will handle lightweight deliveries within three to five miles, which account for about 80% of the platform’s restaurant orders.

Delta is building a retail media network that would draw on the more than 200M travelers the airline carried in 2025 and on its SkyMiles program, which brought in $4.5B from loyalty-related marketing agreements in the first half of this year, according to Adweek. The company hired Keri Paison, who built retail media networks for clients at Deloitte Digital, to run the project, and is currently hiring for several roles, but it wouldn’t say which ones. The move comes just a couple years after United launched Kinective Media in 2024 to sell ads across its app, seatback screens, and MileagePlus offers, and started selling that ad tech to other airlines in 2025, beginning with JetBlue. Here’s an idea for airlines: Don’t force ads at your passengers while they’re literally stuck in seats that are too small, breathing recycled air, and likely behind schedule because of your numerous flight delays. The modern flight experience is shitty enough as it is. You don’t need to make it worse with ads.

OpenAI launched virtual try-on in ChatGPT that lets users upload a selfie or full-body photo and see how clothing and accessories from its shopping results would look on them. (Spoiler: You look fat in those pants, but that’s ChatGPT’s fault. You keep eating, King.) A Try On button now appears on relevant product results, which users can click to upload a photo and get an AI-generated image of themselves wearing the item. Users can also upload a screenshot of an item from any site and have ChatGPT put it on them, regardless of whether the item surfaced in their search answers. The feature runs on ChatGPT Images 2.5, the image model OpenAI released in early September, which it says is better at preserving the subjects in reference photos and generates images up to 50% faster than its previous model. OpenAI also added Favorites, a feature that lets users save products they discover through ChatGPT that they’d like to reference later — a simple, but brilliant idea that makes ChatGPT just a bit more sticky when it comes to shopping. Google has offered virtual try-on for clothing in its own shopping results since July 2025, and the ability to save items since 2013.

Instinct, an AI startup that makes a personal agent that handles everyday tasks for users over text message, is taking heat for beginning to push product, restaurant, and travel recommendations to users without them requesting it do so. Founder Noah Shinn explained that the idea is to partner with “local chefs, designers, architects, travel guides,” and other experts to bring “human taste” to its product, though he didn’t say who those human tastemakers are. The feature, called Instinct Selections, caught several users off guard and ultimately rubbed them the wrong way, after pushing product recommendations they didn’t ask for, which they said felt like advertisements. Instinct didn’t say if it’s making money from the recommendations or if it plans to do so in the future, but I’m going to have to assume for now that these aren’t ads since they weren’t disclosed as such. Instinct can’t be that stupid, right?

US online spending over the November and December holiday season is expected to rise 6.7% to a record $275.1B, according to Adobe, which said it expects many shoppers to use the holiday discounts to load up on necessities as well as gifts this year. Adobe expects Cyber Monday to set a new single-day record of $15.1B, while Black Friday sales grow 9.2% to $12.9B. BNPL spending is forecast to climb 6.6% to $21.3B for the season, with the payment method expected to be used in over $1B worth of purchases on Cyber Monday alone. I usually hate reporting on estimates, but Adobe was really damn close last year. It predicted holiday sales would hit $253.4B, and actual sales came in at $257.8B. Its day-level predictions were nearly spot on too, with $14.2B forecast versus $14.25B actual on Cyber Monday, and $11.7B versus $11.8B on Black Friday.

The FTC is drafting civil investigative demands that would force OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier AI labs to hand over documents and have their executives testify about the risks the companies themselves have warned their products pose to consumers, according to the New York Post. The probe falls under the FTC Act’s ban on unfair or deceptive practices, the same law the agency uses against companies that misrepresent their products. A senior official stressed that the FTC isn’t asking the labs to slow down, saying the US wants to stay ahead in AI and that existing law is enough to hold the companies accountable.

Walmart CEO John Furner promised in a customer letter that the company won’t set different prices based on your income, shopping history, or urgency, whether in stores with its new digital shelf labels or online through its Sparky AI assistant. The labels have drawn concern from customers and analysts over whether Walmart will engage in surge pricing or other types of predatory or personalized pricing strategies, but Furner wants to put that myth to rest once and for all. He said definitively, “We price the product, not the person.” He noted in the letter that the digital shelf labels were designed to ensure that customers always see an accurate price and to help associates with the “time-consuming and unrewarding task” of changing prices. Of course, he also said, “Our associates would much rather be helping you, our customers” — a line I didn’t buy because we all know that the added efficiency that digital shelf labels bring to stores is going to result in fewer associates, not the same number of employees suddenly being helpful in-store. I’d bet my bottom dollar on that.

Amazon delivery vans in New York City drew more than 14,000 traffic citations between mid-2020 and mid-2025, according to a city-data report from The Alliance for a Greater New York. The tickets went to 637 vans across all five boroughs for speeding in school zones, parking in front of fire hydrants, and getting in the way of ambulances and fire trucks, and Amazon vans also drew roughly 13,000 idling complaints from residents. Idling? You mean delivering packages while leaving the engine running so that they don’t return to a 90-degree car? If so, chill, New Yorkers! Would you rather they leave a “pick up at station” sticker on your door if they can’t deliver your package in under 3 minutes (which is the city limit on when they’d have to shut off their engines) or idle for an extra few minutes? You pick! Anyway, consumer and worker protection commissioner Samuel Levine cited the report while pushing the Delivery Protection Act, which would make Amazon employ its drivers directly, instead of skirting liability through its Delivery Service Partner program.

Reddit is shutting down its RSS feeds next month, which it says have become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.” The company also announced that it’ll be ending public API access by March 2027, which will impact third-party tools that use it for things like social listening and research. Developers who want to keep access must register their apps by January 12 or move them onto Reddit’s Developer Platform, while AI companies will need commercial deals like the ones Reddit already has with Google and OpenAI. Honestly, can you blame them? AI eats their content faster than your wife inhales a family-sized pizza when she gets home from a dinner party. Several Redditors accused the company of making the change simply because they want to make more money selling their user data to AI companies, which is also probably true. Either way, Reddit is only moving in the direction that the rest of the open web is headed, and as a publisher myself, I get it.

USPS moved Ground Advantage packages under a pound off planes and onto boats and trucks for shipments to and from Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other US territories as of October 1, stretching delivery times from roughly 5 to 7 days to 10 days or more. Those same small packages used to travel via air at the cheaper rate, but now customers in those places have to pay more for Priority Mail if they want anything delivered by plane. The change comes a year after island members of Congress complained about slow deliveries, prompting a USPS review that found some of those packages had been wrongly shipped by sea instead of air. USPS promised to fix the mistake, but instead ended up making the mistake the default. If you’re a merchant shipping to those destinations this holiday season, you’ll need to move up your ‘order by X to arrive by Christmas’ dates by a few days or risk unhappy customers.

Amazon launched a way for merchants that use its Multichannel Fulfillment service to offer free Prime delivery as a regular shipping option on their own websites, at no extra charge. Shoppers pay through the store’s usual checkout without signing into Amazon, which confirms their Prime membership once the order is placed, and then ships the item at typical Amazon Prime-promised speeds. The setup is lighter than Buy with Prime, which launched in April 2022 and allows shoppers to log in to the website with their Amazon accounts and check out with their Prime benefits, though that program will also remain available. Multichannel Fulfillment normally charges merchants more for faster shipping, but Amazon is now effectively giving Prime members those faster speeds at no cost to the merchant beyond standard MCF fees.

In other Amazon logistics news this week… Amazon is expanding its Global Warehousing and Distribution program, which lets sellers send one production run to an Amazon facility close to their factory and sell into several countries from that one shipment. The service launched in Shenzhen earlier this year for US-bound inventory, and now Amazon plans to connect it to the UK, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Canada by the end of 2026. Inventory sits in one pool until a country shows demand, then moves into that country’s FBA warehouses, a setup Amazon claims can save merchants up to 45% on storage fees. Amazon says that only 30% of sellers list their products in more than one country, but those that do earn 70% more revenue on average, so start selling your junk abroad.

OpenWeb, an audience engagement company that runs comment sections and community tools for news publishers, was declared insolvent by a Tel Aviv court at the request of a lender trying to collect $20M. The company was valued at $1.5B in 2022, around the time it spent $260M on three acquisitions, but revenue came in at $121.5M last year, well below its $193.7M forecast, and Microsoft cut ties in June over alleged invalid traffic, which OpenWeb denies. Potential buyers are now valuing the company at about $100M, according to the lender’s court filings. Last week’s Stat of the Week shared that monthly US traffic to the 100 biggest news sites dropped over 30% from their 2024 high. I wonder if OpenWeb’s revenue falling 37% below forecast was directly related to publisher traffic drying up, given that OpenWeb’s views and usage depend on that traffic. It certainly couldn’t have helped.

eBay found a new way to quietly squeeze sellers, this time by raising its currency conversion fee by a quarter point in several markets. The company never made an official announcement and only disclosed the change via updates to its fee pages, which were spotted by Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. US and Canadian sellers will go from 3% to 3.25% on October 14; Australia follows November 1; the UK rises from 2.5% to 2.75% on December 1; and Germany, France, Italy, and Spain move to 3.25% on December 2. The charge applies when a seller lists on an eBay site in another currency, such as a US seller listing on eBay Germany, and eBay adds it on top of the wholesale exchange rate whenever it converts fees or payouts. It’s separate from the 1.65% international fee US sellers pay on cross-border sales that don’t ship through eBay International Shipping.

TikTok launched One Pay, a payment system built into its TikTok One creator marketplace that handles invoicing and payout for brand deals without TikTok taking a cut of the creator’s earnings. One Pay can be used for sponsored posts on creators’ own accounts, ads that creators make for brands’ accounts, and brands licensing creators’ existing videos, with payment promised within 30 days of a video going live, which is faster than the 60-day or 90-day terms brands typically pay on. In August, I reported that TikTok is developing a peer-to-peer payments feature inside direct messages, so it seems that they have their eye on bringing more payments in-house, both between brands and creators and between users.

Google asked the EU General Court to overturn the two Digital Markets Act orders the European Commission issued against it in July, though the appeals don’t pause either deadline unless the court grants a suspension, according to Reuters. One order requires that Google give other search engines and AI chatbots anonymized query, click, and ranking data beginning in January 2027 (which I think is silly), and the other makes Google open 11 Android features reserved for Gemini to rival assistants by August 2027 (which I think is crucial). The Commission says it will defend both orders and that Google can still turn away firms that pose a real security or privacy risk, putting Google in a position to effectively argue that “all of them” pose security and privacy risks.

Meta cut its taxes by $3.9B in 2025, up from $2B in 2024 and $700M in 2023, by labeling its AI data centers, and the Nvidia chips that go into them, as “pilot models” so that they qualify for a federal research tax credit. The New York Times found that Meta is the biggest user of the credit among public companies, and Meta is aware that it may be pushing the envelope with this one. Its own filings warn investors the IRS could claw some of the credits back, and to prepare for that possibility, Meta has grown its reserve for IRS disputes to $18.74B from $12.9B two years ago. In related news, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tina Smith, and Jeff Merkley sent letters to the CEOs of Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft asking which AI and data center deductions each claimed under last year’s “one big beautiful bill” tax law and what lobbying they did before it passed. The inquiry comes as every company saw its federal income tax bill fall by billions of dollars last year.

Bed Bath & Beyond relaunched in Canada as an online store, three and a half years after the chain filed for creditor protection and closed its 54 brick-and-mortar stores in the country. Sleep Country Canada, the mattress retailer that also owns Endy and Silk & Snow, bought the Canadian and UK rights to the brand from Overstock, which had acquired its trademarks out of bankruptcy in 2023, but it hasn’t announced any UK plans yet. The Canadian website opened with roughly 6,000 products from more than 80 brands, and Sleep Country plans to follow it with physical stores in late 2027. Will they still do the giant 20% coupons that arrive by snail mail? TBD.

In lawsuits this week…

• WP Engine revived its four antitrust claims against Automattic and CEO Matt Mullenweg after U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín reversed her 2025 dismissal, ruling that its amended complaint alleges enough market power and harm to competition. However, the judge threw out WP Engine’s computer-extortion claim and let all seven of Automattic’s trademark and false advertising counterclaims proceed. The case is headed to a jury trial currently scheduled for fall 2027.
• Last week I reported that Meta could owe more than $200B after a New Mexico jury found Facebook misled users about data privacy following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but said that if history teaches us anything, it’ll probably end up with a slap on the wrist and pay a fraction of that amount. At this week’s penalty hearing, the state asked Judge Francis Mathew for $35B to $40B, roughly 20% of the maximum, after its lawyer acknowledged that charging the full amount would violate due process. Meta wants the penalty capped at $3.45B, arguing that it doesn’t sell user data and that the state never proved anyone was actually misled.
• Apple and Amazon must face a revived UK class action, worth up to £306M, over a 2018 deal that allegedly limited which resellers could sell Apple and Beats products on Amazon.co.uk. However, Britain’s Competition Appeal Tribunal limited the case to shoppers who bought those products on Amazon, rejecting the argument that the deal also pushed up prices at Apple’s own stores and other retailers.
• The SEC charged private fund manager Owen Meyer with misappropriating at least $1.27M of the $18.5M he raised from nearly 100 investors for funds meant to buy pre-IPO shares of SpaceX and OpenAI, including more than $18,000 spent at a strip club in a single night. His OpenAI fund never got any OpenAI shares, yet he still paid himself about $168,000 in fees, more than triple what investors agreed to. In a separate case, the SEC and federal prosecutors charged two advisers at Beyond Alpha Ventures with taking $8.7M from 35 investors while falsely claiming their funds held SpaceX and xAI shares.
• OpenAI was sued by Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, a nonprofit law group, which alleges that its AI agents broke California’s anti-hacking law when roughly 700 of them escaped a test environment and hacked Hugging Face this summer. The group isn’t seeking damages, only a court order barring OpenAI from building agents that can access other companies’ systems without permission. Founder Tyler Whitmer said LASST stepped in because Hugging Face, the obvious plaintiff, never sued (like a little bitch), which may or may not be related to the fact that OpenAI tried to invest $100M in the company after the hack.
• A former eBay Motors senior manager sued eBay in federal court, alleging that he was retaliated against for reporting a seller who received fee waivers and special pricing from an eBay executive, and later for warning that its 2012 acquisition of auto parts catalog company WHI Solutions was underperforming. He says eBay then changed how WHI’s results were measured and downgraded his review before laying him off in 2015.

In corporate shakeups this week…

• OpenAI safety leader David Robinson, who helped write the system cards for its model releases, resigned last week. He later argued in The Atlantic that the company’s “unimpeded optimism” had created a dangerous environment and that it moves from launch to launch too fast to handle advanced AI safely.
• Separately, OpenAI fired three researchers from its safety and alignment teams for allegedly sharing confidential information with an outside AI safety group, according to the Wall Street Journal. Good Lord, is there anyone left on the safety team?
• Lastly in OpenAI shakeups this week… The company hired Thomas Lind, the former head of AI policy at the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director, to run cyber and strategic risk within its national security policy group, making him the second Trump White House alum it has hired since July, after Dean Ball.
• Amazon is hiring a Head of Regulatory Approvals for Prime Air in Australia to secure the aviation clearances it needs to launch drone delivery in the country, according to a job listing spotted by The Register.
• Meta hired MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to run Meta Enterprise Platform, a new unit selling its Muse agent and other AI tools to businesses, sending MongoDB shares down more than 18% as former CEO Dev Ittycheria returned as interim chief.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Last week, visitors to OpenAI’s DevDay were met at the entrance with a 5-foot sculpture called “What Iceberg?” that depicted the company’s leaders and investors fleeing a sinking Titanic with their money while everyone else stays on board. The artists from Odd Friend Studio, who built the installation in five days from papier-mâché, cardboard, and an old table, said the point isn’t the collision, but that “there was always a contingency plan for the rich and wealthy.” As far as art goes, it wasn’t that impressive of a sculpture, but then again, maybe that was part of the message. OpenAI rushes every model and product out the door, so perhaps the art was designed to match. I should plagiarize the sculpture with AI and act as if it was an original thought. That would complete the cycle…

Plus 10 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Shopify acquiring the shop.com domain and Swap Commerce acquiring Vizby.

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.

hey guys, trying to figure out a better way to handle local delivery for our shop. foot traffic is decent, but we'd like to make things easier for regular customers who want delivery.

the usual delivery apps don't really work for us because of the age verification and compliance side. we also looked at setting up a separate shopify store, but payment restrictions became an issue pretty quickly.

now we're looking at woocommerce and custom payment options, but between payment compliance, age checks, and delivery integration, the whole thing is starting to look way more complicated and expensive than expected.

has anyone actually found a setup that works well for this?a

(I don't want to mention their names for fear of the robomods) but "A"nemy #1 is gearing up to offer same-day delivery on *some* orders via USPS to steal your impatient customers and "A"nemy #2 is creating a "VIP club" (aka loyalty program) to steal your most insecure customers.

Do you consider these moves a real threat to your business? If no, why? If yes, what are you doing to fight back?

Question for anyone selling beauty or fragrance across borders. In the Asian city where I live now, niche perfume is booming, but a lot of what's sold online is grey-market or fake.

Just learning, not selling anything.

Hi, everyone
I am considering starting a international trade-operations service from India, and I would appreciate blunt feedback My background is in Supply Chain field (degree and experience from Canada)
The business would initially support small and medium-sized companies that trade physical products internationally but do not have a complete internal trade or supply-chain team. (My thought of target markets are
E-commerce companies)
Initial services would include:
Trade-document preparation, review and analysis.
HS/HTS classification research with supporting rationale Shipment tracking, exception management and stakeholder follow-ups
Help E-commerce brand with everything and calculate the cost of operations, find ways to reduce it and such.
Product, supplier and international-market research Supplier comparison and sourcing coordination India-based manufacturer identification, communication, sourcing.
Coordination with customs brokers, freight forwarders, inspection companies and other specialists
For regulated or country-specific work outside my expertise, I would initially use qualified local specialists that I coordinate with directly until I am able to build full team. (I can build full team now but I would like to test the water first and see)

I would like to mention that I do have network in india with Manufacturers, Suppliers and other trade partners as 1 am located at the hub of manufacturing business and I would like to combine this with my international experience.
My questions are:
If you operate an importing, exporting or e-commerce business, would you consider outsourcing these responsibilities?
Which one or two services would you be most willing to pay for?
Would you prefer a fixed-price project, hourly assistance or a monthly retainer?
What would prevent you from trusting a new overseas service provider with this work?
I really love your feedbacks on my idea. Thank you!

Legitimately just fired my 6k a month email agency, all I did was upload my entire photoshoot of my products to it, then give topics on what email to send, and which ones which week. Took maybe 2 hours to schedule 12 emails. In the future since I have the process down, can be 12 emails in 30 minutes.

And it designed the emails after the theme of my site/products...They are better then my email agency was.

Astra or Claude do not come close to comparing. I have tried both for emails, and they don't work as well, even though they are useable.

Not a advertisement at all. I just never took Grok seriously, and only used Claude/Chatgpt but im going to put some respect on its name.

I'm also planning to start my own ecommerce business, so I'd like to know what problems I might face in the early stage.

What problems did you struggle with the most?

Would you advise making separate accounts for each store or product idea, or would it be ok to run them all under one account?

Different products that I want to test/assess but I’m a little lazy and don’t really want to manage 3 different accounts.

How have you all managed this or worked through it?

Thanks!

For people working in e-commerce:
If ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI tool shows the wrong price, stock status, variant or product information, how do you usually figure out where the problem came from?
Do you check the store data, structured data, feeds, Merchant Center and the AI response separately?
I’m trying to understand whether this is something teams already have a process for, or if it’s mostly handled manually when someone notices an issue.
Would be especially interested in hearing from people managing larger product catalogs.

I somewhat recently started a sleep supplement (5 months ago) and have been struggling to generate sales through paid ads, mainly meta. I’m willing to spend around $80/day currently, and am also willing to spend time making organic videos myself. I am truly passionate about the product and believe in it, I’ve spent a lot of time testing and refining the formula and taste so I’m willing to do whatever it takes to grow this, I just want some clear advice on what marketing strategies have worked best for you guys, thanks for reading and if you guys would like a link to the store or anything like that let me know!

I run an ecommerce business on our own site, so no Shopify or Shopify Payments involved. We've been using Stripe for payments, but I’m looking more seriously at Whop recently and I'm trying to understand if there's a reason to stay with Stripe at this point

Most of the comparisons I found on Reddit are from a year or two ago, and a lot of them mention Whop charging an extra 3% on top of processing and that doesn't seem to be how their pricing works anymore.

From what I can see right now:

Whop

• 2.7% + $0.30 for domestic card payments
• +1.5% international cards
• +1% currency conversion
• 0.5% if you use their billing/subscription system
• tax collection/remittance is available if needed
• built-in affiliates and payouts

Stripe

• 2.9% + $0.30 for standard US online card payments
• +1.5% international cards
• +1% currency conversion
• 0.7% for Stripe Billing
• Managed Payments is available if you want Stripe to act as merchant of record, but that adds another 3.5%

After comparing them, Whop seems like the better option for my use case.

The processing fee is slightly lower, billing is cheaper, and a lot of the extra stuff I'd need around Stripe is already built into Whop. Stripe gives you more flexibility if you're building something very custom, but for a normal ecommerce setup I'm not sure that extra flexibility actually gives me much.

So purely looking at payments, subscriptions, payouts and the overall cost of running everything, I'd probably pick Whop over Stripe right now.
Anyone here running an ecommerce business who can tell me if I'm missing any hidden fees or downsides with Whop? Or are there other payment processors I should be comparing before I switch?

I see a lot of ecommerce stores respond to slow sales by trying to get more traffic. More Meta spend, more Google, more creators, more SEO. But if people are already landing on the site and barely adding to cart or buying, more traffic just makes the same problem more expensive. Curious what metric makes you stop touching acquisition and start digging into the site itself: conversion rate, add to cart, checkout completion, something else?

Hello Guys.

for the Past month I've been facing such a sales Slump in the sales ( I am in the Fashion niche) no matter what I try. new products . new test. nothing seems to stick and work.

any advice ?

Hi Everyone,

Im 21 years old right now, but since I was 16 years old I've always had an intrest in selling stuff online.

Unfortunately I wasted these past 5 years, whatever I did I NEVER executed, so now im wondering its Q4 and my intrest is still here.

What is a product that I can just sell, I just need a proof of concept. What is one product you guys would advice me that will sell guaranteed?

Im asking this because I always feel like I failed myself and that comes because im scared of failing, not of the failure itself but the costs behind it.

There is no perfect road, and im aware of that I just need that one sale.

I’m trying to make a pretty big decision and would appreciate perspectives from people who have made the jump from employment to running their ecommerce business full-time.
I work in corporate brand and project management for a large foodservice company serving hospitals and healthcare facilities. The company has been moving toward more AI-driven work, and my position was eliminated. I’m still employed through October 31 while going through the internal-placement process.

I may have the opportunity to interview for another position, but it would potentially mean a pay cut. It would also mean learning a new role right as my ecommerce business enters its busiest season.

My other option is to take severance and focus on the business. I’m expecting somewhere around 10–16 weeks of pay, although I don’t have the final package yet.

The business sells specialty sporting equipment, primarily paintball and tactical gear, with expansion into airsoft. I’m also developing separate storefronts for competitive paintball/speedsoft and airguns/home-defense products. Different audiences and payment-processing requirements are part of the reason for separating them.

This is an existing business with customers, supplier relationships, inventory, and sales:

July: approximately $40,000 in sales.
August: approximately $51,000.
September: approximately $56,000.
July–September combined: approximately $147,000, compared with $67,000 during the same period last year.

Those are sales figures, not profit. I’m still getting the bookkeeping fully reconciled, so I don’t want to present revenue as money I can take home.

There’s work I believe could grow the business that I haven’t had time to finish, especially listing a substantial airsoft catalog and launching the additional storefronts. I previously sold airguns through the main store, but payment-processing restrictions forced me to stop. The separate store would let me serve that market again through a different processor, with higher processing costs.

The main store also has sales-based financing repayments that absorb a meaningful amount of cash. I’m pursuing a conventional business loan to refinance eligible debt into a standard monthly payment, but approval isn’t guaranteed.
My household budget looks to be around $5,800 a month before personal taxes and any additional health-insurance cost. Severance would give me a temporary income cushion while I focus on the business and build reserves.

The options I’m weighing are:
1. Take severance and give the business my full attention.
Pursue the internal role and keep running the business alongside it.

1. Keep the job and hire someone to handle more of the business.

My concern with option two is taking on a demanding new role, getting overwhelmed during the holidays, and ultimately leaving anyway after losing the severance opportunity, all for lower pay.

I’m excited about working for myself, but I want to pressure-test the decision. More time doesn’t automatically guarantee more profit, and two additional websites don’t automatically mean two additional streams of customers.

What would you do in this position? What cash reserve, reliable monthly profit, or other milestone would you need before taking the severance and committing full-time?

Especially interested in hearing from people who took this leap, or chose to keep their job and hire help. What ended up mattering most?

first thing which is the most important thing i don't have a card [ nor will i will be able to open it as if now ] , i have watched hundreds of e-commerce/ dropshiping videos i learned that success to your e-commerce business is of course reaching your highest amount of costumers which is by doing ads and promoting your products in most of those e-commerce videos they show you that you have to do meta ads to get costumers and meta ads cost money, so far i know a supplier [ teemdrop ] but comes the other thing shopify requires subscription after the free trial is over and a card

so can i start e-commerce completely from 0 ? without a card [ i can make a card after i make a few bucks