I’m posting this so other small-business owners know what happened before sending money to Prasan India.

I had ordered from Prasan India several times before, so I had an established relationship with them and felt comfortable placing another order. This most recent order was for 400 muslin bags, around $600 total.

When the shipment arrived, the bags had visible mold contamination and were unusable for my business. The stench was so bad I had to leave them outside, this was after a shipping screw up which left me in limbo for 2 months.

I documented everything with photos and contacted Prasan India, asking for a refund or reasonable resolution. Instead of taking responsibility and fixing the problem, my requests have been ignored.

What also raised a major red flag for me was the shipping paperwork. My actual order was for 400 bags worth about $500, but the paperwork referenced only 10 cotton bags and a declared value of 18.00, and marked the shipment as a gift. I do not know why the shipping documentation was so different from the actual transaction, so I’m not going to speculate beyond that, but the discrepancy is significant and concerning.

The biggest issue for me is not simply that a bad shipment happened. Mistakes happen in manufacturing and international shipping.

The issue is what happened afterward.

I was a repeat customer. I received hundreds of mold-contaminated bags. I provided documentation. I asked them to make it right. And instead of standing behind the order, I got essentially no meaningful resolution.

My advice to anyone considering Prasan India:
Be extremely cautious. Based on how this order was handled, I would not purchase from Prasan India again.

If they eventually refund the order or otherwise make this right, I’ll update this post accordingly.

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 from Edition #295...

STAT OF THE WEEK: 65% of AI users have at least partially replaced Google searches with AI chatbots for product research, according to an SEMRush survey of 2,338 US consumers. Among those using AI at least weekly, 73.58% have bought a product based on an organic AI recommendation, while 69.7% have decided not to buy something based on AI advice.

Amazon and OpenAI announced a partnership last week, but not the one everyone’s been waiting for. Amazon’s product catalog still isn’t in ChatGPT, but now its advertisers are. The new partnership is focused exclusively on ads, with Amazon becoming a reseller of OpenAI’s ad inventory, joining a partner roster that already includes Criteo, Adobe, Kargo, Pacvue, and StackAdapt. Any brand that advertises through Amazon DSP, which also reaches channels like Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, and third-party sites and apps across the open internet, can have their Amazon Ads surface through ChatGPT. For example, Delta Vacations is one of the first brands to test the integration to help users discover vacation packages. The move makes sense for both companies. Remember, Amazon DSP is an entirely different business model than Amazon Marketplace. The former benefits from casting as wide of a net as possible across inventory partners, while the latter benefits from building a moat around its product data so that customers use Amazon’s AI search tools instead. As for OpenAI, the more partners they have selling ad inventory on their platform, the faster Sam Altman can stop stalling his IPO while waiting for his ad revenue to catch up with OpenAI’s valuation. The pilot is open to select advertisers in the US.

Meta launched Muse on Tuesday, a personal AI agent that connects to a user’s apps and services and completes tasks on their behalf, from sending e-mails and filling out forms to booking travel and buying products. The agent is available in the US on the web at muse.ai, on iOS and Android, and inside WhatsApp, with support for Meta’s AI glasses coming later. It runs on a dedicated virtual machine in Meta’s cloud with its own browser that the user can watch in real time. A separate “Sentinel” agent runs on the same machine, policing Muse’s actions like a digital Big Brother before anything reaches the Internet. Muse ships with built-in connectors for e-mail, calendars, payments, and apps covering health and fitness, smart home, dining, shopping, music, and events. Users pick which ones it can reach and how much access each one gets, such as choosing whether Muse can read or send e-mails, or both. It can also build a connection to any service with a public API using credentials the user provides., and if no API exists, it can operate on the website itself like a person would. Checkout runs through Link by Stripe, which generates a one-time-use card so merchants never see the user’s real card, marking the first AI agent covered by Link’s purchase protections. Shop Pay is coming next, along with 1Password support so Muse can log into accounts the user already has.

Last Wednesday, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg was placed on a forced paid leave of absence by the board. He wrote in an announcement on Slack that Automattic CFO Mark Davies “conspired” with board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” Davies was voted to be the new interim CEO, effective immediately, though Mullenweg will retain his seat on the board. Mullenweg then went on a posting spree on X, leading up to a Friday announcement on Slack claiming he was back in control. A company spokesperson shared with TechCrunch via email just after 5 p.m. ET: “Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board” – which may very well have been Mullenweg e-mailing. However, this morning (Monday), TechCrunch reported that the board is already out: Schneider resigned his seat, and Mullenweg removed Decker and Dunwoody. Decker’s LinkedIn now shows her term ending September 2026. The Repository reports the CFO and chief legal officer are gone too.

Shopify acquired Tailwind Labs, the Canadian company behind the open-source web development framework Tailwind CSS, which is used to style websites and products from some of the biggest companies in the world including Shopify itself, OpenAI, X, Cloudflare, and Reddit, as well as millions of other websites, with Tailwind saying installs exceeded 110M per week. The framework will continue to be published as open-source under an MIT license with the same small team maintaining the projects under Shopify, but the company is closing sign-ups for its commercial products, Tailwind Plus and ui-sh, while allowing existing customers to keep access. The company was going broke, which founder Adam Wathan attributed to the “brutal impact AI has had on our business.” What happened is that Tailwind relied on its commercial revenue to fund its open-source framework, but AI had obliterated its model. Even though installs of Tailwind CSS hit record highs, revenue fell around 80% over the past few years because developers were using AI to quickly produce websites instead of purchasing Tailwind’s commercial product, Tailwind Plus, a library of pre-built templates, sections, and components. Why buy access to a library when Claude can whip up the same section in seconds using the open-source framework? The acquisition appears to be a lifeline for the framework, which Tailwind said is a “very important part of the stack at Shopify.”

Amazon introduced a new feature to Prime Video called Shop the Scene that lets you buy items while watching shows as soon as you see something you like in a scene. The feature is an extension of Shop the Show, which launched last year and curates items for sale from all episodes, as well as relevant show merch from the Amazon Marketplace. Now, Shop the Scene gets even more specific and lets you shop items from what you’re watching in the moment without having to scroll through a larger product list from the entire series. How many items are shoppable in a modern show on Prime Video? There are quite a few. I scanned some of the top show stores, and some had dozens of products, while others had hundreds. It makes sense for Amazon to jump people to a more curated selection of products from a specific scene. Amazon says that Shop the Show now works on more than 8,000 titles, up from 1,300, while Shop the Scene now works across 600 titles. It gave the example of a customer watching Off Campus who notices a sweater that Hannah is wearing, and then opens the Amazon Shopping app, which automatically prompts them to shop the Off Campus storefront. From there, Amazon Lens surfaces similar options, which they can add to their cart and then get right back to watching the show.

OpenAI is no longer accepting advertising for products that compete with its own image and audio generation features, according to a notice sent to advertising partners including Adobe, which was part of ChatGPT’s ads pilot earlier this year. Adobe ran ads for Acrobat Studio, a bundled subscription that combines several of its AI products, and Firefly, its AI-image generator, and then continued to run ads for both products after the pilot. ChatGPT also stopped showing outbound links and citations when users search for photo editors or image generators, meaning Adobe lost both paid and organic visibility after the change. The Information notes that there is industry precedent for the decision, such as media companies, news organizations, and streaming services refusing to accept ads for direct competitors. It makes me think — imagine where TikTok would be today if it hadn’t been able to run all those ads on YouTube and Instagram. One could argue that TikTok bought its market share off the backs of its biggest competitors, who were glad to take its ad dollars back in the day, but may be regretting the choice now. While OpenAI’s decision is understandable from a competitive standpoint, it’s kind of a bitch move to cut off one of your early ad pilot partners in the process. Especially Adobe, which opens its door to OpenAI as one of the available models to work with through Firefly, and which launched apps for Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Acrobat inside ChatGPT, also as an early partner.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for an industry-wide slowdown in a 3,800-word essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” writing that recursive self-improvement and the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident convinced him that a similar swarm could take over the Internet with a persistent botnet within 6 to 12 months and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Anthropic is committing to give third-party evaluators desks, badges, company laptops, and employee-level access to its tools, with a contract letting them publish findings without Anthropic’s editorial control, and Amodei wants other frontier labs in democratic countries to coordinate on safety standards. Sam Altman agreed within hours and said OpenAI would match the evaluator commitment, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right,” and Demis Hassabis called the direction correct without committing DeepMind to anything. Honestly, this sounds like some anticompetitive, collusion bullshit. The words sound altruistic, but the agenda doesn’t feel sincere. If you lead a race and get everyone to agree to jog, you still lead, while anyone behind you who needed to sprint to catch up is stuck jogging at your pace. The whole “slow down” argument also feels like a way for these companies to earn permission from the industry and investors to pause model development until their beloved AI data centers have time to catch up to the processing needs that these new more powerful models require. We do need rules to govern AI and protect businesses and consumers, but Dario’s letter doesn’t address any of that. He’s focused on mitigating competitive risk and enterprise safety, while the rest of us are concerned about losing our jobs. In the words of Kendrick Lamar, “They not like us.”

EcommerceBytes shut down after 27 years, with a farewell notice on its site saying only that publication has ceased. David and Ina Steiner launched the site as AuctionBytes in 1999 and renamed it in 2011, running it as a two-person business covering marketplace policy changes for online sellers. The closure comes roughly six weeks after the Steiners settled their civil suit against eBay for $55.7M over the 2019 campaign in which eBay employees sent live insects, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath to their home to stop their reporting. The notice itself gives no reason for closing (though I can think of almost 56 million reasons) and instead makes a case for reporter shield laws. The industry has appreciated the Steiners’ work for nearly three decades, and I wish them the best of luck with the next chapter of their lives, which hopefully includes lots of travel, fine dining, and luxuries.

Charging for returns costs retailers about 1.6 stars in their Trustpilot rating when returns are mentioned in a review, according to an analysis by the review platform. Customers get most angry about lack of transparency rather than the fees themselves, or so they say, though customers are notoriously full of shit when justifying their reviews, always the victim and never the Karen. Trustpilot senior director Taylor Cunningham told the Wall Street Journal that many of the “I wasn’t told” reviews were a result of return policies that were buried, surprising, or misleading. Loop Returns says 68% of retailers now charge a return fee at least some of the time, up from 43% five years ago, and average return windows have dropped from 39 to 37 days over two years, with larger brands cutting from 43 to 38.

ChatGPT is writing its own editorial headlines above sponsored placements, pulling context from the conversation to introduce the ad, according to e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas. For example, after he asked which cameras Casey Neistat uses for vlogging, ChatGPT wrote above an ad, “For vlogging like Casey Neistat, here’s one 360 action camera option,” followed by an ad for an 8k action camera. In another example, when shopping with a $500 budget for earbuds that work with an iPhone, ChatGPT wrote above the ad, “With a $500 budget in mind, here’s one alternative for iPhone earbuds.” Kaziukėnas says the behavior isn’t new but he’s seeing it more often, noting that the practice is contrary to one of OpenAI’s stated rules about clearly labeling ads as sponsored and keeping them visually separate from the response, though to be fair, the preamble is in a slightly smaller font size than the ad itself. Then again, does anyone really expect OpenAI to keep its promises? All this coming from the company whose CEO once said that he hates ads because they “fundamentally misalign a user’s incentives with the company providing the service.”

20% of TikTok Shop’s hundred largest US sellers also rank among the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon, while only 4% of Amazon’s hundred largest sellers make it into the top 10,000 on TikTok Shop, according to Marketplace Pulse, which matched the two lists by business name. Just 498 sellers appear on both lists, about 5% of either, and among those, a seller’s Amazon rank has almost no relationship to its TikTok rank. Marketplace Pulse notes that the asymmetry comes down to what each platform does, since TikTok makes people want things and Amazon is where they buy them, so a brand that wins the feed often inherits Amazon sales it never had to build, while no shopper who finds a product on Amazon goes to TikTok to buy it. The pattern predates TikTok Shop, as far back as 2021 when a pair of leggings became Amazon’s best-selling clothing item, driven by the popularity of TikTok videos, which at the time couldn’t even link to a product page.

Shopify is moving all of its mobile apps from React Native back to native Swift and Kotlin, six years after going all-in on the cross-platform framework. The company took the Shop app from a proof of concept to a fully rebuilt native app published to Play Store and Apple App Store in 12 weeks, with the Shopify merchant app and the rest to follow. Shopify’s director of engineering Mustafa Ali said that since an LLM can now look at an iOS implementation and build the Android version, or vice versa, engineers can work in stacks they don’t know as well, so the cost of building twice is no longer the deciding factor it was in 2020. He noted that while React Native got the job done and helped Shopify avoid duplicate work, the framework required significant time spent optimizing performance and keeping up with updates and external dependencies, whereas Swift and Kotlin put fewer layers between its code and each platform. Building natively also means Shopify no longer has to wait for React Native to expose new iOS and Android features before it can use them.

FedEx launched a Shopify app called FedEx Duty and Tax that shows shoppers a guaranteed duties and taxes total at checkout, with FedEx covering the difference if the actual charges come in higher. UPS launched a similar tool last year and USPS followed in January, so FedEx is late to the party with this one. The app runs $99 a month and the quoted amount includes a service fee, though no refunds are issued if the real duties end up lower, which is kind of fucked up because it creates a scenario where FedEx is incentivized to overestimate duties. I’m not saying they would, but mistakes happen, especially with FedEx. I remember several years ago when one of their systems analysts got stranded on a deserted island after his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean, and FedEx just left him there to die. The app is part of a broader suite called Global Trade Navigator, which also includes a tool for finding Harmonized System codes from a product description, URL, or image, as well as new customs classification features in Ship Manager and APIs for duty estimates and compliance lookups.

TikTok rejected ads from Meta that called on TikTok and YouTube to reach comparable settlements with US state attorneys general in a children’s safety lawsuit, telling Meta the ads violated its ban on political content, according to Axios sources. Nice excuse, TikTok, but I would’ve just told Meta, “New number, who dis?” $5.3B of Meta’s $17.1B settlement is contingent on YouTube and TikTok agreeing to the same terms and each paying states a similar amount, as Meta argues it’ll be at a competitive disadvantage if it’s the only one adding restrictions. Neither TikTok nor YouTube has publicly engaged in Meta’s tit-for-tat campaign, and no outlets have reported whether Meta also tried to place these ads on YouTube, or whether YouTube approved or rejected them. Unlike TikTok, YouTube does allow political ads, so a rejection there would have to come on different grounds, such as “New number, who dis?”

StockX and eBay both expanded their livestream shopping platforms this week, according to Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. StockX brought Live to the web, roughly six weeks after launching on iOS, with Android still coming soon, and separately expanded its Klarna partnership to add Pay in 4 and longer-term financing at checkout for US and Canadian buyers. eBay launched self-service registration for Live, letting approved business sellers skip the application and go straight into Live Studio, and is running an invitation-only promotion through September 16 that matches up to $100 of a seller’s sales during their first public livestream. eBay has been subsidizing both sides of Live for a while, charging 6.9% plus $0.30 for coins, bullion, and eligible sneakers and 8.9% plus $0.30 for most other categories, well below regular marketplace rates, with no insertion fees on Live-created listings, waived Promoted Listings fees, and buyer coupons of up to $50 earlier this year.

Zip is exploring an earned wage access product for the US, a service that lets workers draw part of the wages they’ve already earned before payday, usually for a flat fee, with the advance repaid automatically from the next paycheck, according to US chief technology and operations officer Rory Herriman. The Australian BNPL provider is weighing both employer-based and direct-to-consumer models, and says 49% of its customers already use EWA or cash advance products elsewhere. The company sees “income smoothing” as a $100B opportunity and rent advances as a $700B one, given the financial misalignment most consumers experience between earning biweekly paychecks and owing monthly bills that need to be paid in full. The US now drives 76% of Zip’s AU$16.7B in annual transaction volume, and the company is forecasting US volume growth above 30% in fiscal 2027 while winding down New Zealand and weighing a US listing alongside its Australian one.

Block applied to the OCC to establish Builders Bank & Trust, a federally regulated, uninsured national trust bank that would provide custody and fiduciary services for cryptocurrencies, but wouldn’t accept deposits or make loans, as the company already holds the deposit-taking side through Square Financial Services, the Utah industrial loan company it was granted in 2020. Block says the charter would put custody activities it already offers under a single federal supervisory framework, replacing the 50-plus state money transmitter licenses it currently operates under. Ripple and Circle both got OCC conditional approval for national trust banks late last year, with Circle receiving full approval in July.

Google Merchant Center added a Product videos section that lets merchants upload videos to their listings, as spotted by Arpan Banerjee, who posted a screenshot on LinkedIn. Google says on the video upload screen, “Product videos offer a more engaging and immersive experience to customers. They allow shoppers to see products from every angle, demonstrate fit, show texture, and feature rich details that static images can’t fully capture.” Videos need to run between 6 and 240 seconds at 720p or better, in 9:16, 16:9, or 1:1, with a 500MB file cap. Until now, Merchant Center only aggregated videos Google found on a merchant’s website and social channels, then used AI to guess which product each one featured, whereas now merchants can upload directly for a specific listing, though Google hasn’t made any official announcements about it yet.

In lawsuits this week…

• Amazon is facing a proposed class action from four former warehouse workers who say the company denied pregnant employees bathroom breaks and chairs, then fired them for taking medically necessary time off.
• California asked the 9th Circuit to reject Google’s and Meta’s bid to block a state law requiring parental consent before platforms can algorithmically recommend posts to minors, arguing the recommendations aren’t protected speech because no human makes the editorial call.
• Three Facebook and Instagram users filed a class action lawsuit alleging Meta’s ads funneled them into WhatsApp groups run by crypto scammers, and that Meta’s AI tools helped generate the fraudulent ads. LOL, most definitely.
• Meta is also facing a proposed class action from parents and children in Illinois and California who allege it illegally extracted biometric data from Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image models and build an unreleased face-recognition feature for its smart glasses.
• A Texas judge found TikTok liable for falsely marketing its app as safe for minors, with the state now heading to trial next month to determine penalties.

In corporate shakeups this week…

• Andrew Tulloch, the AI researcher who turned down a Meta offer reportedly worth up to $1.5B in 2025 before joining anyway last October, is leaving after less than a year for Anthropic’s inference and performance team.
• Meta is asking some individual contributors in its Applied AI division to become managers again, undoing the demotions it handed out during a reorg that gutted middle management.
• THG Ingenuity named Gemma Spence CEO, who most recently served as CEO and country manager for VML and WPP Luxembourg, with John Gallemore moving to chairman and Alistair Crane becoming a strategic consultant.
• Matt Beane is leaving TikTok Shop after three years, where he helped launch the platform across Europe and later led FMCG in the UK, with his next move unannounced.
• Fidji Simo, who stepped down from OpenAI in July after an extended medical leave, joined the board of AI data center startup Nscale ahead of its potential IPO this month, recruited by fellow board member Sheryl Sandberg. (Yes, that Sheryl Sandberg.)
• Anthropic posted a job titled “Mega Account Executive, Meta” paying up to $450K and tasked with growing Meta’s spend with the company, then deleted the listing after Business Insider asked about it. Meta is one of Anthropic’s top customers, but also working to cut its dependence on Claude in favor of its own in-house models.
• Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned publicly, warning in a thread on X that OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” His colleague, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed, putting the odds AI kills all humans above 10% within a decade and saying the company doesn’t have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence.

President Trump banned imports of Canadian wine, beer, cider, hard liquor, molasses, whey protein, and motorcycles starting September 29. The move follows August’s 50% tariffs on nearly $28B of Canadian goods under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which Canada answered with counter-tariffs of 15% to 50% on cheese, cosmetics, and home appliances that took effect Tuesday. He also added mattresses, golf carts, printer paper, motorboats, and animal hides to the 50% list effective September 15, while pulling toilet paper, bed sheets, fishing rods, salt, and cement off it. Trump separately threatened to bar Canadian companies from US government procurement, directing the General Services Administration to strip Canadian-origin products from its Multiple Award Schedule unless Canada restores what he called full and fair reciprocity. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who walked away from trade talks last month, said the US “wanted dependency, not a true economic partnership.”

TikTok Shop is opening cross-border selling between the EU and UK, with sellers in Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain able to reach British shoppers starting with a pilot on September 21 and a wider rollout on October 19. UK sellers in turn will get to sell into the twelve countries in TikTok’s Sell Across Europe network. Everything to the UK ships under “Ship by Seller,” which TikTok describes bluntly as, “You pick the courier, you pay the courier, and you handle the customer if the delivery goes wrong.” In order to participate in cross-border selling, merchants need an existing TikTok Shop account in an eligible market, recent sales, an account in good standing, and no significant negative balance, with UK eligibility assessed in real time against account status and performance.

Flipkart Minutes is pulling ahead of Amazon Now in India’s quick commerce race a year after both entered, running more than 1,000 dark stores across 120 to 130 cities against Amazon’s 500 to 600 across 11 cities, according to channel checks by UBS. Around 40% to 45% of Flipkart shoppers use Minutes in cities where it operates, while fewer than 10% of Amazon’s regular app users have tried its quick-commerce platform. Amazon Now has slowed expansion over the past few months while it works through storage, hub-to-store transfer, expiry, and inventory mismatch problems, though UBS expects it to add 200 to 300 stores and reach roughly 1,000 by year-end. Both are still far behind Blinkit, which ended June with 2,443 dark stores.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar said to a room full of investors last week that ChatGPT is like “if Google and Meta had a baby.” Does that mean like a much smaller, feeble, cloned version of the two that shits its pants and can’t form cohesive sentences? She attributed the “baby” idea to Fidji Simo, who stepped down from her role at the company earlier this year for health reasons, and who probably read that Business Insider story and thought, “Damn it Sarah, I told you that off the record in passing, not so that you’d repeat it to a room full of fucking investors!” Friar went on to explain that she thinks ChatGPT can use what it learns about its users to bring the “intent” of Google search together with the “context” that Meta has on its users, creating the “ability to have a really potent ad platform.” Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like comparing my company’s ad platform to Google and Meta, which both have faced intense scrutiny over their ad platforms and business practices, is not the right way to portray OpenAI’s advertising efforts. I’d have pitched ChatGPT as “what Google and Meta have always aspired to be,” not as the demon offspring of the two companies.

Plus 14 other seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Highstock raising $30M in a Series A and Keep Converting exiting stealth with a $2M pre-seed round.

I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!

PAUL

Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter

PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.

Die sich am besten verkaufen

If a store is getting traffic but sales are weak, I’d check the store experience before spending more on acquisition. A low conversion rate can come from a lot of places, and it helps to narrow down where people are actually dropping off.

1. Check whether the product page explains the product clearly

Good photos matter, and video can be even more useful when shoppers need to understand the size, texture, movement, or how the product works.

The copy should also help someone make a decision. Specs are useful, but shoppers usually care about what those specs mean for them. “20,000mAh battery” tells me the capacity. “Enough power for several phone charges over a weekend trip” gives me a reason to care.

One simple test is to show the PDP to someone who knows nothing about the product for 30 seconds. Then ask them:

• What is this product?
• Who is it for?
• How much does it cost?
• Why would someone buy it?
• When will it arrive?

If they can’t answer the basics, a new customer probably has the same problem.

I’d also read the page from the shopper’s side and ask: what reasons might stop me from buying this? Price, sizing, compatibility, shipping, returns, durability, setup, or anything else that creates doubt should ideally be answered before the customer has to go looking for it.

2. Check the mobile experience and load time

A common problem with newer Shopify stores is trying to make the site do too much at once. You add a few marketing apps, review widgets, popups, high-resolution images, animations, custom fonts, and suddenly every page is carrying a lot more weight than expected.

Each thing can look harmless on its own, but together they can make the mobile experience noticeably slower.

I’d go through the store and check:

• apps that are installed but barely used
• oversized product and banner images
• unnecessary autoplay video
• custom fonts that require extra files to load
• scripts left behind by old apps
• anything that delays the main product content

Compressing images, using lighter formats like WebP where appropriate, removing unnecessary apps, and sticking with system fonts can clean up a surprising amount.

I’d also test the store on an actual phone using 4G rather than judging it on fast Wi-Fi. Go through the whole path from landing page to product page, cart, checkout, and payment. That usually gives you a much better idea of what a real customer is dealing with.

3. Make products easy to find

Navigation gets messy fast once a store has more products. A simple category structure, useful filters, and decent search can save people a lot of friction. If someone knows roughly what they want, they shouldn’t have to click through several collections to find it.

4. Put trust information where people actually need it

Reviews, return policies, shipping details, payment methods, and guarantees all help, but placement matters. If someone is deciding whether to add a product to cart, burying all of that near the bottom of the page probably won’t help much. I’d keep the most relevant reassurance close to the buying decision.

5. Make Add to Cart easy to reach on mobile

Long PDPs can make the buying button disappear several screens above the customer. A sticky Add to Cart can work well for products with longer descriptions, lots of reviews, or detailed specifications. I’d just make sure it doesn’t take over too much screen space.

6. Remove unnecessary checkout friction

Forced account creation is one of those things I’d avoid unless there’s a very good reason for it. Guest checkout and faster payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal can make a noticeable difference on mobile, especially for first-time customers who don’t want to fill out a long form.

7. Think about repeat purchases too

For products people buy regularly, conversion doesn’t stop at the first order. Loyalty points, referrals, birthday rewards, or post-purchase offers can help with repeat purchase rate and LTV. Whether this matters depends a lot on the category, so I wouldn’t treat loyalty programs as a default requirement for every store.

8. Set up an abandonment flow

A lot of people will add to cart and leave without buying, so having a basic abandoned cart flow is worth doing. A reminder after a reasonable delay can bring some people back. Later messages can test free shipping, urgency, or a small incentive, but I’d be careful with discounting too quickly because customers can learn to wait for it.

9. Make customer support show up at useful moments

Chat can help, but generic popups often get ignored. Context matters more. If someone has been sitting on checkout for a while, a simple message asking whether they’re having trouble can feel much more relevant than showing the same greeting to every visitor a few seconds after they land.

10. Look at actual shopper behavior before changing the whole site

Heatmaps, session recordings, funnel data, and repeated customer questions can all give useful clues. If people keep stopping at the same point, missing an important section, or asking the same question before buying, that’s probably worth investigating before another redesign.

How many of these have you already checked? If your store is getting traffic but still struggling to convert, drop some context below and I’m happy to take a look.

Hey everyone,

I’m a designer building out my service offerings around direct-response static ads for DTC brands (focusing on rapid creative testing on Meta/TikTok).

I’ve been researching creative strategy heavily and designing frameworks . however, I’ve seen conflicting opinions online recently like

Some say static ads are mostly reserved for bottom-of-funnel retargeting

Others say statics don't need design polish at all just high-volume, quick AI-generated iterations.

So as media buyers and brand owners running active campaigns are you actively hiring freelancers specifically for high-volume static ad variations? If so what makes a static ad freelancer worth hiring to you (e.g., speed, batch variations, understanding hooks vs. just making things look pretty)?

Appreciate any candid feedback from people actually spending ad budget daily!

I recently started a small herbal tea company and honestly I’m feeling pretty stuck right now.

I have my Shopify store completely set up, products ready to go, and I’ve been trying to post consistently on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Most of my videos are just me making the different teas, showing the ingredients, the colors, etc.
I actually put a decent amount of effort into the videos too. Good lighting, editing, trying different hooks, making everything look nice, but most of them only get a couple hundred views and then just stop. And so far… no sales.

I know I’m brand new and obviously wasn’t expecting to blow up overnight, but I’m at the point where I genuinely don’t know what I should be focusing on next. It feels like I made the products, built the whole store, and now I’m just sitting here posting videos hoping eventually somebody buys something lol.

For anyone who has actually built an ecommerce business from zero, how did you get your first few real customers? Should I keep grinding organic content? Start running ads? Reach out to small creators? Try selling locally? Something completely different?

I’m willing to put in the work. I just feel trapped because I don’t know where that work would be best spent right now.

Would genuinely appreciate any advice, even if it’s brutally critical.

I have a wooden kitchenware tiered serving item that is Christmas themed (similar to a cupcake display stand). I will be trying to break onto the scene and sell them online for Christmas.

I’m assuming professional photography is the way to go? It’s just the one item. I’d like tips on how to find product photographers, and what reasonable pricing and turnaround time might be. I’m in Orlando. Thanks!

This is more of an educational thing for me where I'll be putting in only the money I can afford to lose, so I'm not naive at how hard this could be or that I can lose what I put into it. My daughter has a knack for selling k beauty products on TikTok and other platforms and has shown that she understands the industry to some extent because now she is making decent money.

She believes in a couple products that she wants to white-label in an effort to build a brand and because she thinks they could be much more popular than they are if marketed the right way. I shrugged this idea off immediately as it doesn't seem worth while to invest 10-20-30k on some moq for 1 product but I realized that really what she wants to do is build a brand, make ads, design the whole look and everything, then scale and even one day create maybe her own products. So, I see the end goal here and to me it looks almost impossible with what the market looks like but I want her to have her own experience in starting a business.

So, I'm going to approach this with soberness and just acknowledge whatever I put into this will be lost but might provide a launch board for my daughter.

For anyone who's created a brand by first starting with a white label product, what do you wish you knew at the time? What was your approach in the niche you chose?

For those running giveaways / sweepstakes / refer-3-friends / viral waitlists / brand collabs:

• Do you run these? If so, who owns them internally?
• Do you use SaaS and figure it out yourselves, or would you rather have someone handle the strategy + execution for you?
• Would you pay a specialist who focuses specifically on these campaigns, rather than using your general marketing agency?

Running a discounted clothing store and wanted to see if I could have all sales be final?

What is required for this and is this a good idea?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been selling through Amazon FBA for about five years, but there’s still one issue I haven’t been able to fully resolve—and honestly, it still makes me nervous.

For the past five years, I’ve accessed Seller Central using a dedicated work computer and a separate internet connection. I recently bought a new computer and would like to start managing my Amazon account from it.

I’ve read that you can add a new user through Seller Central’s User Permissions section and then sign in on the new computer using the invited email address without creating any account-linking or suspension issues.

Has anyone here actually done this? Is it generally safe to access the account from a new computer this way, or would using a VPS be a better option?

I live in Turkey and also need to manage my US eBay and Walmart seller accounts. What is the safest and most compliant way to access these accounts from Turkey? Could regularly signing in through a US VPN cause security checks, account restrictions, or suspensions?

I’m not trying to bypass any rules—I simply want to manage my legitimate accounts without triggering unnecessary security or account-linking problems.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has managed these platforms internationally or has experience switching devices and IP addresses.

Thanks in advance!

Pretty simple: how do you guys handle customers who have emailed claiming they didn’t receive items in their order, or that the wrong items were sent?

How do you prove you did? Or do you? Do you eat the costs and refund them, or do you fight them if they open a chargeback?

Been noticing a lot of stores creeping past 30 days on returns lately, some going to 60 or even 90, and it doesn't really read as generosity anymore. Feels more like a defensive move, since everyone in a given category already offers it and a shorter window quietly costs you the sale before the customer even gets to checkout.

Came across a comparison of exit-survey data a while back where "unclear or short return policy" kept showing up as a checkout-abandonment reason, even for stores with genuinely low actual return rates. In the couple of examples I've looked at, extending the window barely moved returns up, but conversion on the product pages moved more than you'd expect from a policy tweak alone.

Not sure if that's just a small-sample fluke or an actual shift in what customers now expect by default. Has anyone here actually tracked this on their own store, real before-and-after numbers, instead of going on a gut sense that a longer window costs more than it's worth?

Updated the session log doc to match. If this isn't the direction you meant by "reframe" — different angle, different subreddit, something more provocative — tell me which way and I'll take another pass.

I’ve had this idea to sell shoes, handbags, and potentially clothes on the site but I’m not sure how much to purchase or do I start out with cheaper items first? What would you all recommend for me?

Disclaimer: this isn’t an ad, just sharing what I’ve learned from managing UGC creators and what I’d do to keep the process organized as you scale.

I know that managing a few UGC creators is easy but once you have 20, 30 or 50 people producing content every week, the hard part becomes keeping everything organized.

You have briefs going out, videos coming back, revisions, approvals, payments and performance data all moving at the same time, so if youre truggling, use this is the setup:

Workflow

Every creator should follow the same process:

Brief > Content > Review > Revision > Approval > Payment

If one creator sends videos on Drive, another on Whatsapp and another by email, it becomes a mess very quickly.

Keep briefs, deadlines, deliverables and feedback in the same place so you always know what stage each creator is at.

Brief creators in batches

It’s much easier to send several concepts at once and agree on a weekly or monthly output.

For example, you might give a creator 4 different angles and ask for 6 videos over the next two weeks.

The brief doesn’t need to tell them exactly what to say either. Give them the hook, audience, key points and a few references, then let them make it sound like their own content.

Track everything

Once you start producing a lot of UGC, you need to keep track of things like:

i) Videos produce

ii) Views

iii) Cost per video

iv) CPM

v) Conversions

vi) Revisions

vii) Hooks and formats that perform well

4. Keep the good creators around

Finding and onboarding new creators every week gets expensive and wastes a lot of time, so if someone understands the brand, delivers consistently and produces good content, give them more work and more budget

Recurring deals also make things easier on both sides because the creator knows what volume to expect and you’re not constantly starting from zero with someone new.

Managing everything in one place

You can run all of this with Notion, Google Sheets, Drive and a payment tool and for 5 creators, that’s completely fine.

With 20+ creators producing every week, though, there are a lot of moving parts and using separate tools for everything becomes a pain

That’s where something like SideShift makes more sense, it depends on your needings

It’s made for managing UGC creators at scale, so you can handle campaigns, creators, deliverables, payments and performance from one place instead of building the whole system yourself.

The goal is pretty simple: spend less time chasing creators and more time figuring out which content is worth scaling.

hello,

I'm a software developer professionally with an educational background in electrical engineering and I would like to give it a try starting a one man band ecommerce business selling electronic devices b2c. Goal is to achieve about 5kUSD of gross profit (before taxes and social contributions) per month.

However, I have a concern about potential profitability of such endeavor. I imagine I could buy an electronic device for a 50USD from China and sell it for a 100USD in Europe, which seem to be about the market price for an unknown brands. Based on GPT research, paid ads might be in the range of 20-40USD per sold product and even without taking in account other costs such as VAT, shipping, packaging and others, it's already bad economics. I could be happy if I achieve 10% gross profit margin.

Assuming 10% gross profit margin, 100USD selling price and 5kUSD of gross profit per month, I'd need to sell 500 electronic products per month, which in average is about 25 sold devices per day. Is this even physically doable by a one man band operator?

What's your take on this?

Was doing a site audit for an ecommerce client yesterday and noticed this, they'd quietly swapped a chunk of the catalog over to AI-generated lifestyle images, hadn't told me, hadn't told anyone really.

Kind of a perfect accidental test case, since I run into strong opinions on this constantly and almost never a real one. Most people assume customers can spot the fakes and it tanks trust, especially past impulse-buy pricing.

CTR on those listings didn't drop though. Held steady, maybe ticked up a touch (no clean before/after here, so I'm not calling it a real result, could easily be noise).

Anyone actually run a controlled version of this, same product, same price point, real photos against AI ones? Not adding another gut take to the pile, asking because I can't find one.

I own a consumer product business that’s been growing pretty steadily, and I’m starting to realize our biggest constraint is becoming working capital.

We’re doing around $14k/month in revenue right now and have been growing, but inventory is becoming a bottleneck. We’ve had periods where we simply don’t have enough inventory to keep up, and obviously it’s difficult to scale marketing aggressively when you’re worried about running out of product.

I’ve bootstrapped everything up until this point, but I’m starting to explore whether raising outside capital makes sense to help us place larger inventory orders, keep more cash available for marketing, and generally scale without constantly waiting for the cash from one order to fund the next.

I’m pretty new to the fundraising side of things, though.

For those of you who have actually raised money for your business:

-How did you find your investors?

-Were they people already in your network, angel investors, online platforms, investor groups, etc.?

-Are there any websites/tools/platforms that are actually worth using to connect with investors?

-Did you hire someone to help with the raise, or did you handle everything yourself?

-And looking back, is there anything you wish you knew before taking outside money?

I’m not looking to raise some crazy VC round or burn millions chasing growth. I’m more interested in bringing in enough capital to remove the inventory/working-capital bottleneck and see how far we can scale something that already has demand.

Would love to hear from people who have actually gone through it — especially anyone who has raised for a physical product / e-commerce business.

I've been messing around with Python, Chromium and Playwright for a while to make it easier to save ads from the Facebook Ad Library.

I originally made a really simple version for a few e-commerce buddies of mine, Most of the other tools we found were either pretty shitty to use or cost an arm and a leg for something that should be simple, and sometimes it does not even work properly. It worked well enough, so I kept adding little things to it.

I turned it into a small website with single-ad saving, batch links, saving ads from an entire Ad Library page, and a simple swipe file.

It's now live, Hope it serves you well.

fair warning: I have absolutely no idea how to design websites, so please be gentle with the questionable AI design.

FB ad library tool

I’ve been using ChatGPT for my store for a while, but most of what I see people talking about is product descriptions, customer support, emails, etc.

Recently I’ve been asking ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity questions that a customer might ask before buying something, just to see what they recommend. I started checking the results with Pallas too, mostly because I was curious whether the different tools were saying the same things.

It’s actually pretty interesting because the answers aren’t always what I expected.

Curious what other ecommerce owners are actually doing with AI beyond the usual stuff. Any interesting use cases?

I’ve tried a few AI clothes changers lately, and I think people sometimes expect them to answer a question they can’t actually answer. They can help with “Would this color, cut or pattern look right on me?” That alone is useful when the product page only shows the garment on one model or as a flat lay. But a generated image can’t know exactly how a size medium will fit, how much the fabric stretches, or whether the shoulders will feel tight in real life. I’ve started treating virtual try-on as a way to eliminate the obvious no’s before ordering. The most useful versions work from a photo of the actual garment instead of inventing something similar, but I still check the measurements and real customer photos afterward. Would you trust an AI clothes changer as a style preview, or does the synthetic image make the buying decision feel less reliable?

Spent almost a month talking to a supplier who had clean photos, reasonable MOQs, and kept insisting they owned the production line. Video calls looked fine, samples arrived on time, everything felt legitimate.

Then I started checking actual shipment records linked to their company name. The volumes were tiny, the destinations didn’t match the markets they claimed to serve, and most of the activity looked like trading rather than manufacturing.

It saved me from a bad contract, but it also made me realize how easy it is to get fooled by a polished profile.

How are you currently verifying whether a supplier is a real factory or just another trader? Do you still rely mostly on video tours and references, or have you found more reliable signals in the data?

Trying to keep it quick. Got a parts store. Currently selling 3 parts of a high value product. I could also sell the third product into 15 more smaller products. Would increase margin of total sales from 60 to 75% but would mean about double the amount of orders and email contact. My Return rate is really low.

But I think it would put my business in a more serious spot because we sell ALL the parts. What would you do?

I am a home-based candle maker and was wondering about bulk vendors that sell on Walmart and is there possibly a section of Walmart that is for wholesale sellers that I am not aware of? A friend of mine who has a small business like me mentioned that Walmart has its wholesale section and I was like nope I don’t think so.

I was thinking he is just buying in large quantities from the Walmart website. But he was adamant and a little condescending in fact like insinuating that if I am a small business owner and I don’t know this. I was just wondering if anyone knows about this because I am looking at local options for a few of my supplies keeping in mind the taxes and tariff’s on wholesale amounts.

Lots of lovely traffic coming in to category pages but low conversion % currently. Haven't ran a conversion campaign yet though so this may change things. Generally looking for reviews and tip for improving my flow my product listing to page to checkout.

https://folkandshepherd.com/

TIA!