#270 – Amazon vs USPS, Google updates UCP, & Walmart launches a ChatGPT app

Hi Shopifreaks

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I've got another jam-packed edition for you today, so let's dive right in. 

In this week's edition I cover:

• Amazon cuts back on USPS deliveries
• Amazon introduces 1-hour and 3-hour delivery
• Google updates Universal Commerce Protocol
• Meta can't decide what to do with Horizons World
• Perplexity stacks a temporary win against Amazon
• Walmart launches a ChatGPT app
• Amazon is launching a “Transformer” smartphone
• Shopify is putting its eggs in agentic commerce's basket
• OpenAI is building a shopping homepage for ChatGPT
• Publicis tells clients to avoid The Trade Desk
• JD.com launches Joybuy in Europe

All this and more in this week's 270th Edition of Shopifreaks. Thanks for subscribing and sharing!

Stat of the Week

Shopify Capital has $1.784 billion in outstanding loans and cash advances on its books, up from just $9 million when the program launched in 2016. That's a roughly 19,500% increase over the past decade! In its last financial year it earned $258 million from lending interest and fees from those loans, plus whatever it earned in transaction fees that resulted in merchants selling inventory they purchased with that working capital through its platform.

1. Amazon plans to cut its business with USPS by over 67%

Amazon, which is the Postal Service's biggest customer, is planning to reduce the number of packages it sends through USPS by at least two-thirds after failing to reach agreement on business terms, according to The Wall Street Journal.

USPS delivered more than a billion packages for Amazon last year, which accounted for around 15% of Amazon's total package delivery and up to 40% of its delivery to rural areas, but by September, when its contract ends, Amazon plans to reduce that number to just a few hundred million.

Amazon said it negotiated in good faith with USPS for over a year and believed a deal was near when USPS “abruptly walked away at the 11th hour and introduced the auction concept” — which is where the Postal Service, for the first time, opened its last-mile delivery contracts to competitive bidding rather than negotiating with large shippers individually. The new Postmaster General David Steiner believes that the market should set the rates, which is why the auction system was introduced. 

Amazon said that the deal they were working towards with USPS “would bring them billions in revenue” — but that's obviously not the full picture. That revenue has a cost, and Amazon historically hasn't been a big fan of paying premium rates to its partners. At some point, if profit margins are too thin, that same revenue becomes a liability, as the obligation associated with it can hinder growth in other areas. This is effectively why UPS cut back on delivering Amazon packages last year. The thin margins simply weren't worth the headache and were holding the company back from exploring growth in other higher margin, specialized fulfillment areas.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that USPS was finding themselves in a similar situation with Amazon. The “billions in revenue” may have proven to be a bigger strain on the postal service's resources than it was a profit center. Plus, those “billions in revenue” may very well be worth “multi-billions in revenue” on the free market, which USPS aims to find out with its auction system. 

Frankly I don't blame the postal service for making moves that benefit themselves. Amazon would certainly do the same.

Last year, when UPS pulled back from Amazon, I wrote: 

“Who wants to dedicate business resources towards catering to Amazon when the company is actively competing against your own services? The handwriting has long been on the wall that Amazon wants to completely replace 3rd parties with its own delivery network. 

Twenty years ago, nearly every Amazon package was shipped via 3rd parties like USPS, UPS, and FedEx, but now, Amazon delivers more than 70% of its packages using its in‑house network, and that number is expected to climb.”

Amazon certainly has a lot of weight to throw around in terms of business it can provide third-party carriers, but now we'll see what that business is actually worth on the free market. By this time next year, USPS may be delivering 1/3 the Amazon packages it did this year, but at 3x the profit. It's been well documented that Amazon is actively growing its rural delivery presence, and there's no reason for the USPS to have to subsidize the company's rural delivery while they build a competing service.

2. Amazon introduces 1-hour and 3-hour delivery to millions of U.S. customers

Speaking of Amazon delivery… Amazon introduced 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options to over 2,000 cities and towns in the US. The delivery option is available on more than 90,000 everyday essential products like pantry items, cleaning supplies, health and beauty products, OTC medications, electronics, toys, and clothing.

The new faster delivery options come with an increased price: 

• 1-hour delivery is $9.99 extra for Prime members and $19.99 for non-members
• 3-hour delivery is $4.99 for Prime members and $14.99 for non-members

Do I get my money back if my order is not delivered within the promised time frame?

Yes, as Amazon's delivery guarantee states, “If we provide a guaranteed delivery date and a delivery attempt isn't made by this date, we'll refund any shipping fees associated with that order.” The help documentation doesn't specifically mention the new 1-hour or 3-hour delivery option, however, Amazon's AI assistant Rufus confirmed that the policy applies to new faster shipping options. (And AI assistants never get the answers wrong…)

Amazon's Senior VP of Worldwide Operations, Udit Madan, said:

“Our customers are busier than ever and are looking for new ways to save time while keeping their households running. We saw an opportunity to use our unique operational expertise and delivery network to help make customers’ lives a little easier while unlocking even more value for Prime members. We’re excited to say that two decades after Prime first launched, we’re still innovating to make delivery even faster, while maintaining the same everyday low prices and vast selection Amazon is known for.”

He forgot to mention, “as well as unlocking new profit for Amazon!”

I predict that in a year from now (or sooner), customers will slowly start to see fewer ‘same-day shipping' options on products and be presented instead with ‘Free 2-Day Delivery' versus the new 1-hour or 3-hour options. For most people who work, same-day delivery is essentially the same thing as 1-hour or 3-hour delivery, as the package will likely arrive while they're at work or shortly after anyway. Amazon's going to need a way to funnel customers who need their items fast toward its new upsell shipping options, and the best way to do that is to remove same-day shipping from the equation.

3. Google adds a cart, real-time updates, and identity linking to UCP

Google updated its Universal Commerce Protocol, the agentic commerce standard it launched in January, with three new capabilities including:

• A Cart option that lets AI agents add multiple items from the same store to a shopping cart, same as they would on the store itself. Initially UCP only supported single item checkout.
• A Catalog feature that allows agents to retrieve real-time product details like variants, inventory, and pricing.
• Identity Linking that gives shoppers the same loyalty benefits and member pricing through UCP-integrated platforms as they would get logging into a retailer's site directly. This will enable merchants to treat shoppers like their own customers, as opposed to anonymous users.

Honestly it's hard to believe that some of these features weren't available during the original launch of UCP a couple months ago, especially the first two. Agentic commerce is often referred to as the future of e-commerce, but it currently feels like it's simply recreating the past three decades one feature at a time. To be fair, it's happening over the course of months instead of decades, so I should be patient.

Is Google already winning the agentic protocol war?

OpenAI recently scaled back its plans to introduce commerce directly inside ChatGPT and is now pivoting towards having checkouts take place inside ChatGPT apps. As a co-creator of Agentic Commerce Protocol with Stripe, a standard that competes with Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI's pullback is ultimately a few points in UCP's favor.

If you were an e-commerce platform or marketplace developing your future tech stack around an AI commerce protocol, would you lean towards developing it around standards built by Google, which has played a huge role in commerce search and discovery for decades, or standards co-developed by OpenAI, which can't seem to decide if it wants to go all-in on commerce yet?

The recent moves by OpenAI, which was poised to be the biggest platform that utilized ACP, make me question whether Stripe should simply end the protocol altogether and exclusively support UCP, as it's already been an endorser of UCP since it launched. Does agentic commerce really need a Betamax and a VHS format? Or could this be the one time that tech companies learn from the past and work towards one accepted format early on?

Personally, I feel the best move Google could make with UCP is to spin it off into its own nonprofit organization governed by an independent body with Shopify, Stripe, Walmart, Microsoft, and other tech leaders given a seat at the table in shaping its future. OpenAI and Amazon can even come too! That's the only way I truly see UCP becoming a universal standard like TCP/IP, HTML, and CSS, as opposed to being forever known as a Google product. Then again, UCP might win out either way.

4. Is Meta shutting down VR on Horizons World or not?

Meta announced last Tuesday that Horizon Worlds would no longer be accessible through VR headsets starting on June 15th, after which it would pivot to a mobile-only experience for the virtual world. The news led many to believe that this marked the final nail in the coffin of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse dreams, which inspired the company's name change five years ago.

Then on Wednesday, after the entire Internet collectively took a dump on Zuckerberg's metaverse vision for the umpteenth time, the company came back with a second statement backpedaling on the decision.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has said during an Instagram AMA: 

“We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans that have reached out like yourself who really care about that. The Horizon Unity runtime games — they're not going to work on mobile. They'll just be working on VR. We're not bringing new games. Again most of our energy is going towards mobile and the meta horizon engine there. The reason for that is that's where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, so we're kind of leaning into that. But for people who already have games they like that they are using in Horizon Worlds, they'll be able to download the horizons app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”

Dozens of people worldwide were relieved. 

Meta has poured over $90B into its metaverse projects during the past seven years since originally acquiring Oculus, but it never quite took off — unlike competing digital worlds like Roblox and Fortnite, which became household names. Turns out you can't buy cool!

At its peak, Horizon Worlds had fewer than 200,000 monthly active users, recorded in October 2022. A YouTuber who spent a week inside Horizon Worlds in 2023 found it only had around 900 daily active users at the time. And even more dismal than its number of users is the fact that Horizons World has only generated around $1.1M in consumer spending on the platform since its inception. Meanwhile Roblox generated $4.9B in revenue just last year.

Despite keeping Horizon Worlds VR on life support for a little while longer, it's obvious that Meta has effectively scrapped its VR plans to go all in on AI. The New York Times notes that in September, at the same developer conference where in 2021 he announced the renaming of Facebook to Meta, Zuckerberg used the term “metaverse” just twice in the final minutes of his presentation, after mentioning AI 23 times throughout the hour.

5. Perplexity's Comet browser gets to shop on Amazon a little while longer

Last week I reported that Amazon won a temporary federal injunction against Perplexity to block Comet browser from scraping its e-commerce website after Judge Chesney ruled that the retailer provided strong evidence of unauthorized access. I called that a point for Amazon. 

Well, now the score is tied 1-1 after a U.S. appeals court subsequently suspended Judge Chesney's ruling. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals paused the lower court order that was set to take effect on Tuesday, and the order will remain on hold while the federal appeals court considers Perplexity's appeal.

The case stems back to November, when Amazon had filed a lawsuit against Perplexity to stop the company's AI browser, Comet, from shopping on its website. Amazon had previously sent cease and desist notices to Perplexity, which it ignored, and tried to block Perplexity's AI agents with technology, which it bypassed.

Perplexity argues that people should have a right to choose their own AI and that Amazon's sole motivation was to keep consumers shopping directly on their website so that they can continue to serve them ads. While Amazon defends its right to protect itself against the risks that third-party AI agents bring to the customer experience and security of their shoppers. Amazon also noted its contractual obligation to its advertisers to serve ads to legitimate human users who will actually see them.

Perplexity originally wrote in a public statement back in November: 

“Your AI assistant must be indistinguishable from you. When Comet Assistant visits a website, it does so with your credentials, your permissions, and your rights… Publishers and corporations have no right to discriminate against users based on which AI they've chosen to represent them.”

However I've got to challenge Perplexity on two things: 

1) I'm not so sure that users want their AI assistants to be “indistinguishable” from them. Personally I don't trust any AI agent enough to give it autonomy to browse the Internet using my identity or make purchases on my behalf. What if the AI agent goes rogue and starts browsing areas of the web it shouldn't? Or downloads illegal content? Or makes a nonrefundable purchase for an item I don't want? Think it can't happen? AI agents have already reportedly shut down entire systems of multi-billion dollar platforms. Believe me, they can and do go rogue!

2) Perplexity is quick to defend its “rights” to represent its users, but takes absolutely no responsibility for doing so. The company's own Terms of Service for its Comet browser explicitly states that you bear all the risk of using it, that Perplexity makes no warranties of any kind, and that any transaction the agent completes on a third-party platform is ‘solely between you and such third party provider' — meaning if Comet buys something you didn't want, accesses something it shouldn't, or downloads something illegal, the consequences fall on you.

Perplexity argues that software is merely a tool, like a wrench, and that “large corporations have no right to stop you from owning wrenches.” It argues that Amazon “does not believe in your right to hire labor, to have an assistant or an employee acting on your behalf.”

However here's the thing Perplexity… If I purchased a defective Crescent wrench and it broke in half and broke my nose while using it under normal conditions, I could sue Crescent. Similarly, if I hired an executive assistant who maxed out my company credit card with personal expenditures, I'd fire them and file criminal charges. You can't claim to play the role of an assistant or employee while simultaneously taking no accountability for assuming the position. Well, technically you can, but it makes your whole argument bullshit in my opinion.

6. Walmart makes a second attempt at shopping on ChatGPT

Walmart launched a ChatGPT shopping app that allows users to search products, compare options, and add items to their cart without leaving the chat interface — all powered by its internal Sparky chatbot. Results within ChatGPT differ slightly from Walmart.com, with a stronger emphasis on discovery and alternative suggestions based on the conversation rather than static search results. 

GeekSeller notes that the experience surfaces not just Walmart Fulfillment Services listings or Shipped by Walmart listings, but also seller-fulfilled items without free shipping, suggesting that Walmart is exposing a much wider portion of its catalog than it originally did through OpenAI's recently abandoned Instant Checkout. 

Two weeks ago I reported that OpenAI was scaling back its plans to introduce shopping directly inside the general ChatGPT chatbot, pivoting instead to a focus on having checkouts take place inside of specific apps within its interface. Now Walmart has made the pivot along with them and launched its own app.

Instant Checkout was one of the biggest flops in modern e-commerce history. 

Walmart reported that conversion rates for products purchased directly inside ChatGPT via its Instant Checkout feature were three times lower than those requiring users to click out to Walmart's website. Daniel Danker, who oversees design and product for Walmart, says the companies could have spent years trying to fix the “unsatisfying” consumer experience of Instant Checkout.

Damn! This coming from the same company that called its partnership with OpenAI the “next generation of retail” just five months ago. Walmart, you know you guys signed off on it too, right?

In the new experience, Walmart users will have to log into Sparky the first time they encounter the app through ChatGPT. From there, the shopper's carts will sync between ChatGPT, Walmart.com, and the Walmart mobile app to create a cross-platform shopping experience that leverages ChatGPT for discovery and Walmart's own platform for checkout.

Despite how few people wanted to actually complete their purchase on ChatGPT, Walmart says that the chatbot is great for discovery, bringing in about twice the rate of new customers as search engines.

7. Amazon is developing a smartphone codenamed “Transformer”

Amazon is developing a new smartphone codenamed “Transformer” nearly 11 years after ditching its Fire Phone, according to Reuters sources. The phone is being developed by a year-old group within Amazon's devices unit called ZeroOne, which is tasked with creating “breakthrough” gadgets, and is designed to sync with Alexa and serve as portal to Amazon's digital services including its marketplace, Prime Video, Prime Music, and partners like Grubhub. (Technically, so are all existing phones, right?)

Amazon originally launched the Fire Phone in 2014, but it wasn't a great device. Fire used a proprietary operating system called Fire OS that, despite being an Android fork, lacked availability to popular apps found on Android. It also had a complex multi-camera screen system that drained users' batteries. Despite offering a free year of Amazon Prime with purchase and eventually dropping the price from $649 to $159, the phone didn't sell well, and Amazon cancelled the project after just 14 months, taking a $170M hit on unsold inventory.

The billion dollar question — will Transformer run on “true” Android?

Sources say that Alexa would be a core feature of the phone, but not necessarily serve as its primary interface, which realistically leaves Android as its likely operating system. But will it be a “true” Android operating system, like the kind that runs on Samsung or Google devices, or a forked version, like what ran on the original Fire Phone and currently runs on Amazon's Fire tablets today?

I've long said that the mobile operating system ecosystem needs a major third player to bring true competition to the space that's dominated by Android and iOS, but initial reporting doesn't make it sound like Transformer is going to bring that to the table. It sounds like it's just going to be another lackluster device designed to shove Alexa and other Amazon products down your throat.

The real move would be if Amazon went balls to the wall on its new device and treated it as a loss leader — bringing specs that rival the iPhone 17 Pro Max, Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, and Google Pixel 10 Pro at a $599 price point. Amazon would make it a no brainer for consumers to put a device in their hands each day that integrated with the rest of their hardware and software stack including Alexa+, its Ring camera and security systems, and Echo devices.

However I highly doubt that'll be the case. We'll likely end up with the equivalent of a Samsung Galaxy A26 loaded with preinstalled Amazon apps.

What are your thoughts about an Amazon smartphone? Hit reply and let me know or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

8. Shopify says agentic commerce will be the biggest transformation in its history

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein told the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles that agentic shopping represents the biggest transformation in the company's history, but that initial rollout will be slow.

Finkelstein believes that AI-powered personal shoppers will act as a “merit-based” discovery engine that surfaces products based on genuine consumer preferences rather than paid placement, which he says traditional search engines currently don't do well at, and that this type of discovery will give Shopify's smaller merchants a more level playing field against large retailers.

Finkelstein said:

“We’re still going to be influenced by the people we see, the people we watch on social media, on television, but I think the chat application is actually a more authentic personal shopper because it’s generally not on commission, meaning it’s only going to show you the things it thinks you are most likely to purchase.”

He also noted that only 18% of U.S. retail purchases are made online, but that agentic commerce can change that by acting as the “new front door for e-commerce.”

Shopify was a co-developer of Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and a launch partner for both ChatGPT Instant Checkout and Microsoft Copilot Checkout. As the world's largest e-commerce platform for independent merchants, it has a lot to gain from agentic commerce driving traffic towards D2C sites and away from Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces, so I can understand the public optimism.

9. Other e-commerce news of interest

OpenAI is building a shopping homepage on ChatGPT that lets users “Shop for anything” via search bar, followed by a page of recommendations for shopping prompts such as “Find me a lightweight carry-on for weekend trip,” as discovered by Juozas Kaziukėnas. For example, clicking “Find me a gift for my coffee-loving friend” starts a new conversation with a pre-written prompt that reads, “I need to buy a gift for a coffee-loving friend. Help me find options under $100 that feel thoughtful, useful, and genuinely gift-worthy.” Kaziukėnas says the page is not live yet, but he was able to find it by “digging around.” He commented, “Nothing groundbreaking but user friendly; Microsoft's Copilot has a similar shopping homepage. I expect features like price tracking, deals, and offers will get added there.”

Publicis is advising its clients to avoid working with The Trade Desk, according to an e-mail obtained by ADWEEK. The world's third-largest advertising holding company claims that The Trade Desk failed an audit conducted by a third-party consultant that evaluated its fee structures and media spend, which concluded that The Trade Desk “improperly applied their DSP fee to other fees” it charged Publicis and some of its clients. The Trade Desk refuted the claims made in the memo and said that the auditor had requested data “that would violate customer and partner confidentiality agreement” — which Publicis later denied. ADWEEK previously reported that Dentsu and WPP had pulled back from using The Trade Desk's OpenPath platform over hidden fees and lack of transparency in where their ads were running.

Criteo is pitching advertisers on conversational advertising inside ChatGPT through a newly revealed partnership with OpenAI, positioning itself as the easiest on-ramp to the platform that allows clients to go live “in days” using their existing Criteo Performance Media setup, according to a pitch deck obtained by Digiday. The deck frames ChatGPT as the dominant source of AI-driven traffic and argues that shopping inside the platform compresses the traditional purchase funnel into a single conversation, making it an essential channel for performance advertisers. Criteo's pilot program carries a $60 CPM standard across all campaigns, but it remains unclear from the deck whether OpenAI's previously reported $250,000 spend minimum applies when purchasing ads through Criteo's platform.

JD.com launched Joybuy, its new European shopping platform, in the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, promising same-day delivery for orders placed before 11 a.m. in select cities. While Chinese competitors like Temu, Shein, and AliExpress operate via a direct-from-China model in the region, JD.com has its own local warehouses and logistics networks, putting it more in line with Amazon, which has 30 fulfillment centers in the UK alone. Joybuy is positioning itself as a first-party retailer focused on global brands like L'Oréal Paris and De'Longhi rather than as a discount marketplace like its Chinese rivals, though it is initially undercutting Amazon on product price and membership fees, with its JoyPlus delivery subscription running £3.99 per month compared to Amazon Prime's £8.99.

Costco is partnering with retail adtech firm Moloco Commerce Media to launch a new onsite ad format called Reserved Display on its e-commerce site, using Moloco's AI engine to serve personalized ads described as “digital end-caps” that surface relevant products to individual shoppers at the moment of purchase. The partnership is part of a broader infrastructure buildout for Costco Velocity, the company's recently rebranded retail media network, which last week also announced a deal with Symbiosys to promote Costco products in Google Shopping search results. Unlike other retail media networks, Costco has made it clear that Costco Velocity is not designed to generate significant ad revenue, but rather to help brands that already sell at Costco build more cohesive campaigns across its website, stores, and the Internet. Also, hot dogs will remain $1.50 for life.

Facebook launched “Creator Fast Track,” a program that offers creators with 20,000+ followers on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube guaranteed pay of $100 to $3,000 per month for three months, plus boosted reach on eligible Reels, if they bring their content to its platform. In exchange, creators are expected to publish at least 15 Facebook Reels over a 30-day period, spread across at least 10 different days, though the content doesn't have to be Facebook exclusive. Meta reportedly paid creators almost $3B through its monetization programs in 2025, a 35% YoY increase and its highest annual total to date, but many creators are still wary to jump on board because they don't have trust in the platform. Facebook attempted a similar approach in 2018 with its Gaming Creator Program, luring streamers away from Twitch and YouTube with cash incentives, before scaling back payments, causing creators to drift back to competing platforms and ultimately leading Facebook to shut down the program entirely.

Coinbase is developing payment infrastructure for AI agents, including a payments protocol called x402 that allows websites to accept payments from agents, along with dedicated agent wallets and a marketplace where agents can discover and pay for third-party services. The company is also competing with crypto infrastructure startup Zerohash to issue a stablecoin for Cloudflare, which is set to launch later this year. Last month, trading activity across all crypto exchanges fell to the lowest level since October 2024, and Coinbase's share value has dropped in half from their 2025 peak. To make matters even worse, the company lost $667M last quarter alone. It really needs a win!

Speaking of stablecoins… Shopify is integrating the USDC stablecoin directly into its core payments stack, allowing merchants to accept the coins at checkout without adding new payment providers, which in turn trigger an additional transaction fee from Shopify. Shoppers can select USDC at checkout, pay from a crypto wallet, and complete the purchase like any other transaction, while merchants can choose whether to receive funds in USDC or in traditional fiat payouts.  So far only USDC is support, but plans to support USDT were announced earlier this month.

Walmart secured two U.S. patents for machine learning-powered pricing tools, including an automated markdown system for its e-commerce platform and a demand forecasting tool that recommends prices to merchant teams. The approvals come as Walmart installs electronic shelf labels across all 4,600 of its U.S. stores within the next year, but Walmart insists that both patents are unrelated to dynamic pricing and that price updates will remain “people led.” Walmart has been granted nearly 50 U.S. patents so far in 2026, which feels a little patent hoardy if you ask me, though Amazon is historically no better in that regard.

TikTok began a limited test of a new in-app mini-drama feed called “TikTok Short Drama,” featuring vetted short-form series broken into one-to-five-minute episodes across categories like crime, romance, and CEO fantasy. Unlike most micro-drama apps that operate on a freemium model, all episodes on TikTok's feed are free, and AI-generated content is prominent, including one series called “Untamed” with over 500M views featuring a dancing polar bear making jokes about climate change in one episode. TikTok is prompting some viewers to download its separate PineDrama app after watching episodes, while also hosting third-party drama feeds through its minis program, where most content is free for a few episodes before requiring payment, keeping both lanes open simultaneously. In other programming news, TikTok also launched a Creatorverse Incubator program with Tubi that will help content creators produce long form original series for the Fox-owned streaming service. 

TikTok is expanding its #BookTok bestseller lists to Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland, combining TikTok platform insights with NielsenIQ BookData sales figures to produce a monthly overview of book trends driven by the app's community. Last year, more than 50M books recommended by the #BookTok community were sold across Europe, with TikTok claiming to have generated €800M in revenue for the publishing industry in 2025. Alongside the list expansion, TikTok is rolling out its in-store #BookTok bestseller sticker program to the UK, Italy, and Spain, giving approved titles a physical retail signal tied to their performance on the platform.

eBay is beta-testing a new Promoted Listings Priority feature that lets sellers showcase short videos of their items in select ad placements across the site, with the initial rollout starting in Australia. Sellers can use existing listing videos or add new ones between 5 and 60 seconds long, with videos auto-playing in eligible placements and falling back to static images where video isn't supported, all under the same cost-per-click pricing model as standard Priority ads. eBay is also introducing new video-specific metrics like view rates and video competition rates, which will be available alongside existing campaign analytics in the advertiser dashboard. 

Saks Global unlocked an additional $300M tranche of its $1.75B bankruptcy financing package after an ad hoc group of bondholders approved the retailer's five-year business plan, completing what the company calls its pre-emergence financing. Saks filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January with $3.4B in debt, has since closed 20 of its 33 Saks Fifth Avenue stores, and said it needed the funds to repair vendor relationships and buy time to renegotiate its debt. No disrespect to Saks Global, but if I were a vendor owed millions of dollars, and I received this lifeline payment, it wouldn't “repair” the relationship, it would officially “end” the relationship. There's very little chance I would keep selling Saks product without payment upfront. No siree, Bob. I question whether Saks even has enough stores left to satisfy revenue expectations to ever get out of debt. It certainly couldn't make it work with 33 stores and now it's got a third less. A plan of reorganization is expected to be filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas within the next several weeks.

Meta is replacing its “Sponsored” ad label with a smaller “Ad” tag on Instagram and Facebook, framing the change as delivering a “cleaner, simpler experience” while maintaining ad transparency, though some would argue that the smaller labels could make make it more difficult for users to identify sponsored content as they scroll, which very well could be the point. The update is fully live on Instagram and being tested at small scale on Facebook, with no timetable announced for a full rollout. Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today notes that the change is likely to draw scrutiny from EU regulators, who have been increasingly aggressive about ad transparency requirements. Objectively, I think the new “Ad” label is fine. It's in the same place as the “Sponsored” label previously was, and you could argue that it's quicker to read and therefore easier to recognize promoted content than the longer label.

Meta is removing end-to-end encryption from Instagram direct messages effective May 8, reversing a feature it introduced just two years ago and restoring the platform's ability to scan message content for automated moderation and law enforcement compliance. The U.S. government's new Take It Down Act, which requires platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery including AI-generated deepfakes within 48 hours of a request, takes effect May 19, just eleven days after the encryption cutoff, which is likely related to both the decision and its timing. WhatsApp, on the other hand, will remain encrypted, according to Meta. Meanwhile, TikTok confirmed that it never offered end-to-end encryption at all, claiming the absence of private messaging is a deliberate safety feature that makes the platform less attractive to bad actors running scams or sharing illegal material.

Some of China's biggest retail companies like Shein, Temu, and TikTok spent years downplaying their origins to sidestep Western scrutiny through an approach known as “China shedding,” but now the global attitude towards Chinese-made apps and products has shifted, and the practice is coming to an end. Bloomberg reports that concern over TikTok's future drove many young Americans to check out RedNote and other Chinese apps, leading to a trend called “Chinamaxxing” in which influencers drink hot water, use chopsticks, or engage in other ways of “becoming Chinese.” On top of that, Shein founder Xu Yangtian made his first-ever public appearance in China last month to thank local government and suppliers, which led many to believe that the company was officially abandoning its prior strategy of presenting itself as a Singapore-based retailer. Just wait until Americans discover Chinese cars!

In lawsuits this week…

• Google has been hit with four class-action lawsuits accusing it of sharing user data with Chinese-affiliate entities including a ByteDance affiliate and PDD Holdings, which owns Temu, in violation of the Justice Department's Bulk Sensitive Data rule. The suits allege Google tracks users across browsers and devices to create digital identifiers linked to IP addresses that are shared with advertisers without meaningful consent. Similar lawsuits against Microsoft and Lenovo are pending.
• Depop is facing a California federal class action lawsuit alleging its mandatory marketplace fee, disclosed only at checkout rather than in the advertised item price, violates the state's Honest Pricing Law, which has banned drip pricing since July 2024. Depop's response deadline is set for April 27th, which means any resolution will likely come after the eBay acquisition closes in Q2 2026. Screenshots show that the marketplace recently changed its website to comply with the law, but the changes aren't reflected for all users.
• Elon Musk was found liable by a California jury for misleading Twitter shareholders during his $44B acquisition of the company in 2022. The jury found that Musk's tweet claiming the deal was “temporarily on hold” was harmful and misleading, resulting in Twitter's shares sliding almost 10% in a session. The verdict could cost Musk up to $2.6B in damages, though he plans to appeal. To be fair to Musk, he greatly overpaid for Twitter at a time in which the entire tech sector, including Meta, was in free fall. Twitter holders definitely walked away in 2022 with more than they would have if they had attempted to sell their shares on the open market — none of which means Musk isn't guilty of attempting to mislead them — but an interesting footnote nonetheless.
• In other Elon Musk lawsuit news… The billionaire says that if wins his case against OpenAI, he will give away any financial proceeds to charity. Musk's suit argues that OpenAI strayed from its original purpose of building AGI safely and for the broader good of society and that the company's transition into a capped-profit structure and its ties with Microsoft go against the founding vision. He is seeking damages ranging from $79B to $134B. 
• Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging the company scraped nearly 100,000 copyrighted online articles to train its large language models without permission, and further violates copyright law when generating outputs containing “verbatim reproductions” of their content. The lawsuit says that “ChatGPT starves web publishers of revenue by generating responses to users' queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers,” and that ChatGPT's hallucinations jeopardize “the public's continued access to high-quality and trustworthy online information.”
• Whatnot is facing 15 arbitration claims alleging the live selling platform is operating an illegal gambling operation through its trading card “breaking” practice, where users pay for a random chance at valuable cards pulled from packs on livestream. The complaints allege that Whatnot lacks fraud prevention, spending limits, or addiction safeguards that regulated gambling operations are required to provide and that the platform has repeatedly failed to permanently ban sellers caught manipulating breaks, prioritizing revenue over consumer protection.
• Meta is seeking to overturn a ruling that would have forced it to face a class-action lawsuit over the company failing to remove fraudulent ads from Facebook, including a scam that duped an Oregon man out of $49 for a car-engine kit that never arrived. The case centers around whether Meta's terms of service and community standards, which promise to remove fraudulent content, constitute a legally enforceable contract obligation, or just a pinky promise to give an A for effort. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear Meta's appeal, the outcome of which will ultimately decide whether users can sue the company for allowing scam ads on its platforms.
• Music rights management company BMG is suing Anthropic for using lyrics from artists including Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, and the Rolling Stones to train its Claude chatbot without authorization. The suit also claims that Anthropic did not respond to a cease-and-desist letter sent in December 2025 or engage in licensing discussions. BMG wrote, “Generations of inventors have brought revolutionary new products to market while complying with copyright law. Anthropic’s rapid development of its new technology is no excuse for its egregious law-breaking.” Fair point, BMG.

In corporate shakeups this week…

• Josh D'Amaro officially became Disney's CEO, taking over from Bob Iger, who will remain on the board until his scheduled retirement at the end of the year.
• Flipkart CFO Sriram Venkataraman, who has been with the company since 2015, is stepping down, with marketplace unit CFO Ravi Iyer taking over the role on an interim basis during the transition.
• Roblox appointed Dennis Durkin, former CFO and President of Emerging Businesses at Activision Blizzard, to its board of directors as an independent director.
• Ledger hired John Andrews, a former Circle executive who led that company's IPO process, as its new CFO to help take the company public.
• Pattern appointed David Jennison, a European e-commerce veteran with prior experience at Amazon, as Managing Director for Europe to help the company expand in the region. 
• Lululemon named former Levi's CEO Chip Bergh to its board and appointed him to serve as interim co-CEO as the company continues its search for a full time replacement.
• Klarna lost its head of investor relations, Andrea Ferraz Estrada, and global head of litigation, D. Andrew Pietro, among several other senior departures, as the company navigates a turbulent period that has seen its shares fall 66% since its IPO.
• Google's DeepMind unit hired Jasjeet Sekhon, former chief scientist and head of AI at Bridgewater Associates, as its chief strategy officer.
• Bryan McCann, co-founder and CTO of You.com, left the company to join Anthropic as a member of technical staff.
• Alibaba formed a new business unit called Alibaba Token Hub, led by CEO Eddie Wu, to consolidate all of its AI operations.
• OpenAI reorganized its Stargate computing initiative under former Intel executive Sachin Katti.
• Wonder hired former Wordpay CFO, Gabrielle Scheibe Rabinovitch, to serve as its new CFO and help the company prepare for an IPO.

That's a lot of corporate turnover! Something's in the air..

In layoff news this week…

• Block rehired at least four employees across engineering, recruiting, and creative roles following its February layoffs, which cut roughly 40% of staff.
• TikTok's global head of consumer marketing, Zuber Mohammed, is no longer with the company, as part of a new round of cuts to its global marketing organization.
• Crypto.com is laying off roughly 180 employees, or around 12% of its workforce, as the crypto exchange integrates AI across its business.
• Ingka Group, which owns and operates most IKEA outlets worldwide, is eliminating 800 office-based roles across its Group Functions, primarily at its Swedish offices and Netherlands headquarters.
• OpenAI is planning to double its workforce to 8,000 from 4,500 by the end of 2026, deploying most of the new hires across product development, engineering, research, and sales, according to a Financial Times report.
• Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent letters to executives at Microsoft, Amazon, Home Depot, Meta, Nike, Verizon, Target, and UPS, asking why they're laying off workers despite tax perks. Warren asked the companies to detail by March 30 how much of a tax cut they received in 2025 following President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, whether they anticipated any tariff refunds, and whether they made any contributions to Trump's projects.

OpenAI applications chief Fidji Simo told staff in a meeting last week that the company needed to refocus on business customers and cut back on side quests that were becoming a distraction — referring to the company's consumer-focused products. The comments, which echoed a similar “code red” declaration that Sam Altman made at the end of last year around ChatGPT growth, came the same day OpenAI announced it was exploring a joint venture with private equity firms to sell its technology to businesses, following a report that Anthropic was pursuing a similar joint venture with Blackstone and other PE firms.

In other OpenAI news… The company is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, Codex coding platform, and browser into a single desktop superapp, with President Greg Brockman temporarily overseeing the product revamp. OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, also suggested that the company would be ending its unlimited subscriptions at some point in the future. Turley told Altimeter Partner Apoorv Agrawal on the Bg2 Pod, “There's no world in which pricing doesn't significantly evolve when the technology is changing this quickly.” On one hand, it's great that OpenAI is becoming more financially responsible. On the other hand, it feels like they've gone from a market leading innovator to playing catch up to Anthropic, Google, and Amazon across every industry they serve.

Microsoft publicly warned OpenAI that its planned product with Amazon Web Services, a stateful runtime environment that lets AWS customers build AI tools using OpenAI models, will violate OpenAI's contractual obligation to run models exclusively on Microsoft's Azure cloud. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company is “confident that OpenAI understands and respects the importance of living up to its legal obligations.” OpenAI and AWS argue that the product sidesteps Microsoft's exclusive hosting rights by offering custom AI application development tools rather than directly selling model APIs, but Microsoft executives are unconvinced the distinction holds up contractually. We very well might see a legal square-off between the two companies soon!

The World Trade Organization's 28-year-old moratorium on customs duties for electronic transmissions is set to expire on March 31, just days after the organization's March 26-29 ministerial conference where member nations will debate whether to extend it. Developed countries generally favor continuing the moratorium, arguing it has enabled digital trade to flourish, while developing nations including India, South Africa, and Indonesia argue they should have the right to tax digital trade to fund domestic infrastructure and reduce inequality. General indications suggest the moratorium will likely be extended again, though the debate over whether it should be permanent, temporary, or scrapped entirely is expected to drag on for years.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing “serious concerns” about the reported $10B payment to the Treasury as part of the TikTok deal. Warner wrote, “This arrangement, if true, would continue a pattern set by the Trump administration of exercising the power and authority of the government to benefit certain companies and individuals close to the president, and to extract financial concessions as a condition of doing so.” The letter went on to request detailed documentation from the Treasury Department addressing the legal authority for approving the sale, the basis for requesting $10B, how the amount was determined, any involvement of President Trump, and the intended use of the funds “given the Anti-Deficiency Act's prohibition on spending non-appropriated funds.” Last week I noted that the “broker fee” represents a more than 70% commission on top of the total deal value, which Warner also highlighted in his letter.

The U.S. Justice Department charged three Super Micro Computer employees, including co-founder and board member Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, with illegally shipping at least $2.5B worth of advanced AI servers to China in violation of U.S. export controls. Prosecutors say the defendants installed thousands of hollow, non-functioning server replicas at warehouses to deceive compliance teams while actual chips were already en route to China, and used dryers to remove identifying labels from machines. Supermicro said the alleged conduct contradicts company policy and that it has been fully cooperating with the government's investigation. Dude, what were they thinking?

Tencent President Martin Lau confirmed at the company's annual earnings press conference that it is building an AI agent within WeChat capable of handling practical daily tasks by drawing on the app's ecosystems of miniprograms, content, social interaction, and payments, following reports that circulated last week. Lau said the company also plans to at least double its AI product investment this year from the 18 billion yuan ($2.6B) it spent in 2024, though he did not provide a specific timeline for the WeChat agent's launch. The announcement came alongside strong quarterly results, with Tencent reporting Q4 revenue up 13% to 194.4 billion yuan and net profit up 18% to 66.7 billion yuan year over year.

🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy briefly published an interactive chart showing which jobs are most likely to get displaced by AI, but then took it down after backlash ensued. Karpathy created the chart by using AI to analyze Bureau of Labor Statistics data, rating jobs on a scale of zero to ten, where zero is safe from AI, and 10 is most exposed. He found that white-collar jobs like accountants, software developers, and customer service reps face the highest risk while trades like electricians, bartenders, and construction workers are largely in the clear. He later pulled the chart down after saying it was “wildly misinterpreted” and that AI exposure scores have “no bearing on what actually happens to these occupations.” You can still see an archived version of the chart here.

10. Seed rounds, IPOs, & acquisitions

Amazon acquired Rivr, a Swiss robotics company formerly known as Swiss-Mile that develops four-legged wheeled robots designed to carry packages from delivery vehicles to customer doorsteps, for an undisclosed amount. Amazon plans to use Rivr's technology to research and field test how robots can be integrated alongside human delivery associates in the last steps of the delivery process, with real-world testing and contractor feedback informing how the company scales the technology. Amazon had previously invested in Rivr through its $1B Industrial Innovation Fund and participated in Rivr's $22M seed round last March via Bezos Expeditions, and now has more than one million robots deployed across its operations network. Check out the video on Rivr's homepage of its robots in action — really cool!

OpenAI acquired Astral, a startup behind widely used open-source Python developer tools uv, Ruff, and ty, for an undisclosed amount. The Astral team will join OpenAI's Codex platform, which has seen 3x user growth and 5x usage increase since the start of 2026 and now has over 2 million weekly active users, as OpenAI pushes to evolve Codex beyond code generation into a full development workflow collaborator. The deal follows Anthropic's December 2025 acquisition of JavaScript runtime Bun, as both companies race to build the most integrated AI-native development environment.

Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter-clone co-founded by Jack Dorsey, raised $100M in a Series B round led by Bain Capital Crypto, bringing its total amount raised to $123M. The round actually closed in April 2025 but has not been disclosed until now. The news was shared the week after Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced she was stepping down from the lead role and transitioning to become chief innovation officer. Since its Series A in 2024, Bluesky has grown from 13M to over 43M global users, with its AT Protocol now powering an ecosystem of over a thousand third-party apps.

Oasis Security, a cybersecurity startup that helps enterprises manage and secure non-human identities such as AI agents, bots, and service accounts, which now outnumber human users 82 to 1 across enterprise environments, raised $120M in a Series B led by Craft Ventures, bringing its total raised to $195M. The company's platform aims to solve a growing problem where traditional identity security systems were built for humans but enterprises now have thousands of AI agents and bots operating autonomously with their own credentials and access permissions. Oasis tracks those identities, enforces least-privilege access, and shuts down risky behavior before it becomes a breach. The company reported 5x growth in annual recurring revenue year-over-year, with most of its client base coming from Fortune 500 companies on multi-year agreements.

Microsoft acqui-hired the entire team behind Cove, a Sequoia-backed AI collaboration startup that built an infinite whiteboard where AI could generate cards, tables, and lists, with the product shutting down on April 1 and all user data to be deleted. Cove was founded in late 2023 by three former Google Maps veterans and raised $6M in seed funding from Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, and others before the acquihire. Microsoft did not detail how it plans to integrate Cove's technology, though the company said the ideas behind Cove “will live on” within Microsoft, which already added Copilot to its own Whiteboard collaboration product in 2023.

ByteDance agreed to sell Moonton, a Shanghai-based video game developer that it acquired in 2021, to Savvy Games Group, a Saudi Arabian gaming conglomerate, in a deal that values the company at more than $6B. The sale comes as ByteDance shifts focus toward its AI business, including developing proprietary chips and releasing large language models. Savvy CEO Brian Ward said the acquisition will strengthen the firm's position in mobile games and expand its global esports footprint.

Sequen, a startup that brings TikTok-style real-time personalization and ranking technology to Fortune 500 consumer companies via API, raised $16M in a Series A round co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures, bringing its total amount raised to $22M. The company's platform learns from live in-session user behavior like hovers, scrolls, and conversations in under 20 milliseconds to personalize the experience for visitors without relying on cookies or stored user identities. Sequen was founded by former Etsy executive Zoë Weil, who drove a billion-dollar GMV increase in a single year by overhauling Etsy's AI ranking systems, and its 14-person team includes alumni from DeepMind, Meta, and Anthropic.

Assiduus Global, an AI-powered cross-border e-commerce accelerator that helps D2C brands launch and scale across global marketplaces, raised $25M in a Pre-Series B round led by Bajaj Finserv. The company currently supports 150+ enterprise brands across 20+ countries and 18+ marketplaces, and claims to be the third-largest technology-led e-commerce distribution and supply chain platform globally. Assiduus Global has remained profitable for seven consecutive years while quadrupling revenue since its last funding round, and plans to use the new funds for AI and data capability expansion and geographic growth across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

Jeff Bezos is in early talks with major asset managers and sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Singapore to raise $100B for a fund that would buy companies in sectors like chipmaking, defense, and aerospace, and then use AI to accelerate their automation. The fund, described in investor documents as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” would rival SoftBank's $100B Vision Fund in size, with Bezos planning to deploy technology from Project Prometheus, an AI startup where he serves as co-CEO, to boost the efficiency and profitability of acquired businesses. JPMorgan Chase is also in preliminary talks to back the project through its newly formed $10B Security and Resiliency Initiative, and Project Prometheus is separately raising up to $6B in additional funding.

Uber plans to invest up to $1.25B in Rivian as part of a deal to deploy up to 50,000 autonomous versions of Rivian's upcoming R2 EV through its platform in 25 cities across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. An initial $300M investment is expected shortly after signing, with four additional tranches tied to milestones through 2031. The deal adds to Rivian's growing roster of major partnerships, following its $5.8B software deal with Volkswagen in 2024 and Amazon's ongoing commercial delivery van relationship with the company, while adding to Uber's list of robotaxi partnerships that also includes Lucid, Zoox, Stellantis, and Nvidia.

IBM completed its $11B acquisition of Confluent, a data streaming platform used by more than 40% of the Fortune 500 companies, paying $31 per share in cash. IBM plans on integrating Confluent's technology, positioning the combined platform as the data foundation enterprises will need to move from AI experimentation to production deployment at scale. The acquisition makes IBM a more formidable competitor in the enterprise AI infrastructure race, giving it a real-time data streaming layer to complement its existing watsonx AI platform and challenge rivals like Microsoft and Google who have built similar capabilities.

RunSybil, an AI cybersecurity startup whose autonomous agent continuously hacks live applications to find and document real security vulnerabilities without human involvement, raised $40M in a round led by Khosla Ventures. The company's approach is different from other AI security tools, such as Claude Code Security, which analyzes source code in applications for known vulnerabilities before it is deployed. RunSybil was co-founded by Ari Herbert-Voss, who served as OpenAI's first security research hire, and Vlad Ionescu, who previously led offensive security red teams at Meta.

Nebius Group, an AI cloud infrastructure company spun out of Russia's Yandex in 2024, announced plans to raise approximately $3.75B in convertible debt through two senior notes due in 2031 and 2033, with proceeds earmarked for data center expansion and custom chip purchases. The raise follows a $27B compute deal with Meta announced Monday and last week's $2B strategic investment from Nvidia and gives Nebius a significant capital runway to compete in the crowded AI data center market alongside CoreWeave and others.

Mastercard announced plans to acquire BVNK, a stablecoin payments infrastructure platform that bridges fiat currency and digital tokens across more than 130 countries, for up to $1.8B including $300M in contingent payments. The deal will enable Mastercard users to carry out cross-border remittances, business payments, and payouts with stablecoin, which can be faster and cheaper than transferring fiat. Mastercard's chief product officer, Jorn Lambert, said, “BVNK has spent the last seven years building not just the technology, but also obtaining licenses in multiple geographies,” which will enable the company to “get to market much faster.”

Choice, a Prague-based all-in-one SaaS and QR ordering platform for restaurants, raised $7.1M in a Series A round led by Alea Capital Partners, bringing its total amount raised to $11.6M. The company began as a platform that enables restaurants to communicate with customers online and has since evolved into an operating system for restaurants that offers a website builder, takeaway and delivery ordering, QR menus and payments, reservation management, and loyalty programs. Choice currently serves more than 30,000 registered restaurants across nine European markets and generates over 1.5M monthly orders, representing €35M in monthly GMV. 

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Paul E. Drecksler
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PS: Why did the puppy need to lose weight? It was a little husky.