#292 – Amazon Drones, TikTok Payments, & Canadian Tariffs

by Paul Drecksler | Aug 24, 2026 | Recent Newsletters

Hi Shopifreaks

Before we begin, I’d like to welcome Organizely to the Shopifreaks family as our newest official News Partner!

(Shopify merchants, if you’re on the hunt for a Stocky alternative before the August 31 deadline hits, pay attention to this one.)

While Shopify manages your storefront, Organizely runs your back office, without the expensive enterprise price tag or painful complexity.

Organizely offers catalog management, inventory health, demand forecasting, purchasing automations, warehouse bin organization, and manufacturing work orders – with one flat fee for all modules on its platform, starting at just $26 per month (with 50% off your first three months).

Founder Christian Santos built Organizely after operating his own Shopify store for 6 years called Kinetic Labs. He found that existing tools available on the market were either too expensive, too complicated, or simply didn’t do what a small-but-growing merchant needed. So he started building something better.

If Christian’s story sounds familiar, you might remember his 90 Second Pitch from earlier this year. The pitch led to new customers for Organizely, enough that he came back to partner with Shopifreaks long-term. I’m thankful for the continued partnership.

📦 Here’s what Organizely brings to the table:

AI demand forecasting – Organizely watches your sales history and supplier lead times and tells you exactly what to reorder and when, before you hit a stockout. It even flags how much revenue you’re putting at risk by running low on a given product.
Purchase orders and receiving – Draft POs from an AI recommendation, a supplier PDF, a spreadsheet, or an e-mail, then receive shipments by scanning each line in with your phone. If you get shorted on a shipment, you only sync what actually arrived, so your counts stay honest.
Warehouse mapping down to the bin – Print barcodes for every shelf and bin, scan a location to see everything in it, or scan a product to see where it lives. No more having to guess where inventory exists in your warehouse. (Yeah, I’m looking at you…)
Raw materials and manufacturing – If you manufacture what you sell, you can give products a bill of materials, track the raw materials used to produce each item, see how many units are buildable from stock on hand, and run production with work orders. I’ve seen other apps charge more than Organizely just for this feature, which is built into most plans.
Oppy, their AI assistant – Ask questions like “what should I reorder for Black Friday?” in plain language and get answers pulled straight from your own data. Oppy will also proactively flag issues and take action. For example, if you’re about to run out of an item, it’ll draft a purchase order that you can approve instead of having to build it from scratch.

✨ A few things that stand out about Organizely:

It was built by e-commerce operators. Some of the best e-commerce solutions I’ve come across were built by merchants who experienced the pain in their own business, and Organizely is a great example of that.
It’s extremely affordable. Organizely offers an entire inventory workflow in one tool, with plans running $26 to $250 per month (currently 50% off the first three months). If you’ve looked into other warehouse management software in the past, then you know how great of a value their plans offer.
Every plan includes white-glove onboarding. Christian and his team of warehousing experts handle your setup and migration personally, importing your data and getting your workflows up and running properly, so there’s no downtime with your inventory or warehouse operations.
Organizely runs on any Shopify plan. There’s no POS Pro requirement, like there was with Stocky. If POS Pro was the only thing keeping you on that tier, you may be able to drop back to POS Lite and save the $89/month per location.
Christian listens to merchants and ships new features fast. The company takes merchant feedback seriously and moves quickly to build the tools and features users need. Every time I’ve gone back to the website, Organizely has shipped new features.

🚀 Two ways to get started with Organizely:

If you’re one of the many merchants scrambling because Shopify’s Stocky app shuts down on August 31, Organizely will bring your whole Stocky history over (purchase orders, stocktakes, suppliers, and adjustments) and their team will handle the migration for you. Start here for a free white-glove Stocky migration.

If you’re not moving from Stocky and simply want to get your warehouse and inventory under control before the holiday season ramps up, book a demo and their team will walk you through how Organizely can help.

And now onto your regularly scheduled programming…

In this week’s edition I cover:

Facebook and Instagram aren’t for friends anymore
Amazon drone delivery is expanding
TikTok is exploring P2P payments
U.S. tariffs on Canada are in effect
Meta went to trial over its addiction lawsuit
ChatGPT ads are coming to Europe, consentfully
Stripe says the singularity has arrived
Walmart finally gives in to Apple and Google Pay
PayPal’s Honey extension lost millions of users
Meta is paying influencers to argue teen safety
Target’s tariff refunds aren’t headed your way

All this and more in this week’s 292nd Edition of Shopifreaks. Thanks for subscribing and sharing!

Stat of the Week

Less than 5% of posts in your Instagram feed and less than 15% in your Facebook feed are from your actual friends, according to Meta. To defend itself in a case where the FTC is accusing it of holding a monopoly on “personal social networking services,” Meta argued that it’s not actually a personal social networking service anymore. The company said, “By any accounting, content posted by friends has become a small fraction of the content that users see on Facebook and Instagram.”

1. Amazon to expand drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns this year

Amazon’s Prime Air service is expanding to reach nearly 500 cities and towns in the U.S. by the end of 2026, increasing its footprint (or should we say “airprint”) sixfold. The drone delivery service currently serves customers in cities across seven states, including Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas, with plans to launch in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho, and New York soon. The company also has the service running in Darlington, England, its first city outside of the U.S.

Just when you thought data centers were your town’s biggest problem, now you can add “drone crashing down from the sky” to your list of concerns. These things are big too! Imagine a floating dishwasher-sized drone, not some handheld DJI Mavic Air.

Amazon says that nearly all items 5 pounds or less that fit into a large shoebox can be delivered by drone, which accounts for more than 60% of the most frequently purchased items on its marketplace. Prime members are eligible for free drone delivery on orders of $50 or more, or pay $2.99 for orders under $50, while non-Prime losers pay a flat $4.99 delivery fee regardless of order size.

Like most people who aren’t accustomed to having robots fly over their heads as they’re walking down the street, I have my reservations about drone delivery, mostly in regard to safety and privacy. It’s going to be real hard to tell the difference between Amazon delivery drones and Flock surveillance drones, that’s for sure. Communities have also been pushing back against drone delivery over the noise it produces in otherwise quiet neighborhoods.

However skepticism aside, it’s insanely impressive that Amazon has developed a drone delivery system that can consistently reach customers in under 60 minutes, while offering the service for either free or at most $4.99. I used to sell paper maps online and it would cost me more than that to deliver a single map through the USPS — for a freaking 6×9″ paper map! Now it’s cheaper to send one via drone in some cities.

Granted, I imagine that Amazon will push prices and free thresholds higher as time goes on, as they have a habit of introducing new logistics services at a loss and then later raising prices or forcing sellers to subsidize the cost. “Optional: Enable drone delivery for just $0.30 per FBA delivery and reach customers who are looking to get their items delivered fast.” — and that’s how some items in the future will have an “Available For Drone Delivery” badge and others won’t. We’ll see. Either way, it sounds like drone delivery is coming to a city near you faster than anticipated.

They couldn’t have picked worse week for this story to go viral though!

2. TikTok is exploring a peer-to-peer payments feature

TikTok is developing a peer-to-peer payments feature that would let users send each other money inside direct messages, according to code Bloomberg found in TikTok’s U.S. iPhone app. That’ll be perfect for your online girlfriend who’s kind of stressed out because her rent’s due.

The payments would run through TikTok Pay, which is a digital wallet and payment processor already available in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand that people use to make purchases on TikTok Shop. TikTok also offers TikTok PayLater in some markets, which is their BNPL offering.

The code indicates that receivers can “tap to accept” payments sent to them before an expiration date hits, and senders can be notified about the status of transactions through push notifications or via their inbox. There’s also reportedly an option to attach a message with the payment such as “Love you baby! Can’t wait for us to finally meet in person and be together. Love, Your Big Bear.”

P2P payments on TikTok sounds good to me and makes perfect sense. People are already using TikTok to exchange cash value, though it happens via the purchase and transfer of virtual gifts, which can then be converted back into cash. As Morty Smith would say, “That just sounds like payments with extra steps.” Not to mention the insane amount of Internet begging that happens on the platform, with people posting their sad stories alongside their Venmo usernames. TikTok might as well make it official and transfer the cash directly. X is doing it.

Bloomberg notes that some of TikTok’s payment tools have been the center of lawsuits brought by state attorneys general who have claimed that the features led to sexual and financial exploitation of children, broken money transmission laws, and money laundering. However, to be fair, those problems have been happening on every payments platform since the dawn of the Internet, and there are solutions in place to mitigate them. If anything, bringing the money transfer in-house gives TikTok more controls to manage and prevent the problems, rather than just being an enabler of them. So I say, go for it.

A TikTok spokesperson told Bloomberg that the feature is not being tested in any market yet. I’ll let you know if/when it ever gets released.

🔥 Partner News

ReFiBuy published the Q2 2026 edition of the AI1000, the quarterly benchmark it co-developed with Digital Commerce 360 that scores the top 1,000 online retailers on how ready their catalogs are for AI shopping agents. 972 of the 1,000 retailers changed rank in a single quarter, and Nixon, a watch brand that ranks 722nd by online sales, took the top spot from Online Labels by 0.03 points. The report found that scale alone doesn’t determine leadership in AI shopping, with only 10 of the 100 largest online retailers placing in the AI1000 top 100. ReFiBuy also found AI traffic leadership spreading beyond ChatGPT, which went from the largest source for 844 retailers in Q1 down to 722 in Q2, while Gemini-led retailers doubled from 16 to 32, Perplexity climbed from 8 to 21, and Claude went from 1 to 15. Even more surprising, only 225 of the top 1,000 have a detectable Universal Commerce Protocol endpoint heading into a holiday season where Salesforce expects 20% of e-commerce traffic to come from AI chat agents.

3. New 50% U.S. tariffs take effect on many Canadian goods

The White House is at it again with tariffs, this time targeting our neighbor and closest ally, Canada. Robin Sparkles doth protest! I almost got whiplash this past week trying to keep up with the “will they, won’t they” news headlines, but I’ve put it all together for you below:

July 20 – President Trump invoked Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a never-before-used authority, to impose 50% tariffs on ~$20B of Canadian goods, effective in 30 days. Unlike previous rounds, it applied to USMCA-compliant goods, meaning products made with enough North American content to qualify for duty-free treatment under the trade pact, like cars assembled in Ontario, Canadian lumber, and Quebec maple syrup.
Aug 18 – Hours before they took effect, Trump paused the tariffs for three days, posting that the two countries “have a DEAL!”
Aug 20-21 – Negotiators met in Washington. No deal.
Aug 21, near midnight – Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended negotiations and recalled Canada’s team, calling the U.S. terms “uneconomic” and “unfair.”
Aug 22, 12:01 AM – The tariffs took effect. Carney called it “a miscalculation” and promised to match dollar for dollar starting September 8. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said no further talks were scheduled.
Aug 24 – Trump threatened to raise Canadian auto, truck, and parts tariffs to 50% on January 1, 2027.

What’s the reason for all these tariffs?

Section 338 requires the president to find that a country actively discriminates against U.S. commerce, so the White House had to name specifics:

Canada’s dairy quotas, which the proclamation says give European cheese better access to Canadian retailers than American cheese gets.
Canada’s United States Surtax Order, which imposes a 25% tariff on U.S.-built vehicles (which to be fair, was in response to Trump’s own Section 232 tariffs on Canadian-made cars and parts).
Provincial liquor boards pulling American wine and spirits off their shelves (which was also in response to Trump’s earlier tariffs)

Carney is now facing pressure at home to explain what he turned down. Conservatives are demanding he release the full text of the U.S. offer, saying they support the decision to reject it but want to see what was actually on the table. Bloomberg reported the tentative deal would have cut U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 50% to 25%.

Carney said on Saturday, “You’re at war when you get attacked.”

4. Meta goes to trial over whether it built Instagram and Facebook to addict children

Meta went on trial in Oakland on Tuesday against 29 states that accuse it of building Instagram and Facebook to hook children and hiding what it knew about the damage. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are running the case, and they’re after more than money, asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to strip likes and infinite scroll from both apps, cap screen time for younger users, and order Meta to delete every piece of data it collected from under-13 users along with the algorithms trained on it. The trial is expected to run about six weeks, but the first few days have already been quite revealing.

Here’s what’s come out so far:

California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill told jurors Meta’s business model was to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth from the ⁠public” She said Meta “needed kids, and it needed to reassure the people who cared about them that their kids were safe.”
Meta’s lead attorney Paul Schmidt told the court the company doesn’t deny that some teens struggle to manage their time on social media, or that some people post negative things.
The states’ first witness was Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who Meta tried to block. Béjar spent eight years on product safety at Meta across two stints, and took the stand Tuesday after the company attempted to bar his testimony the week before.
Béjar said Meta published numbers that made the platform look safer than its own research showed. He helped build internal studies surveying how often users, including teens, encountered bullying, self-harm, and violent content, but Meta instead publicized content-policy violation rates, which he said “create a false impression of safety.”
Béjar blamed Zuckerberg directly. Testifying a second day Wednesday, Béjar said safety was “not a meaningful priority” and that the culture Zuckerberg built made it “practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues.”

Judge Rogers will decide the verdict and penalty, which Meta says could reach $1.4T, close to its market value, while the states figure closer to $200B. Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri are both due to testify at some point during the six-week trial.

Outside the courthouse, parents held a banner several feet long listing the names and ages of children who died from social media-related harms. One of them, Mary Rodee, told reporters they’ve had to add 39 names since March.

Honestly, I’d be okay with just wiping the slate clean with social media and starting over. Meta is a failed experiment. Let’s fine them into oblivion and build something beneficial to society from its ashes. But we’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.

5. OpenAI brings ChatGPT ads to Europe, with consent at the start

OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT ads to Europe later this month and plans to ask users for consent to personalize them, rather than leaning on the “legitimate interest” argument other ad platforms like Meta have used to try to skip that step.

Quick Backstory: Under GDPR, a company needs a legal basis to process your data. Two of those reasons are “consent” (explicitly saying yes) and “legitimate interest,” which covers ordinary processing that would be near impossible to ask permission for every time, such as fraud detection, network security, keeping records to defend a lawsuit, or sending a customer an invoice. Meta and others spent years claiming that behavioral advertising fit under legitimate interest so they’d never have to ask, until EU regulators ruled in 2023 that it doesn’t. Flash forward to 2026 and OpenAI has no choice but to ask for consent from day one.

One additional note: Meta initially responded to the 2023 rulings with a “consent or pay” model, making paying a subscription the only way to opt out of personalized ads in the region. The Commission thought that was bullshit and hit them with a DMA fine. So instead of recreating that “pay or consent” model that bit Meta in the ass, OpenAI is building explicit consent into its free tiers from the beginning, to avoid an inevitable headache later on.

Free and Go accounts that opt in to personalized ads can be targeted on their ad history and interests, along with what advertisers report people bought after clicking an ad. Opting out of personalization doesn’t remove the ads, but merely stops them from drawing on your chat history. Non-personalized ads will still get served based on whatever the current chat is about and the user’s approximate location.

Since ChatGPT ads initially launched in the U.S. in February, the pilot program has since expanded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Brazil. Digiday notes that the company has already laid the groundwork for ads in Europe since its June 4 privacy policy update, which stated that it could use data from users to personalize ads, without offering a timeline.

6. The singularity has arrived, according to Stripe, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk

Stripe executives told investors that the singularity already arrived more than eight months ago, according to a letter obtained by Axios. The company said that singularity arrived at the start of 2026 and that it’s been acting accordingly since then.

Stripe’s founders wrote in the letter:

“It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis. The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously.”

WTF is “singularity”?

Singularity is usually defined as a point in time in which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. It’s predicted to happen (or have happened) when AI becomes capable enough to improve itself, entering into a stage of progress that outpaces human ability to predict or control it. The term comes from math and physics, where a singularity is a point at which the existing rules stop producing meaningful answers.

Stripe is not the only company to declare singularity this year.

Sam Altman said on a podcast in July, “We are now, like, in the singularity,” adding, “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”

Elon Musk posted on X in January, “We have entered the Singularity.” And then posted again in July, “We are in the Singularity.”

Stripe’s letter went on to say:

“The singularity appears to be accelerating our core business… Stripe is, of course, a private company today. We view this as a growing advantage as we venture into the vicissitudes of the singularity. The world is becoming harder to predict and we expect that deft helmsmanship will be required of every company. We’re fortunate to have a corporate structure that helps us steer the right long-term course.”

Are you scared yet?

7. Walmart finally allows Apple Pay and Google Pay at select U.S. stores

Walmart is officially enabling tap-to-pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other NFC systems at select U.S. Walmart and Sam’s Club stores after more than a decade of blocking the payment type. The move makes Walmart the last major U.S. retailer to begin accepting tap-to-pay, which is accepted by around 85% of U.S. retailers.

Why was Walmart so anti tap-to-pay?

Walmart has avoided allowing tap-to-pay from major digital wallets to favor adoption of its own solution, Walmart Pay, which is built into the Walmart app. It also let Walmart keep control of the checkout data, since a customer paying through the Walmart app hands its purchase history to Walmart rather than routing it through Apple or Google.

I’ve actually used Walmart Pay in the past, and it was a lifesaver when I forgot my physical wallet, but if it didn’t exist, I would’ve just used my Google Pay instead, which already had my card info saved. Walmart Pay doesn’t really add any unique value to my life beyond that one experience, because who needs a digital wallet per store? What is this, Starbucks?

Tap to Pay starts today, August 24, at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, expands to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026, and reaches fuel stations by mid-2027.

The reversal landed one day after Walmart posted its weakest U.S. comp growth in six-plus years, which may or may not have been related. I can’t imagine that people weren’t shopping at Walmart because they didn’t accept Apple Pay, but maybe those edge cases add up when doing over $700B in sales per year.

If nothing else, the decision will make the lives of cashiers easier, who don’t have to repeatedly say to customers, “Sorry, we don’t accept Apple Pay.”

8. Honey lost over 7M Chrome users and 7,000 merchants after MegaLag’s investigation

Remember Honey? The PayPal-owned browser extension that auto-applies discount codes to your cart when shopping online. Also, remember in December 2024 when MegaLag, a New Zealand YouTuber, published a video entitled Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam, which revealed that the extension was secretly replacing original affiliate tracking cookies with its own, in order to take credit for the sale and earn the commission? A few weeks after the video published, I reported that content creators sued Honey over the practice.

Well, flash forward almost two years, and MegaLag returned with a new video investigation reporting that Honey lost 7M Chrome users and around 7,000 merchant partners since his original video dropped (though he’s posted a few updates since). His investigation revealed that Honey’s collection of coupon codes also declined from around 90k to 50k, and that at least 10k of the remaining codes have already expired.

MegaLag notes a few other post-investigation happenings and fallouts:

Rakuten Advertising, Impact.com, and Awin Group suspended Honey from their networks, though Rakuten eventually added them back after introducing a new system to prevent affiliate hijacking.
The creator lawsuit against PayPal survived multiple attempts by PayPal to have it dismissed, and the case is now in discovery, meaning creators can pull internal communications and depose employees.
Google changed Chrome Web Store policy to restrict extensions doing what Honey did, though apparently not well enough (keep reading).
MegaLag’s new research, done alongside researcher Ben Edelman, also revealed that Honey can now tell when it’s being tested and turns off the sketchy behavior when it thinks someone’s watching, which doesn’t appear to be a bug.

Cookie-stuffing… Affiliate hijacking… Where have I heard all this before?

You might recall from last week’s edition that Phia, the AI shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is facing similar allegations. You’d think they would’ve learned from Honey’s mistake that the chickens always come home to roost, but apparently not. Even more damning is that Phia’s “enable coupon auto drop” feature ran from December 10, 2025 to July 7, 2026, immediately after Google implemented its new rules, which it seems aren’t enforced very well.

Great investigative work, as always, MegaLag. I’ll keep you posted in the future on the creator lawsuit.

9. Other e-commerce news of interest

Meta pays influencers to argue to their audiences against government limits on teen social media, according to a Tech Transparency Project investigation. The company recruits actors, radio hosts, and psychologists at branded events with names like Instagram Safety Camp and Screen Smart. Those recruits then present Teen Accounts to followers as evidence that Meta’s internal controls make a ban unnecessary because it’s doing such a grand spanking good job on its own. Meta developed the tactics in the US, then took them global at a July 2025 event on Sydney Harbour, five months before Australia’s under-16 ban took effect, and TTP found the playbook running in over a dozen countries weighing similar rules. Meta spokesperson Edward Patterson told The Guardian the campaign isn’t misleading, since blanket bans push teens to unregulated parts of the Internet. Hey Meta, why aren’t you paying me to spread your propaganda? Oh wait, because I think you’re the worst and never would.

Google’s $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines’ digital archives stalled after a flight attendants union objected that it would feed confidential worker records into AI models. Judge Sean Lane moved the hearing to September 9 to weigh the union’s demand that attendant records be cut from the sale or protected as tightly as customer data. The union argued that stripping identifiers settles only whether a record traces to a named person, not whether the contents are confidential, and that customer profiles and loyalty data were largely left out while payroll, time cards, and tax forms weren’t. Google said a third party will scrub personal information before it takes delivery, and Spirit said one is deidentifying the archives and will certify the sale is legal. In the meantime, while waiting for things to settle, an AI training startup called Micro1 sent a $12.5M offer to Spirit’s legal team in an attempt to outbid Google, though experts told Business Insider that companies look at more than just bid price when weighing offers, so the higher bid might not matter at this point.

Square expanded its partnership with OpenTable to enable restaurants to merge what they know about a guest before the meal with what they learn during their visit, putting booking history, dining preferences, and dates like anniversaries into the same profile as what the guest ordered, how much they spent, and how often they return. The new features allow restaurant operators that opt in to link reservations to revenue and make more informed decisions about loyalty, marketing, and guest engagement, such as knowing a regular’s favorite dish and what they’re celebrating before they sit down. Man, that sounds like a classy experience. I’ve been eating at the wrong restaurants, I guess. The other day at breakfast, the waitress came by, stuck her fingers inside my half-filled orange juice glass and coffee mug and started to walk away with them. I stopped her and said, “I’m still drinking those,” so she put them back on the table, but then I was too grossed out to finish either drink. A note that says “doesn’t like when you put your fingers in his drink” could’ve gone in my Square profile with this new integration.

Target collected $994M in tariff refunds last quarter, but the company said none of it will directly go back to shoppers, and also, fuck you for even asking. Instead of refunds, Target said it would use the returned funds to lower prices, which is the same thing Walmart promised about its refunds back in May, prior to disclosing a $2.9B tariff refund last week. (Coming Later This Year: Target coincidentally posts its best earnings and profits in over a decade.) Amazon disclosed roughly $640M in its filing and said reimbursement will reach only a small group of affected customers, while Nike, which expects to recover $986M, has stayed quiet even as shoppers sue it for keeping the money. FedEx and UPS began sending refunds to customers this month, and FedEx is holding about $800M for that purpose. Roughly $100B of the $166B collected had been certified for refund as of July 31, according to Fortune.

TikTok Shop has been courting Whatnot’s biggest live-auction sellers to woo them over to its platform, according to The Hollywood Reporter. TikTok reps met several times with Taylor Lally, who said his candy auctions will clear $1M this year on Whatnot, but that he’s open to moving because of Whatnot’s fees, which run 8% commission plus 2.9% and a flat 30 cents per transaction. On a $2 candy bar, that comes out to 52 cents, or a quarter of the sale. TikTok’s two big pitches to sellers are its reach of over 100M users and its flat 6% referral fee on food sales with no per-transaction fee, which on that $2 candy bar would only have cost the seller 12 cents. Kip Roland, another live seller, said the algorithm pushed his World Cup jersey auction to 40,000 viewers off an account with barely 13,000 followers.

Amazon is buying printed books in bulk, including some rare books, cutting the bindings off so the pages run through scanners faster, and destroying what’s left once the text has been turned into AI training data, according to an investigation by 404 Media. The outlet had a bookseller hide an AirTag inside one book from an anonymous 1,000-book order placed through the marketplace Biblio, then tracked it to a Las Vegas warehouse where a unit called VGT3 does the scanning behind a door marked with a Tyrannosaurus Rex clutching a book. Technically, what Amazon and other AI companies are doing is not illegal. It’s just sad and feels a bit Hitlery. More than a dozen civil society groups are now urging the FTC to examine the “destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies” to determine whether it constitutes an unfair method of competition for “starving the market” of critical source materials. I respect the effort, but all they’re going to do is slow these companies down, not stop them. It’s too late. These succubuses are coming for everything.

Walmart store workers are spending part of their shifts fixing the company’s AI agents that hand them assignments, according to Business Insider. The company’s AI sends tasks and targets through its MyWalmart app, but employees said the metrics and time restrictions the software sets ignore what the job actually involves, since restocking a shelf also means checking dates, pulling damaged goods, mopping up spills, and navigating “idiot fucking customers.” (That’s not a real quote from the article, but I’m sure a Walmart employee somewhere has said it at one point.) One online fulfillment worker said the route the app builds sends her all over the store, so she never hits its projected pick times, and Spark drivers said a smart path feature has them grabbing frozen food first instead of last. Brooks Forrest, Walmart’s VP for associate tools, said stores choose how to use the tools and nobody is punished for ignoring the guidance, unlike at Amazon where the robot overlords make you drink from your piss bottles if you disobey them.

U.S. retail e-commerce sales reached $340.2B in Q2 2026, up 12.2% YoY, according to the Census Bureau, up from a 5.0% YoY growth rate in the same period in 2025. Total retail grew just 6.7% over the same quarter to $1.99T, so online sales expanded at nearly double the rate of retail overall and accounted for 17.1% of everything Americans bought. E-commerce also drove about 30% of all retail growth in the past year, roughly $37B of the $125B added. It’s important to note, however, that the figures above aren’t adjusted for price changes, so some of that is Trump tariffs rather than volume. The tariffs eventually got refunded, but the economic growth remains on paper.

Amazon raised prices overnight across its Echo, Fire TV, Kindle, and eero lines as high as 60%, with the Echo Dot going from $49.99 to $79.99, the 16GB Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from $59.99 to $84.99, and the eero Pro 7 from $699.99 to $799.99. A spokeswoman confirmed the price increases and attributed them to “significant increases in memory and storage component costs” that Amazon absorbed for as long as it could. She also said the company will run promotions across its lineup through the year, which I’m sure they will. In fact, I’m not convinced they didn’t raise prices just so they could lower them during their holiday sales events. The timing is nothing short of suspicious. To be fair, the same shortage, driven by demand for AI compute, has pushed Apple, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus to raise prices or cut memory in their hardware as well, so it’s not like Amazon is alone in price gouging, but still suspect timing.

Salesforce redesigned how outside AI agents can plug into its platform, replacing a fixed list of about 60 actions with a system that allows an agent to ask what’s available. The new Headless 360 MCP Server, now in open beta, hands the agent the full set of capabilities along with the permissions and approval rules attached to them, limiting an agent running in Claude or ChatGPT to what the employee using it is already cleared to do. For commerce specifically, Salesforce is extending the same setup to sales workflows so they can run inside storefronts and AI buying experiences instead of only inside CRM.

Google is expanding AI Max for Search campaigns with account-wide A/B testing, brand and location control experiments, and new Performance Planner capabilities. The A/B change lets advertisers test budgets and ROI targets across several Search campaigns at once instead of one at a time to help simulate what happens when they scale up spending. Experiments can also now run with brand and location controls switched on, where advertisers previously had to drop those guardrails to test AI Max at all, which kept out anyone worried about Google bidding on their own brand terms. Campaigns using automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match start auto-upgrading to AI Max on September 1, with Dynamic Search Ads following in February 2027.

Meta is removing the Placements option from ad sets, which lets an advertiser keep a campaign out of specific channels such as Facebook search results or the in-stream slots between Reels, according to in-app notices that ads consultant Jon Loomer shared. Loomer said the option to exclude whole platforms is going away as well, leaving Meta free to run any campaign across any of its apps and pick the spots it thinks will perform best, though Meta has given no date for either change. Meta has spent two years pushing advertisers toward its automated targeting, and Mark Zuckerberg told Stratechery last year that the end goal is for a business to state an objective and let Meta handle creative, targeting, and measurement on its own. In that hypothetical world, I wonder if Meta can get too good at advertising, to the point that people stop using Instagram as much because they always end up buying something during a doom scroll session.

In lawsuits this week…

Amazon asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear its Perplexity case before 11 judges, after a three-judge panel ruled that Comet’s users, not Perplexity, are the ones reaching Amazon when the agent shops. Amazon said the ruling “degraded website owners’ ability to set the terms on which powerful, fast-evolving, and potentially destructive AI agents may enter their secure systems.” Yup!
TikTok agreed to pay $400M to settle a 2024 Justice Department suit alleging it collected data from children under 13 without parental consent and left up accounts it knew belonged to under-13 users. Meta is currently on trial in Oakland over the same 1998 statute.
Twitch and Amazon are facing a proposed class action from streamer Warren Pandiscia who alleges they copied millions of creators’ videos to train Amazon’s AI models without permission or payment, going back as far as 2024. Twitch acknowledged the practice on August 12 and added an opt-out setting, though channels are enrolled by default and chief product officer Mike Minton said the same day that nobody would opt in if the company asked.
Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday is suing TikTok and ByteDance for allegedly understating how much alcohol, drug use, sex, and violence it carries in order to keep the 13+ app store rating that opened it to 13-year-olds. He also alleges that ByteDance gives minors in other countries more protections than it does minors in the U.S., which TikTok called misleading and inaccurate.
OpenAI asked a judge to throw out a privacy suit over ChatGPT, arguing its policies already warn users that anything they type may be shared with outside vendors, including health and money questions. The plaintiff’s rewritten complaint uses OpenAI’s own marketing against it, citing company reports that call ChatGPT a “healthcare ally” for 40M people a day and count 200M a month asking it about their finances. Also, literally no-one read their TOS, so quit hiding behind it.
Four major ad industry groups backed Google in a lawsuit brought by two Californians over 60 who say its ad tools let banks and insurers hide their ads from older people in violation of a California anti-discrimination law. The groups argue that picking an audience by age isn’t discrimination, since a company selling spring break trips shouldn’t have to advertise to retirees, which is kind of a silly argument to make given that no-one is suing Google over ads for vacations.
Shopify lost its second attempt to get a California privacy class action dismissed, after the judge pointed to new allegations that the order confirmation e-mail came from Shopify itself and carried images served off Shopify’s own network. Plaintiff Brandon Briskin alleges the company’s checkout software collects shoppers’ names, addresses, card numbers, and locations while looking like it belongs to the merchant, then builds profiles it sells back to merchants without permission from customers.
Meta must face Mike Huckabee’s claim that Facebook ads faked his endorsement of CBD gummies, after a federal judge rejected its argument that it merely distributes third-party content and earns nothing tied to what the ads say. The judge pointed to allegations that Meta sells the ads, charges extra to place them prominently in feeds, and approved and kept these running.

In layoffs this week…

TikTok is cutting 75 jobs in Bellevue, Washington, and nearly every title on the state notice is a TikTok Shop or Global E-Commerce role, including anti-fraud managers, seller and creator operations staff, data scientists, and engineers. Bellevue is where the company built out its US shopping business, and the cuts land two weeks after TikTok said it would close its Nashville office and lay off 250 employees.

In corporate shakeups this week…

Flipkart is losing two more senior executives, business finance SVP Gunjan Bhartia and supply chain VP Amer Hussain, both within a year of arriving and following the departures of group CFO Sriram Venkatraman and Myntra CEO Nandita Sinha, as the company holds off on an IPO with no timeline set.
Commerce hired Emily Harnish as chief marketing officer, bringing over the former Pellera Technologies and CivicPlus CMO to replace Michelle Suzuki, who took the role in January 2025.
ReFiBuy brought on Rob Goodman as fractional executive producer of the ReFiBuy Media Network, tapping the former Google, Wix, and Webflow content lead to run podcast production and a YouTube-first strategy.
eBay rehired Renee Paradise to run its $10B fashion business starting August 25, bringing her back after a 2014-to-2019 run in the category to pull newly acquired Depop closer while both lose UK ground to Vinted.
Relay is shutting down its Zapier-rival AI workflow app, cutting off paying customers September 14, while founder Jacob Bank and some of the staff rejoin Google, where he’ll be VP of product for Chrome running its product and developer relations teams.
Klarna announced that CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström will both depart in the first months of next year, with the company looking to base its next finance chief in New York starting in 2027.
OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team, the unit that judged whether frontier models posed catastrophic bio, cyber, or loss-of-control risks, folding its members into teams that now own individual risk areas and making it the third safety group the company has dissolved in two years.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Google’s AI is being racist as fuck! Last week, Google’s AI Overviews told users who searched “I’m alone with an African” to lock the door, move somewhere safe, and call emergency services, and returned similar warnings for Indian and Pakistani. The same query about a Brit produced advice to offer tea and remark on the weather, and other Western nationalities came back harmless. The results were posted by a user on Reddit and later confirmed by Futurism with its own testing. Google said the results “aren’t what they should be” and that it is working on improvements, and that the inconsistent warnings hit more than one group. Google also told Futurism that the term “alone” was what tripped a safety flag. Nationality queries went neutral after Futurism got in touch, which I can confirm, as I just searched “I’m alone with a Jew” (myself, LOL) and it asked me for clarification on what I wanted before outputting anything.

10. Seed rounds, IPOs, & acquisitions

Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter, an AI model gateway that routes requests across more than 400 models from over 80 providers, for an undisclosed amount reportedly around $7.5B. The deal combines Stripe’s payments technology with OpenRouter’s AI routing, letting businesses manage and split their token spending between various providers, performing simpler tasks with cheaper models and saving their more complex queries for frontier models. Earlier this year, co-founder Alex Atallah described his company as the AI version of Stripe, though I don’t recall Stripe ever giving me options to route my payments to cheaper providers.

Ode with Anthropic, an enterprise AI services firm formed in 2026 by Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman that builds custom Claude deployments for large companies, acquired Casper Studios, a consultancy that builds the connectors, skills, and context companies use to run Claude inside their internal software, for an undisclosed amount. Both companies built solutions in the same Claude Code setup, and even served some of the same clients, so their tools are interchangeable between teams and require no rebuilds. Casper is the first company Ode has bought since launching under its own name in July. Ode itself was assembled out of Fractional AI, an applied AI engineering shop the joint venture acquired in May, ending Fractional’s 11-month partnership with OpenAI in the process.

Nvidia is in talks to invest in Mercor, a data labeling startup that supplies human-generated training data for Nvidia’s open-source Nemotron models, which lean heavily on synthetic data, as part of a round that would value Mercor at $20B, doubling its October valuation. Nvidia paid Mercor tens of millions last quarter and a handful of Mercor staff now work almost entirely on the account, though Nvidia still also buys from competitors including Turing and Scale. Mercor took in $614M in gross revenue over the first half of the year, up 70% from all of 2025, and pays 60% to 70% of that out to the contractors doing the work.

Space, a cloud filesystem startup that streams remote files into desktop apps without downloading them to the device, raised $2.4M in a pre-seed round led by a16z Speedrun. The company is pitching its solution against Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive, which sync whole files onto a device or pull them into a browser for use, whereas Space only sends the byte ranges needed at that moment, with files appearing within Finder, same as locally stored ones. That way, for example, an editor can start cutting video footage that would otherwise never fit on the laptop, or a locally run coding agent can read across a bigger dataset than a computer’s own hard drive would hold. Co-Founder Matthew Ao said, “The computer no longer needs to hold every file. It becomes a window into any file, wherever it lives and however large it is.”

Shiprocket, an Indian e-commerce logistics platform that lets online sellers compare and book shipments across a network of courier partners, listed at ₹131 on the NSE on Wednesday, 35% above its ₹97 issue price, and rose as much as 48.6% during the session to a valuation of ₹100.1B (roughly $1.05B). Demand for the offering was heavy, with investors bidding for 99 times the shares available and institutional buyers alone bidding 123 times their allotted portion. The company plans to use the IPO proceeds for product development and strategic acquisitions to expand its fulfillment and logistics network.

Veeda AI, a Toronto startup building world models that simulate physical environments for training robots through trial and error, raised over $90M in seed financing from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, as first reported by The Logic. The company’s CEO, Sanja Fidler, announced her exit from Nvidia in July after eight years there, most of them spent running the Toronto research group that became its Spatial Intelligence Lab. Two Nvidia colleagues came with her as co-founders, chief scientist Huan Ling and CTO Zan Gojcic. Fidler wrote on LinkedIn that the “real world is simply not a practical training ground for robots to learn through trial and error” because it is “unsafe, expensive, and time-consuming,” and that “robots will need to learn in simulated reality” to scale interactive learning.

Takt, a warehouse labor management platform that measures worker and robot activity against engineered labor standards in real time, raised $9.25M in a Series A round led by Ballast Point Partners. The company’s software, which exists in one of Amazon’s wet dreams, pulls data out of warehouse management systems, time clocks, in-house apps, and the controls running robotics gear, then measures all the activity against baseline metrics so supervisors can catch when a shift begins to fall behind while it’s running. Takt says the platform covers over 100 warehouses, including sites run by Fortune 500 retailers and large North American 3PLs. The company will use the funds to deepen its integrations with tier-one warehouse and robotics systems, as well as for expansion in the UK, EU, and Asia-Pacific.

Fractile, a London-based AI chip startup building inference hardware aimed at displacing Nvidia GPUs, is in advanced talks to raise $600M at a $6.5B pre-money valuation, more than six times the $1B it commanded in May during a $220M round, according to Bloomberg sources. Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners are lined up to co-lead, with one source also placing Thrive Capital and Founders Fund on the co-lead list, though nothing has closed and the terms could still move. The increase in valuation follows an agreement to sell Anthropic roughly $250M of chips, which both sides want to expand, even though the chips won’t be ready until 2027.

Ours Privacy, a HIPAA-compliant customer data platform that strips protected health information out of healthcare marketers’ ad and analytics tracking, raised $15M in a Series A round co-led by Lightbank and Health Velocity Capital. The market for its services opened in 2022, when the Office for Civil Rights said sharing protected health information with tracking vendors can breach HIPAA unless the vendor is contractually bound by HIPAA as well, causing many marketers to turn off tracking and lose sight of campaign performance. The founders launched Ours Privacy in 2024 after struggling to find a compliant way to run marketing and analytics at their own telehealth company, Ours Wellness.

Rundoo, a POS and operations platform for independent paint, hardware, and building materials stores, raised $30M in a Series B round led by Battery Ventures, bringing its total amount raised to $48M. The company sells what it calls an “AI-first system of record” for independent supply stores that combines point-of-sale, e-commerce, CRM, loyalty, and general ledger tools into one product that now runs in over 500 stores across the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. Rundoo is also building supplier integrations, including one with Benjamin Moore’s tint software that lets independent dealers mix the right colors and keep the customer record on their own system.

Helcim, a Canadian payment processor handling in-person payments and invoicing for SMBs, raised $53M CAD in a Series C round led by BDC Capital’s Growth Venture Fund. The company is one of the last merchant payment processors still Canadian-owned, and it has been marketing that status to patriotic merchants since a U.S. firm earlier this year agreed to acquire one of its biggest domestic competitors, Moneris, the last processor owned by the country’s Big Six banks. Helcim will put the funds toward customer support and product development, including an extension that lets a merchant swap out the default processor built into booking or invoicing software and run payments through Helcim instead.

Peeko, an Indian quick commerce startup that delivers baby and kids products in under 60 minutes, raised ₹67.4 crore (around $7M) in a Series A round led by Chiratae Ventures. The company offers a try-and-buy service, where a parent can try the products on their kids while the delivery driver waits outside the door, and then hand back what doesn’t fit, an option which Peeko says most customers take. The driver then returns the item to one of Peeko’s dark stores, where it gets inspected before going back on the shelf. The company plans to use the funds to double its number of dark stores from three to six and expand beyond Bengaluru.

Chief Media, an independent agency that plans and buys performance media, acquired Amazon consultancy AMZ Advisers along with the company’s stake in TikTok Shop agency Reach Social, which AMZ Advisers had only picked up three weeks earlier when it bought out one of Reach Social’s owners. Chief Media says it will keep both brands and all of their employees. Can you imagine being a Reach Social client and receiving two different “We’ve sold!” e-mails in a matter of weeks? Should we place a bet that Chief Media gets acquired soon too? Maybe the cycle will never end…

Higgsfield AI, a San Francisco startup whose platform generates and edits images and videos from text prompts, raised $400M in a Series B round led by DST Global at a $5.4B valuation, more than quadrupling the $1.3B it commanded during its Series A extension in January. The company says it hit $700M in annualized revenue this month, up from the $500M run rate reported in June when the round was still in talks. Higgsfield has more than 30M users across 238 countries and now powers visual production for 390 of the Fortune 500, across advertising, media, fashion, retail, financial services, and pharma.

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Paul E. Drecksler
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PS: What do penguins eat for lunch? Ice-burgers!