Paul Drecksler is the founder and editor of Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter, covering the most important stories in e-commerce since 2021.
AI shopping agents recommended Brooks in 67% of answers to 40 questions about running shoes priced below $150, according to a test by Recommended by Agents, an agency that sells AI-agent readiness services to online stores. Across the 200 answers from ChatGPT, Gemini,...
Shopify App Store app counts are growing about 28% a year while the number of Shopify stores grows 10% to 14%, leaving 8.8 apps per 1,000 stores compared with 5.5 in July 2023, according to research from Barn2 founder Katie Keith. Keith also modeled the earnings of...
ChatGPT referred only 0.62% as many visits as Google organic search across 100 websites, according to SEO consultant Marie Haynes, who analyzed a year of GA4 data covering more than 145 million sessions. Counting every AI chatbot raised that to 0.73% of Google’s...
President Trump told a rally at Clemson University on Tuesday that he called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to ask whether Google Maps could rename the Atlantic Ocean, and that Pichai turned him down this time, saying oceans border too many countries. Trump said he’ll now...
Affirm signed a multi-year deal to be Sam’s Club’s exclusive pay-over-time option, launching on SamsClub.com within weeks and expanding to physical clubs in 2027. Shoppers get an eligibility check for each purchase at checkout and, if approved, pick a monthly plan...
Amazon renamed Kindle Unlimited as Kindle+ and added audiobooks to the $12-a-month subscription in the US, including AI-narrated versions of self-published books. Any ebook enrolled in KDP Select now automatically gets an audiobook in both Kindle+ and Audible Plus,...
Meta’s São Paulo office drew hundreds of protesters on Monday, some wearing Mark Zuckerberg masks and carrying a “Meta, don’t interfere” banner, over claims the company is favoring Flávio Bolsonaro over President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva before Brazil’s October 25...
OpenAI’s system for watching what its own AI agents do internally could be evaded in six ways, including an exploit that would let an agent keep hundreds of its recent actions out of the monitor’s view, according to a joint report from safety groups METR and Redwood...
Meta’s revised business terms, which kick in October 30, make advertisers “solely responsible” for anything its AI tools generate or alter in their ads, even when Meta switched the tool on, according to Trishla Ostwal at Adweek. Until now, advertisers carried that...
Uber is giving all of its more than 30,000 employees OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work, an agent inside ChatGPT Enterprise that handles multi-step jobs, after testing it with 1,000 staff. The agent can pull from Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Slack to research...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a Stanford audience that mathematicians moved from panic to acceptance within days of OpenAI’s math results, first telling grad students to switch majors and then deciding AI could give them a “different but hopefully better” career. But...
Reservoir sued Suno and Anthropic in separate federal lawsuits on Wednesday, alleging each company copied its songs without permission to train AI that generates new music. The independent publisher’s complaints cite tracks including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,”...
Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI each spent more on federal lobbying from July through September than in any previous quarter, with Nvidia at $2.2 million, Anthropic at $2.1 million, and OpenAI at $1.5 million, according to federal disclosures reviewed by Lauren Feiner...
DeepSeek closed a funding round of about 100 billion yuan ($15 billion), one of the biggest ever for a Chinese company, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the deal. DeepSeek first sought 50 billion yuan and lifted its target to 80 billion yuan...
Google is facing a backlash in Finland after clearing an estimated 250,000 trees near Muhos for a data center without the environmental impact assessments the law requires, according to Miranda Bryant at The Guardian. Finland’s environmental regulator ordered work...
Anthropic appointed Harvard astrophysicist Christopher Stubbs, a former Harvard dean of science known for evidence that cosmic expansion is speeding up, to its Long-Term Benefit Trust. Through special shares that carry no economic stake, the trust picks an increasing...
Aftersell said an automated attack that started October 7 exposed upsell configuration data, such as discount settings, from 22 Shopify stores, according to a LinkedIn post from CEO Dhruv Patel. Patel denied speculation that Aftersell was part of this month’s checkout...
Amazon gained share of US food sales this year through late August while traditional grocery stores lost share, according to NielsenIQ data reported by Alex Bitter at Business Insider. Amazon’s sales of perishables like seafood, dairy, and produce grew severalfold...
