Hi Shopifreaks
Before we begin, I’d like to welcome Napster to the Shopifreaks family as our newest official News Partner! 🎉🥳
Yes — that Napster. Earlier this year, the iconic brand from my Millennial past came back with an entirely new mission for e-commerce merchants – to build the next generation of shopping with conversational AI technology.
And it’s really cool! You’re definitely going to want to check this out because this is as cutting edge as it gets in our industry right now when it comes to intermixing AI with commerce.
Their new offering, Napster Spaces, turns any Shopify store into an interactive shopping experience powered by an AI sales expert who can guide shoppers, answer questions, and provide personalized recommendations in real time as the shopper speaks to them.
✨ Want to see Napster Spaces in action?
Click here to enter your Shopify store URL and instantly transform your shop into a Napster Space with just one click.
Or check out their newly launched Holiday Gift Guide — a virtual shopping experience created using Napster Spaces, featuring interactive storefronts for 67 standout Shopify brands, each featuring its own AI sales expert. It’s a first look at the new “smart web” that Napster is building, and a preview of what any merchant can deploy on their own site.
In addition to its Spaces product, Napster is developing a full ecosystem of agentic AI tools, designed to transform how people shop, work, communicate, and explore online.
Here’s what else the newly relaunched Napster offers:
The Napster App (B2C) – A new world of AI experts trained across every domain imaginable. Whether you need a coach, collaborator, analyst, or creative partner, The Napster App generates intelligent companions on the fly, each one capable of deep context, memory, and adaptation.
Napster View – A holographic-style, second-screen device that sits above your laptop and brings your AI companions to life. Imagine an ongoing face-to-face video chat with your AI companion in real time.
Twenty-six years ago, Napster democratized music. Now they're democratizing access to AI expertise.
Visit Napster.ai today to discover the measurable impact across sales, engagement, and customer loyalty that brands are achieving through their investments in Napster's immersive technologies.
And now onto your regularly scheduled programming…
In this week's edition I cover:
- Shopify's Cyber Monday admin outage
- Google bringing AI Mode closer to search
- Final BFCM sales numbers
- OpenAI's “code red” over Google
- Amazon's fallout with USPS
- Amazon delivery partners organize for better terms
- Amazon's new 30 minute delivery
- U.S. school districts overpaying with Amazon Business
- Canada Post workers end rotating strikes
- X was fined €120M by the European Commission
- Shopify overhauls its compensation model
- ChatGPT users report seeing ads
All this and more in this week's 255th Edition of Shopifreaks. Thanks for subscribing and sharing!
PS: Congrats to Bridger and Carson Hart, founders of Infinite Color Search, for being included in the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 List! A well-deserved recognition for one of the industry's most innovative and promising startups. If you missed their 90 Second Pitch a few weeks ago, check it out on LinkedIn and YouTube.
Stat of the Week
“0” the number of apologies Shopify or its leadership have issued over the Cyber Monday admin outage.
1. Shopify went down on the biggest sales day of the year
Shopify experienced a major backend outage on Cyber Monday, leaving merchants unable to login to their admins, edit themes, add products, launch discounts, fulfill orders, send e-mails, or any other of the many things you do from the Shopify admin. Not the greatest timing for an outage on the busiest shopping day of the year!
The issues began surfacing around 9am EST when merchants reported difficulties logging into their Shopify accounts and POS systems, preventing them from processing transactions, and continued until around 3:30pm.
What caused the outage?
Filippos Dematis of dev commerce explained it well in a LinkedIn post, but in a nutshell, the outage was caused by a bug in Shopify's identity authentication system that caused encryption keys to fall out of sync across servers, making valid login sessions fail. The issue had been masked for several months by constant code deployments, but surfaced when Shopify paused updates for BFCM and the broken sync logic was finally exposed.
Here's what pissed me off about this whole situation….
Where was Shopify's communication about the outage all day while it was happening? And during the days that followed?
- No posts on their primary X or LinkedIn accounts.
- Nothing from Tobi or Harley, other than posts pumping up Cyber Monday.
- No email communication to store admins.
Everyone was kept in the dark about the backend outages throughout the entire Cyber Monday and had to hear about it through social media. I feel that this issue deserved open, transparent, and ongoing public communication throughout the day from Shopify and its leadership.
The only X post Shopify made about the outage was via their less followed @ShopifySupport account:
“We're aware of an issue with Admins impacting selected stores, and are working to resolve it. For the most up-to-date information, please refer to our status page at http://shopifystatus.com. Thank you for your patience.”
Tobi barely mentioned it in a reply to a post celebrating BFCM numbers:
“We had some issues that meant that the admin interfaces were unreachable for merchants for a while, but online stores were up and selling throughout the BFCM weekend. You kept going, kept selling, and hit a record this weekend. Thank you and well done.”
Lastly, Shopify posted an incident report that you had to be logged into your Shopify account (how ironic) to read.
Where's the apology?
I've poured through social media posts from Shopify accounts and its leadership, read dozens of articles about the outage in search of a statement from Shopify, and basically scoured the web for the words “apologize” or “sorry” to no avail.
It feels like Shopify has been trying to sweep the outage under the rug so that it can focus on its big BFCM sales numbers, but frankly, the less Shopify has talked about it, the more it's made me want to talk about it! Their silence over the matter has been deafening.
I'm incredibly disappointed in how Shopify handled this outage, and I don't feel that I'm overreacting.
And to clarify, I'm not talking about their engineers. To you folks — great job identifying and resolving the issue as quickly as possible.
I'm specifically talking about Shopify's leadership. Where's the recognition, accountability, and well-deserved apology?
Their response to this outage, not the outage itself, has caused me to lose some respect for Shopify, as well as lose confidence in how they will communicate and handle similar scenarios in the future — of which there will inevitable be.
Merchants, partners, agencies, and everyone else in the Shopify ecosystem deserve a sincere and public apology from leadership regarding the outage, along with clear steps communicated about how Shopify will prevent it from happening in the future. Otherwise, you're no better than the rest of them.
2. Google brings AI Mode closer to mobile search
Google began testing a new feature that merges its AI Overviews with AI Mode in mobile search, enabling users to go deeper into a topic by asking follow-up questions to its chatbot.
Google launched AI Mode to U.S. users this past May and to global users in August, allowing conversational chats with its Gemini AI, however the starting point for the experience has so far been completely separate. In other words, you had to choose ahead of time whether you wanted to perform a traditional Google search or ask your question in AI Mode.
Whereas now, the AI Overview that you've grown accustomed to seeing above traditional results begins the conversation, and then the user can click “Show More” to expand it and follow-up with questions like they would in AI Mode.
AI Overviews have effectively become the gateway into AI Mode. First one's free. Just take one hit, everyone's doing it.
Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, said:
“This brings us closer to our vision for Search: just ask whatever’s on your mind – no matter how long or complex – and find exactly what you need. You shouldn’t have to think about where or how to ask your question.”
Seems like an obvious move, right? I guess I've always assumed that Gemini would eventually take over the traditional search experience, given how AI chatbots have shaped our searching habits. However the backlash has been swift and expected.
X users responded to Stein's post with:
- Not an inline link to source in sight, just a bunch of crap we all know consumers will never click and a lot of content stolen from them.
- Where did the publishers whose content you’ve scraped without consent to realize this “vision” factor in?
- And when all the websites from which you “borrow” the answers die due to lack of traffic, what will you do? Can anyone at Google comprehend unintended consequences?
- What’s the difference between that and stealing someone’s content? And then you serve their content with your ads. Disgusting
- Nothing like completely false AI hallucinations in the place of what was a solid product. Great job
- Just stealing the value from all the sites you pull info from. This sucks
- “You shouldn’t have to think about where or how to ask your question.” Fantastic. No more “considering the source.” No thanks. Take your “Ministry of Truth” bullshit plagiarism machine elsewhere. Just give me the links.
It's interesting how much more critical users can be of Google's AI search results versus ChatGPT or other AI chatbots. I'd imagine it has to do with the longstanding symbiotic relationship Google has had with publishers, and the expectations we've built for Google to be good stewards of our content.
It's a tough spot to be in for Google, with only two options:
- Embrace AI and take the heat that comes with it
- Let ChatGPT and Perplexity have all the fun and take its search market share
One thing is for sure… there's a reckoning coming. Information is power (and money), and that information is about to get paywalled and AI-gated like never before on the Internet. AI companies are creating an unsustainable environment for publishers, and the best ones aren't going to continue writing for the LLMs for free.
The beginning of Google's transition from legacy search results to AI results marks the end of the Wild West days of AI, the end of Google's established relationship with publishers, and the end of traditional publisher business models online. Get ready!
3. How'd we do on BFCM? The numbers are in…
We did it! We made it through another year of Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. And like I always tell my daughter Mia, “The best part is, we did it together!”
Here's a roundup of sales numbers and other BFCM metrics published across the web:
- Cyber Monday sales in the U.S. increased 7.1% YoY, reaching $14.25B, according to Adobe.
- BNPL drove $1.03B in online spend, a 4.2% YoY increase on Cyber Monday. Adobe estimates that BNPL will facilitate $20.2B worth of payments over the course of the Nov. 1-Dec. 31 holiday shopping season, an 11% YoY increase.
- Shopify merchants generated $14.6B in total ales on BFCM weekend, a 27% YoY increase. More than 81M customers purchased from Shopify merchants.
- commercetools merchants sold $4.5B in GMV during Cyber Week, marking a 48% YoY increase.
- My favorite line from the commercetools press release was, “The core commercetools platform delivered 100% uptime across Cyber Week, extending a year-over-year proven track record of supporting uninterrupted shopping during the highest-stakes moments of the year.”
- TikTok Shop said it crossed $500M in U.S. sales over the four-day BFCM period.
- ChatGPT referrals to retail mobile apps increased 28% YoY from Black Friday through Sunday. Amazon’s share of ChatGPT referrals grew from 40.5% in 2024 to 54% in 2025, and Walmart’s share increased from 2.7% to 14.9%.
- U.S. online sales for Cyber Week grew to $79.6B, up 5% YoY, according to data from Salesforce, and up 7.7% according to Adobe.
- 129.5M consumers shopped in person over the five-day period, up 3% from 2024, according to the National Retail Federation.
More importantly than collective numbers that grow bigger every year… How was your Cyber Week? Merchants, did you hit your numbers? Shoppers, did you find good deals? Hit reply and let me know.
4. OpenAI declares “code red” over increased AI competition
Sam Altman told OpenAI employees last Monday that he was declaring a “code red” to improve ChatGPT and ward off threats from Google and other AI competitors, according to an internal memo viewed by The Information.
As a result, the company plans to delay progress with certain products including AI agents, which automate shopping and health tasks, Pulse, which generates personalized reports for users to read each morning, and advertising, which it has yet to publicly admit that it's working on.
Altman didn't specifically mention what he felt was wrong with ChatGPT, but he didn't really have to. We all use it, and we know.
He simply said that, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT” and directed more employees to focus on personalizing the chatbot for the 800M people who use it and letting each of those people customize the way it interacts with them.
Other priorities include:
- Improving Imagegen, its image generation tool
- Improving “model behavior” so that people prefer interacting with ChatGPT over other models.
- Boosting ChatGPT's speed and reliability
- Minimizing “overrefusals”, which is when ChatGPT refuses to answer a question or perform a task
OpenAI was originally planning to launch GPT-5.2 later in December, but The Verge reports that pressure from competitors has moved the release forward, which is now earmarked for Dec 9th.
Robert Cyran summed up the situation nicely in a Reuters commentary piece:
“OpenAI clearly would benefit from greater focus… OpenAI is trying to do too much at once with technology that still requires a great deal of development and funding… The only thing bigger than the company’s attention deficit is its appetite for capital.”
5. Amazon may drop USPS and expand its own delivery network
Amazon is preparing to expand its nationwide delivery network and give up its longstanding relationship with USPS, according to The Washington Post sources.
Amazon has recently been in talks with the Postal Service over its negotiated service agreement, hoping to come to a new agreement that would have locked in better rates and set higher benchmarks for package volume, but the talks have stalled.
USPS instead plans to hold a reverse auction next year to make Amazon and other business customers compete for postal capacity — a move that is making Amazon want to pull all of its packages entirely. For reference, Amazon is the Postal Service's top customer, providing more than $6B in annual revenue in 2025 alone, or about 7.5% of its total revenue, so that'd be a big loss! Especially given the fact that even with that contract revenue from Amazon, USPS still posted a $9B loss in the 2025 fiscal year.
Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly in a statement called the Postal Service a “long-standing and trusted partner” and said the company remained committed to working with the agency, but that Amazon was “surprised to hear” that the Postal Service wanted to run an auction after nearly a year of negotiations.
Kelly added, “Given the change of direction and the uncertainty it adds to our delivery network, we’re evaluating all of our options that would ensure we can continue to deliver for our customers.”
Is the USPS really in the best position to make their top customers bid for their services?
USPS has posted multi-billion dollar losses in 9 of the past 10 years and has faced threats of privatization and de-funding from President Trump since taking office. Then again, it obviously can't keep operating in the same capacity, so perhaps the shakeup will prove to be fruitful in the long run.
6. Amazon delivery partners organize in secret to push for better terms
Hypothetically, even if Amazon decides to completely part ways with USPS and expand its own delivery network, it might not be all sunny skies doing so.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is facing a new labor challenge from its Delivery Service Partners, who are aiming for Amazon to increase pay for package deliveries and reimbursement for van usage, and loosen the criteria for bonus payouts.
The initiative is being spearheaded by a group calling itself “DSPs for Equitable and Fair Treatment” (DEFT), which went public on Black Friday in an attempt to organize Amazon's roughly 2,400 delivery service partners to fight for better terms.
The founders haven't yet revealed their identities, but the group has apparently been in the works since this summer, around the time when delivery-fleet owners started receiving surprise bills for van repairs. Backlash by owners on Amazon's internal forums, partly organized in Signal chats, led to Amazon reversing the fees, but ultimately inspired DEFT's founders to create a formal organization as a chapter of the American Association of Franchisees and Dealers.
One of the group’s anonymous founders wrote in a Signal chat:
“My hope is that DEFT will be a voice for the voiceless. DEFT is the answer to those of you who are pleading to help and feel you’re screaming into the void.”
DEFT is hoping to sign up enough delivery service providers to force Amazon to give them a voice in crafting new policies. So like a union? Am I allowed to use that word?
Amazon has historically not reacted kindly to unionization, which is why DEFT's founders are taking steps to protect members’ identities and communications from the company. After consulting with a military veteran, they've even gone as far as creating a structure of five person “cells” to keep members of the larger organization anonymous in the event that one cell is compromised.
Well, that certainly speaks volumes about the state of labor rights in the U.S. How fortunate for our country that Amazon employees contractors have to rely on military concealment tactics to maintain secrecy and avoid retaliation from one of the country's largest employers.
7. Amazon pilots 30 minute grocery delivery in Seattle and Philadelphia
Ready for one more story about Amazon delivery? The company is piloting a new “ultra-fast” delivery service in Seattle and Philadelphia called “Amazon Now” that offers delivery of grocery and essential items like milk, eggs, fresh produce, pet food, cosmetics, and electronics, in 30 minutes or less. (Or your money back?)
Here's how it works:
- Shoppers in those cities will see a 30 minute delivery option on Amazon's website and app.
- Prime members will have delivery fees start at $3.99 per order, while 30-minute delivery for non-Prime members starts at $13.99, plus a basket fee of $1.99 on orders below $15.
- Amazon plans to hold grocery items in small warehouses in the trial areas.
- It will use “flex” drivers at its Seattle location to make the ultra-fast deliveries, which are gig economy workers who use their own vehicles.
- Filings for the Amazon Now sites in Seattle show that they’ll run 24/7 with a small front-of-house area where the drivers can pick up the deliveries.
- After placing their order, customers can track their orders in real time and tip their drivers. (Oh great, more tips.)
For now, Amazon is only trialing the program, however, The Information reported that the company is pursuing approvals for similar centers in Fort Worth, Texas.
Will Amazon Now be a success? Do shoppers want a small selection of grocery and household items in 30 minutes or less, and are they willing to pay extra for it? Or do they prefer full grocery store selection with slightly slower same-day delivery? This trial run should help Amazon find out.
8. U.S. schools are paying 17% more for basic supplies through Amazon
One more Amazon story to close out this week's headlines…
U.S. school districts are paying on average 17% more for basic supplies due to unpredictable dynamic pricing on Amazon, according to a report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Unlike the contracts that schools and local governments traditionally make with local suppliers, who bid to offer the best rates, Amazon Business doesn't guarantee locked-in prices, which results in big price swings throughout the year, or at times, throughout the day.
The report gives an example of an employee from one school who purchased a 12-pack of Sharpie markers for $8.99, while an employee of another school nearby was charged $28.63 for the same product on the same day.
Another example showed a Denver school placing two separate orders for bulk cases of dry-erase markers on the same day — paying $114.52 for one and $149.07 for the other.
In terms of price fluctuation, the report found that “among the 100 most frequently ordered products, the highest prices Amazon charged were, on average, 136 percent higher than the lowest.”
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance said:
“Amazon has persuaded cities and school districts to abandon competitive bidding and surrender to its dynamic, algorithm-driven pricing. This opaque system subjects buyers to erratic price swings and allows Amazon to covertly inflate prices and overcharge schools and cities.”
The organization is calling on local and state governments to ban dynamic pricing in public procurement and to prioritize independent, local businesses for supply needs.
Michael Scott called this out decades ago in a Chili's:
“Here's the thing about those discount suppliers. They don't care. They come in, they undercut everything, and they run us out of business, and then, once we're all gone, they jack up the prices. It's bad.”
An Amazon spokesperson questioned the study's validity:
“Pricing research is notoriously difficult to conduct accurately and typically lacks reliable methodology, including cherry-picked product selections, mismatched product comparisons, and comparing in-stock items with products out-of-stock at competitors.”
9. Other e-commerce news of interest
Canada Post and the postal workers union have “reached agreements in principle” after more than two years of negotiating that will allow rotating strikes to end and uninterrupted deliveries to continue. The latest rounds of strikes kicked off in September when Canada Post was authorized by the government to phase out home delivery, allow non-urgent mail to move by ground instead of air, and lift the 1994 moratorium on closing rural post offices, which resulted in the Canadian Union of Postal Workers to go on a full strike for two weeks, followed by a rotating strike since then. The union notes that while they've agreed on the main points of the detail, they reserve the right to strike again if the final language is not to their liking.
X was fined €120M by the European Commission over a number of violations against the EU's Digital Services Act, including the “deceptive design” of the site's blue checkmarks, which it says “anyone can pay to obtain” without the company “meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with.” Other violations include not providing required transparency on advertising and withholding mandated data access from researchers. The move will likely trigger a retaliatory response from the Trump Administration. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that the fine “isn't just an attack on X, it's an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments. The days of censoring Americans online are over.” Censoring Americans? Did he even read what the fine was over? Sometimes Rubio, sometimes…
Shopify is overhauling its compensation model for salespeople, following a fraud scandal where certain employees inflated projected revenue estimates of new accounts in order to increase their commissions. Moving forward, compensation will be 100% tied to merchant revenue over a three year period, making salespeople “stakeholders in the long haul, paid as merchants actually succeed, not just when they sign,” according to COO Jess Hertz. Shopify salespeople have historically been paid a commission based on the annual revenue that new merchants estimated they would make when signing up — a system that was ripe for abuse. The company told The Logic that the changes were not linked to the sales fraud scandal, and that the company had been working on them for quite some time. Just a guess, but maybe working on the new compensation model is what led to uncovering the scandal in the first place?
Klarna is expanding its Premium and Max membership plans to the U.S., following their rollout in Europe and the U.K. in October. Memberships include benefits like airport lounge access, travel insurance, and lifestyle subscriptions without requiring that customers reach a certain spending requirement. In other Klarna news this week, the company launched its Tap to Pay feature across 14 European markets, with support for Klarna Credit Card coming to those markets soon.
Paid subscribers to ChatGPT are complaining about seeing promotional messages for companies like Peloton and Target within their AI answers. OpenAI's chief research officer Mark Chen later acknowledged that the company “fell short” with recent promotional messages and is working to improve the experience. ChatGPT head Nick Turley later said he was seeing “lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT,” but that “there are no live tests for ads” and “any screenshots you've seen are either not real or not ads.” Wait, so which is it? Were those ads or not ads? Perhaps the OpenAI team should start a Slack channel to get on the same page about this before posting on X about it.
Walmart published a set of rules for AI agents via a llms.txt file, prohibiting agents from performing any transactional, account-related, or decision-making functions on its website, but allowing them to show store information and policies, as spotted by Juozas Kaziukėnas. llms.txt is an emerging standard that aims to provide information to LLMs on how they should behave on a particular website, similar to the robots.txt standard that offers similar instruction for crawlers, but not as widely adopted. A day after Kaziukėnas spotted and reported the file, Walmart removed it from its website.
Several retailers launched new AI shopping assistants in partnership with LLM overlords including Ashley's Furniture in partnership with Perplexity, Albertsons in partnership with OpenAI, and and Tractor Supply also with OpenAI. Exclusivity with LLMs seems to be trending too. For example, Tractor Supply has historically experimented with multiple LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft to power various features on its website and within its internal operations, but now says it's made a decision to build a stronger collaboration with OpenAI rather than use several different platforms.
Amazon is cutting EU seller fees on cheap fashion items in response to heavy competition from Shein and Temu in the region, marking what the company says is one of its largest ever fee reductions. Referral fees on clothes and accessories are dropping from 7% to 5% for items up to €15 or 15 pounds, and from 15% to 10% on items between €15 and €20 or pounds, effective December 15th. In comparison, Shein charges sellers a referral fee of 10% in the EU and 12.24% in Great Britain, with zero referral fees for new sellers for the first 30 days,. Additionally Amazon said it would cut referral fees from Feb 1st onward for home products from 15% to 8% for items up to €20 or pounds, as well as cut fees on pet clothing, grocery, and vitamins. This is a great example of how markets benefit from competition!
OpenAI is experimenting with a “confessions” feature that forces its chatbot to report when it breaks instructions or takes shortcuts. First the model gives a normal answer in one channel, then a second channel demands a Confession Report, which lists every explicit and implicit instruction and whether it followed each one, flags any hallucinations or rule breaking, and then scores its confession for honesty and completeness. During preliminary stress tests, OpenAI says its model only fails to confess about 4.4% of the time when it breaks the rules. Don't worry, it'll get better at lying!
Snapchat and Wix partnered up to enable Wix users to connect their Snapchat account, link their product catalog, and create Snapchat ad campaigns directly from the Wix dashboard. Snap says that advertisers using both its Snap Pixel and Conversions API are seeing a 22% increase in attributed purchases and 25% increase in purchase value. The move follows a similar partnership with WooCommerce announced in October.
Meta launched a new centralized support hub for Facebook and Instagram users aimed at helping recover hacked accounts. The new hub offers easier-to-find recovery options, enhanced device recognition, and smarter recovery flows, which Meta says offer clearer guidance and simpler verification, including a new option to take a selfie video to verify your identity. Meta also said it is working on an AI assistant for help with things like recovering your account or updating settings, which initially will only be available to Facebook users, but later may provide help with all of Meta's apps.
Anthropic inked a $200M multi-year partnership with Snowflake, a cloud data platform that provides storage, processing, and analytics services for enterprise data, to bring its LLM to Snowflake's platform and customers. Claude Sonnet 4.5 will power Snowflake Intelligence, the company's enterprise AI service, allowing customers to run multimodal data analysis and build their own custom agents. In recent months, Anthropic has signed deals with Deloitte and IBM to bring its LLMs into their software products. Code red again OpenAI!
Should the money you secretly give to OnlyFans models using the credit card your wife doesn't get the statement for be considered “tips”? The answer to this question will mean whether or not your “girlfriend” gets to exempt up to $25,000 in qualified tips per year under President Trump's “no tax on tips law,” outlined in the One Big, Beautiful Bill. The passing of the tax law included a caveat, which is that pornographic creators were not entitled to have their taxes waived, but the platform has other types of creators too, such as those that do naked cooking and close up exercising. The only reasonable solution the IRS has come to is that taxpayers reporting tips from OnlyFans will need to have their content viewed by an IRS agent to ensure that its eligible for tax exemption on tips. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
Wing and Walmart launched drone delivery in Mero Atlanta from six stores, offering under five-minute delivery time on groceries, household items, over-the-counter medicine, and last-minute gifts. The expansion marks the first major metro added in Wing’s broader expansion that will reach 100 Walmart stores by 2026, following strong adoption of the service in the Dallas Fort Worth area, where Wing reports that 75% of customers have used its drone delivery service more than once in the past year. The drones travel around 60mph at about 150 feet above the ground, arrive at their destination, and lower their packages to the ground without human assistance.
Amazon Music launched its first ever 2025 Delivered, which offers a personalized annual summary of users' music-listening histories, similar to Spotify's annual Wrapped experience. Delivered offers listeners animated shareable cards that highlight their music stats to share with friends on social media, designed with a music festival theme personalized for each user, such as “Katie Fest 2025” for a user named Katie. . The feature is available this year in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, India, Canada, and Australia.
TikTok introduced a “Nearby Feed” in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany that offers a dedicated way for users to explore what's happening around them. The company wrote, “Whether you're looking for a new restaurant close to home, or a new place to explore during your next trip, the Nearby Feed makes it easy to discover and connect with local content, creators, and businesses wherever you are.” Posts displayed within the new Nearby Feed are shown to users based on their location, topics of interest, and when the content was posted. Location sharing, which is necessary for the feature to work, is only available to users who are 18 or older, and people can turn it on or off at any time. What should Instagram call their Nearby Feed after they swipe this idea? Instagram Local?
Poshmark is facing seller backlash after the company began running its own Posh Shows to live sell items through partnerships with big brands, raising concerns about self preferencing and reduced visibility for independent sellers. Recent livestream events hosted by the official Posh Shows account featured inventory from Quince and Korean beauty brands, prompting complaints about preferential placement, discounted shipping, and advantages not available to regular hosts. Liz Morton of Value Added Resource compares the concerns to past allegations against parent company Naver in Korea involving algorithmic favoritism, though those penalties were later overturned.
Meta added $69B in market value after reports that the company will reduce metaverse budgets by 30%, following years of losses in the Reality Labs division, which has accumulated $70B in deficits since 2021. Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms in October 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg was convinced that the metaverse would be the future of the company. In hindsight, he wishes he had changed the company's name to AI Platforms.
Google and Amazon are teaming up to offer a jointly developed link between their cloud services, allowing companies to quickly establish a private connection between their AWS and Google Cloud servers as a safety net if either of the providers experiences an outage. Google says it comes with a “proactive monitoring system that detects and reacts to failures before customers suffer from their consequences” and a coordinated maintenance system to “avoid overlaps” that could impact service. The new service is being unveiled a few weeks after an AWS outage that disrupted thousands of websites worldwide. I love how both companies are collectively like, “Our outages are your problem now. Pay for both of our services as backups to each other.”
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton is urging the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to open formal investigations into Shein and Temu over what he claims is wide-scale IP violations and counterfeiting. Cotton told Reuters, “These companies now stock massive inventories in US warehouses and distribution centers. Their goods are no longer slipping through ports. They are sitting on American soil under US jurisdiction.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also announced last week that he is investigating whether Shein violated state law related to unethical labor practices and the sale of unsafe consumer products, and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a lawsuit against Temu over harvesting user data.
The New York Times is suing Perplexity for violating its copyrights by retrieving its content with its AI crawlers and displaying large parts of it in a way that competes with its own publication's website. The suit also accuses Perplexity of damaging its brand by making up information and falsely attributing that information to the NYT. The publisher contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 moths and demanded that it stop using its content until the two companies reached an agreement, but as we're starting to see revealed in similar lawsuits, Perplexity didn't give two fucks. The company's head of communication Jesse Dwyer said, “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”
Speaking of AI companies getting sued… Remember in 2023 when a group of authors sued OpenAI for illegally training its LLMs on their works and then subsequently deleting the datasets? Well, last week a U.S. judge ordered OpenAI to share all communications with in-house lawyers over the matter, including “all internal references to LibGen that OpenAI has redacted or withheld on the basis of attorney-client privilege.” The dispute has also drawn attention to testimony from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who allegedly helped create the datasets while at OpenAI and has been compelled to answer questions about their development and destruction.
A federal judge rejected Meta's bid to force advertisers to arbitrate claims that Facebook overstated the reach of ad campaigns, saying that the company waived that right by failing to assert it until the case had been pending for seven years. U.S. District Court Judge James Donato said, “Overall, Meta waged a seven-year campaign of litigating this case in two federal courts, and took full advantage of the procedures available in the court system, while staying silent about the arbitration agreement.” Donato also urged an appellate court to rule quickly on a potential appeal by the tech company, arguing that “plaintiffs have been waiting many years now for their day in court.”
Cloudflare was hit by yet another outage on Friday, causing widespread disruptions across major websites including LinkedIn, Zoom, Shopify, Deliveroo, and HSBC, just weeks after its Nov 18th outage. The most recent outage lasted 25 minutes before services were fully restored. Cloudflare says the issues were not caused by a cyber attack or malicious activity of ay kid, but rather, “triggered by changes being made to our body parsing logic while attempting to detect and mitigate an industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components.” The company said it plans to release more information this week about how it plans to prevent further outages.
Venmo also experienced a separate outage last week that prevented users from being able to send money for several hours. Problems began around 6:30pm EST on Wednesday and took until early Thursday to get resolved. The company did not provide any details about what caused the problem or how it was fixed.
In corporate shakeups this week… Apple's VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson, and general counsel, Kate Adams announced their retirements. The company named Jennifer Newstead as its next general counsel, who joins from Meta where she was chief legal officer. Alan Dye, the design executive who led Apple's UI team for the last decade, is leaving the company to join Meta, as it makes a push toward consumer devices. Last but not least, Torben Severson, who served as chief of staff to Amazon's retail CEO Doug Herrington, departed Amazon after 17 years to join OpenAI as VP and Head of Global Business Development.
PhonePe is shutting down its Pincode e-commerce app and is planning to shift the business toward B2B services for offline merchants. The company's CEO Sameer Nigam said that operating a consumer-facing quick-commerce app had become a distraction from its core focus on small retailers and instead wants to concentrate on helping stores “achieve operational efficiency, improved margins and visibility.” PhonePe launched Pincode in April 2023 as part of its push into e-commerce, pulled out of most categories except food a year later, and then shifted to a quick-commerce model earlier this year.
Amazon updated Alexa so that it gives kid friendly answers to questions about Elf on the Shelf after Business Insider reported that the device had been revealing the truth — that parents were the one moving the Elf! Alexa now describes the elf as a magical scout sent by Santa if asked how he moves around the house, as well as other kid-friendly answers to questions about the existence of Santa and other characters. “Uh… Alexa? Is God real?”
🏆 This week's most ridiculous story… Mark Zuckerberg has begun personally delivering home cooked soup to researchers he wants to recruit away from OpenAI, according to OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen, who at first admitted to being shocked by the tactic, but then started copying it! Now Chen also delivers soup to his own recruits that he hopes to poach from Meta. However instead of home cooking it, Chen buys it from a high-end Korean soup restaurant. And for those who turn down their offers of employment? No soup for you!
10. Seed rounds, IPOs, & acquisitions
Anthropic is in talks to go public as early as next year, according to Financial Times sources. The company has tapped law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin working on a potential float, while holding similar early talks with investment banks. Anthropic recently hired former Airbnb executive Krishna Rao, who helped orchestrate the company's IPO in 2020. It recently received investments of $5B from Microsoft and $10B from Nvidia at a $350B valuation.
In other Anthropic news… The company acquired Bun, a JavaScript engine that helps developers run apps, bundle code, and manage packages all in one tool, for an undisclosed amount, marking its first-ever acquisition. The acquisition aims to enhance the infrastructure behind Claude Code, which recent reached a $1B run rat six months after launch. Bun has been used internally to support Claude Code's growth, and Anthropic said the acquisition will improve speed, stability, and workflows for developers. Bun will remain open source and continue to serve companies that rely on it for faster software development.
SpaceX is in talks for a secondary sale at an $800B valuation, doubling its most recent $400B valuation, which would make it America's most valuable private company, according to Wall Street Journal sources. The company also said that it is weighing a potential IPO in 2026. Elon Musk said in June that SpaceX was expected to generate $15.5B in revenue for the year.
Omnicom Group completed its $8.9B acquisition of Interpublic Group, creating the largest agency holding company in the world with $25B in revenue. Following the merger, the company said that it will lay off more than 4,000 employees by December, or about 3% of its workforce, including 85% from client-focused roles and 15% administrative roles. Since the deal was first announced in 2024, IPG have already cut over 3,000 roles each.
Versant, Comcast’s planned spin-off of select media brands and digital businesses, acquired Indy Cinema Group, a cloud-based cinema operating system, for an undisclosed amount. Indy Cinema will now operate within the group as part of Fandango, offering a vertically integrated platform designed to support operations across ticketing, point-of-sale, concessions, loyalty, marketing, inventory management, and analytics. Indy’s presence in nearly 300 locations worldwide gives Fandango a stronger base for international expansion and deeper operational integration with cinema partners.
Netflix reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros' film studio and streaming service, HBO Max, for $82.7B in cash and stock. The deal brings a library of content under Netflix's umbrella including The Wizard of Oz, the Harry Potter Franchise, the DC comics universe, The Sopranos, and Game of Thrones. Warner Bros. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, after Discovery moves forward with its previously planned spinout of Discovery Global, which includes its portfolio of pay TV networks like TNT and CNN. Netflix beat out Paramount Skydance and Comcast, who also made aggressive bids and are now salty over losing.
Meesho held its long awaited IPO, attracting about 2.5 trillion rupees ($27.8B) in bids for a $604M offering as institutional investors subscribed 120 times their allotted shares. The deal ranks among India’s most heavily subscribed offerings, following a series of major tech listings in a record fundraising year. Meesho reported revenue of 55.78 billion rupees ($620M) in the first half of fiscal 2026 and losses of 7 billion rupees ($78M), and its shares will begin trading next week.
Duvo, an automation platform that helps companies streamline workflows by connecting apps, data, and AI driven processes, raised $15M in a seed round led by Index Ventures. The platform offers access to ready-made AI agents for retail operations that can automate “painful tasks” like weekly margin reviews, reconciling supplier invoices, activating promotions, and prices changes. The company aims to differentiate itself from other agentic systems by catering to business users rather than developers, enabling finance and supply chain teams to create and edit AI agents themselves without waiting for technical support.
Jingdong Industrials, the supply-chain technology arm of JD.com, is aiming to raise as much as $412M through a Hong Kong IPO. About 10% of its offering would be allocated to the public, with the remainder reserved for institutional investors. trading is scheduled to begin on December 11 with an overallotment option available.
Vambe, an AI startup that develops tools to automate workflows and decision making for businesses using large language models, raised $14M in a Series A round led by Monashees. The startup is focused on Latin America and aims to help midsized B2C companies scale their businesses and grow without hiring sales and support staff, providing them with AI agents that can manage the customer journey autonomously and automat the full commerce cycle. The funds will be used to scale up its operations in Chile and Mexico, as well as develop a new “agent-to-agent recommendation ad engine” that will allow agents from different companies to collaborate on advertising campaigns.
Azoma, a London-based startup that helps brands show up in AI search results and chatbot conversations, raised $4M in a pre-Series A round led by Ignite Ventures. The company has developed two patented technologies including a “digital twin” to simulate how brands appear in AI chatbot responses and a content generator to create product pages and product listings optimized to appear in AI search results. It plans to use the funds to invest in R&D and hire across sales and customer success roles.
Kalshi, a predictions market platform that lets users bet on the outcomes of future events, raised $1B in a Series E round led by Paradigm at a $11B valuation, doubling its valuation from two months ago when it raised $300M at a $5B valuation. The platform's trading volume now surpasses $1B every week, up over 1000% from 2024. It plans to use the funds to accelerate consumer adoption “to the next hundred million customers,” integrate more brokerages, build new partnerships, and broaden its product offerings.
Meta acquired Limitless, an AI-wearables startup formerly known as Rewind that's developing a pendant that records conversations, takes notes, and provides real-time insights, for an undisclosed amount. The team will join Meta’s Reality Labs division as the company integrates the technology into its broader hardware roadmap. Limitless will continue supporting existing users, but the company will stop selling devices to new customers.
AppDirect, a software platform that powers automated SaaS marketplaces and billing systems, acquired Tackle.io, a platform that helps software vendors list and sell their products through cloud marketplaces like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, for an undisclosed amount. The deal will combine subscription management, marketplace listings, cloud distribution, and co sell analytics into a single platform for B2B software commerce, offering vendors unified access to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces. Customers of both platforms will retain existing workflows and gain new options for private storefronts, white label marketplaces, and assisted cloud deals.
Brevo, a Paris-based CRM formerly known as SendinBlue that provides e-mail marketing, SMS, and chat tools, raised €500M in a round led by Bridgepoint at a valuation exceeding $1B, officially making it a unicorn. The company serves over 600,000 businesses across 180 countries and is on track to surpass €200M in ARR this year, with goals to reach €1B by 2030. It plans to use the funds to support additional global expansion, particularly in the U.S., where only 15% of its revenue is currently derived from.
Socure, an identity verification and fraud prevention platform that uses AI and machine learning to authenticate users and reduce risk for financial institutions and enterprises, acquired Qlarifi, a real-time BNPL consumer credit database that provides underwriting data for lenders via consumers' transaction history, for an undisclosed amount. The deal creates the industry's first unified identity, anti fraud, and BNPL credit system designed to give lenders cross provider visibility. Socure plans to integrate Qlarifi’s data with its Identity Graph and RiskOS decisioning engine to support faster and safer lending.
OpenAI entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Neptune, an AI infrastructure startup that builds monitoring and de-bugging tools that AI companies use as they train models, for an undisclosed amount. The deal will enable OpenAI to expand its ability to analyze complex training workflows as it continues scaling frontier models. Neptune will wind down external services as its tam joins OpenAI.
OpenAI is also taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, an AI infrastructure company that builds data centers and power solutions to support large scale model training and deployment, for an undisclosed amount. Thrive Holdings' parent company, Thrive Capital, is one of OpenAI's major investors, so the investment marks one more circular deal for OpenAI. The deal will place OpenAI engineers, researchers, and product staff inside Thrive’s portfolio companies to build AI products and improve operations, with OpenAI earning returns as those businesses grow.
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