Shopifreaks
Weekly e-commerce industry newsletter curated by Paul Drecksler, focusing on Shopify ecosystem news and global retail tech trends. Each issue of Shopifreaks rounds up the top headlines – from platform updates to notable brand launches – and delivers them with brief insights and wit for busy store owners
OpenAI Is Backing an Illinois Bill that Would Shield AI Companies From Lawsuits over Catastrophic Harm if They Meet Safety...
OpenAI is backing Illinois Senate Bill 3444, which would limit liability for AI developers when "critical harms" occur, provided the companies did not act intentionally or recklessly and have published safety and transparency reports. The bill defines critical harms as events causing 100 or more deaths, $1 billion or more in property damage, or AI‑assisted creation of a weapon of mass destruction. Liability protection applies only to AI systems built on more than $100 million in compute, a threshold that includes OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI and Meta. The move comes as OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits and as the industry spent roughly $50 million on federal lobbying in early 2025.
Palantir Stock Fell 8% After Michael Burry Argued Anthropic Is Capturing Enterprise AI Spending that Palantir Cannot Compete For
Michael Burry warned that Anthropic is seizing the bulk of enterprise AI spend, claiming the startup captures 73% of new budgets and wins seven out of ten head‑to‑head contests with OpenAI. He contrasted Anthropic’s plug‑and‑play API with Palantir’s labor‑intensive consulting...
USPS Plans to Raise Stamp Prices to 82 Cents in July and Suspend Retirement Fund Contributions to Avoid Running Out...
The U.S. Postal Service has asked the Postal Regulatory Commission to raise the price of a First‑Class Forever stamp from 78 cents to 82 cents on July 12, while other market‑dominant products will see roughly a 4.8% increase. The move...
Amazon’s Internal Project Houdini Aims to Cut Data Center Construction From 15 Weeks to 2-3 Weeks Using Prefabricated Modular Server...
Amazon is piloting Project Houdini, a modular construction system that ships prefabricated server‑room skids from factories to data‑center sites. The approach slashes the typical 15‑week build cycle to roughly two to three weeks and cuts up to 50,000 electrician hours...
An Illinois Man Received 150+ Unwanted TikTok Shop Return Packages After a Scammer Used His Address as a Fake Return...
Charles Coleman of Oak Forest, Illinois, began receiving daily deliveries of fireplace‑shaped diffusers he never ordered, accumulating more than 150 packages since September. The items were sent because a TikTok Shop seller listed Coleman's home as a fraudulent return address,...
Checkout.com Integrates with SAP Commerce Cloud’s Open Payment Framework to Simplify Enterprise Payment Deployments
Checkout.com has linked its Flow checkout platform to SAP Commerce Cloud’s Open Payment Framework (OPF), offering enterprises a plug‑and‑play payment layer. Flow’s pre‑built components support global cards and local methods, delivering up to a 5% lift in acceptance rates and...
Amazon’s Andy Jassy Says the Company May Sell Trainium Chips to Outside Customers, Putting the Business at $50B in Annual...
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the company may begin selling its proprietary Trainium AI chips to external customers. A full market rollout could lift the chip business from a $20 billion run rate to roughly $50 billion annually. Trainium, alongside Graviton and...
Federal Appeals Court Refuses to Block Trump’s Blacklisting of Anthropic but Expedites the Case with Oral Arguments Set for May...
A three‑judge DC Circuit panel denied Anthropic’s emergency motion to stop its designation as a “Supply‑Chain Risk to National Security,” allowing the Trump administration’s blacklisting to remain. The court, however, recognized likely irreparable financial harm and set oral arguments for...
Google Cloud and Intel Expand Their Multiyear Partnership to Co-Develop Custom Chips for AI Infrastructure
Google Cloud and Intel have deepened their multiyear alliance, extending the use of Intel’s Xeon 6 processors for AI, cloud and inference workloads while expanding joint development of custom ASIC‑based infrastructure processing units (IPUs). The IPU effort, launched in 2021, targets...
OpenAI Says Enterprise Revenue Has Crossed 40% of Total Sales and Is on Pace to Match Consumer Revenue by End...
OpenAI’s chief revenue officer announced that enterprise revenue now exceeds 40% of total sales and is on track to match consumer revenue by the end of 2026. The surge stems from businesses deploying coordinated AI‑agent teams inside their tools, reducing...
The Ball Depot Launches as a Single-Category E-Commerce Store Selling over 1,000 Ball Products Across Sports, Fitness, and Pet Toys
Vancouver entrepreneur Terri‑lyne Gedanitz launched The Ball Depot, an online store dedicated solely to balls, on April 7. The site offers more than 1,000 SKUs covering sports, fitness, kids, novelty and pet toys, and ships across Canada and the United States....
Commerce Announces Its 2026 APAC Customer and Partner Award Winners for BigCommerce and Feedonomics
Commerce unveiled its 2026 APAC Customer and Partner Awards, spotlighting top merchants and ecosystem collaborators across the region. Atlantic Pet Products earned the Growth Champion Award on the BigCommerce platform, while Qantas Loyalty secured the Innovation in Digital Experience Award...
OpenAI’s Sora Shutdown Is a Warning to Chinese AI Video Rivals, Not the Market Opening It Appears, Says Bloomberg’s Catherine...
OpenAI pulled the plug on its Sora video‑generation model after it burned roughly $1 million a day in compute, signaling that the technology is not yet cost‑effective for mass‑market social media. Bloomberg columnist Catherine Thorbecke warns that Chinese rivals such as...
Australia’s Competition Regulator Is Reviewing eBay’s $1.2B Depop Acquisition with a Decision Expected by May 19
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has opened a public review of eBay’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Depop, seeking input from buyers, sellers and rival platforms on its effect on Australia’s pre‑owned fashion market. The review is complicated by eBay’s...
EBay Cuts Its Money Back Guarantee Window for Coins and Bullion From 30 Days to 3 Days Starting May 7
eBay will cut its Money Back Guarantee for coins, bullion and paper money from 30 days to three calendar days, effective May 7. The change applies only to sellers who do not offer returns and was announced via email. CFO Peggy...
Perplexity’s Pivot From AI Search to Agents Drives 50% Revenue Growth in a Month, Pushing ARR Past $450M
Perplexity reported annual recurring revenue (ARR) topping $450 million in March, a 50% jump from the previous month. The surge follows the company’s strategic pivot from a chatbot‑style search engine to AI agents that execute tasks for users. Its platform now...
PayPal Partners with Meta to Enable One-Tap Checkout on Facebook without Leaving the Feed, with Instagram Coming Soon
PayPal and Meta have teamed up to embed a one‑tap checkout directly into Facebook’s news feed, letting users complete purchases without leaving the platform. PayPal will process the transactions, and the integration is slated to expand to Instagram. The deal...
Block Launches Managerbot, a Proactive AI Agent for Square Sellers that Manages Inventory, Scheduling, and Marketing Autonomously
Block unveiled Managerbot, an AI‑driven agent built into Square that continuously monitors merchant performance and recommends actions for inventory forecasting, staff scheduling, and marketing campaigns. Unlike Square’s prior reactive chatbot, Managerbot operates proactively, suggesting changes before sellers request them. The...
Google Says Page Weight Is Not a Reliable SEO Metric because Raw Size Doesn’t Reveal Whether Data Is Useful or...
Google’s search quality engineers Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt said that raw page weight is a poor SEO metric because much of the increase in median page size—from 845 KB in 2015 to 2.3 MB in July 2025—comes from structured data, metadata,...
OpenAI Asks California and Delaware Attorneys General to Investigate Elon Musk for Anti-Competitive Behavior
OpenAI’s chief strategy officer Jason Kwon has written to the attorneys general of California and Delaware, asking them to investigate Elon Musk for alleged anti‑competitive conduct aimed at seizing control of the nonprofit arm. The request comes weeks before Musk’s...
Anthropic Plans $1B Venture with Major PE Firms to Sell and Deploy AI Tools Across Their Portfolio Companies
Anthropic is negotiating a $200 million investment as part of a broader $1 billion fundraising round with private‑equity giants General Atlantic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman. The capital will launch a new consulting arm that embeds the Claude AI suite into the...
Broadcom Signs Expanded Deals with Google and Anthropic, Giving the AI Startup Access to 3.5 Gigawatts of Compute Capacity
Broadcom will manufacture future generations of Google’s AI chips and has expanded its agreement with Anthropic, granting the startup access to roughly 3.5 gigawatts of Google Tensor Processing Unit compute, up from 1 GW. Anthropic disclosed annualized revenue now exceeds $30 billion,...
Perplexity Launches Computer for Taxes to Draft, Review, and Optimize U.S. Federal Tax Returns Using Loadable AI Tax Modules
Perplexity has expanded its Computer AI platform with dedicated tax modules that can automatically draft U.S. federal tax returns on official IRS forms, review professionally prepared returns for errors, and create custom tools for complex scenarios such as rental portfolio...
The New Yorker’s Investigation Into Sam Altman Drops the Same Day OpenAI Releases Its AI Policy Vision for Humanity
The New Yorker published an investigation based on over 100 OpenAI insider interviews and dozens of internal memos, portraying CEO Sam Altman as a people‑pleaser and even labeling him “the problem” in a message from former research head Dario Amodei....
TikTok and HubSpot Launch Native Integration to Manage Paid and Organic TikTok Campaigns Alongside CRM Data in One Place
TikTok and HubSpot have deepened their partnership by launching a native integration that embeds TikTok’s ad management, lead generation, and organic content tools directly within HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. Marketers can now run paid campaigns, build audiences from CRM data, enable...
SpaceX in Talks with Saudi Arabia’s PIF for a $5B Anchor Stake in a Record-Targeting $75B IPO
SpaceX is negotiating a roughly $5 billion anchor investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) ahead of a planned initial public offering. The company aims to raise about $75 billion, a figure that would eclipse the record‑setting IPOs of Saudi Aramco...
Salesforce Agentforce Executive Eric Eyken-Sluyters Departs After 23 Years to Join Rival AI Startup Sierra
Salesforce veteran Eric Eyken‑Sluyters, who led the company’s flagship AI agent platform Agentforce, resigned after 23 years to become president of field operations at rival AI startup Sierra. Sierra, valued at roughly $10 billion, builds AI‑driven customer‑service agents that directly compete...
23 WTO Members Including the US, UK, Japan, and Mexico Form Their Own E-Commerce Duty-Free Agreement After Global Talks Collapse
A coalition of 23 WTO members—including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Mexico—has signed a separate pact to keep electronic transmissions such as digital downloads and streaming free of customs duties. The agreement follows the collapse of WTO‑wide talks...
Database Startup Supabase in Talks to Raise $500M at a $10B Valuation, Five Times Its Value From a Year Ago
Supabase, the San Francisco‑based backend‑as‑a‑service startup, is negotiating a $500 million financing round led by Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC. The round would value the company at roughly $10 billion, a five‑fold increase from its $2 billion valuation a year earlier. Supabase’s revenue is...
Tether Gives Investors Two Weeks to Commit in Final Push to Raise Capital at a $500B Valuation
Tether, the leading stablecoin issuer with roughly $184 billion of USDT in circulation, is pressing investors to commit within two weeks to a capital raise that would value the company at $500 billion. The fundraising effort, coordinated with Cantor Fitzgerald, Clear Street...
Meta Researchers Verify Code Patches without Running Them at 93% Accuracy
Meta researchers introduced a semi-formal reasoning technique that lets AI agents confirm functional equivalence of code patches without executing them. The approach forces agents to build explicit premises, trace execution paths, and draw formal conclusions, achieving 93% accuracy on real‑world...
Google Home Adds Interactive, Conversational News Updates Through Gemini Live
Google Home has integrated Gemini Live, an AI‑driven feature that delivers interactive news summaries. The system lets users ask follow‑up questions within the same conversational thread, eliminating the need for new prompts or device switches. Unlike traditional headline reads, Gemini...
Shopify Expands Capital Repayment Through Shopify Payments to All U.S. States
Shopify announced that its Capital repayment service will now route payments through Shopify Payments for merchants in every U.S. state, making it the default method. ACH debit remains available only as a fallback after three consecutive Shopify Payments failures. The...
Amazon’s AWS Bahrain Data Center Damaged in Iranian Strike, Second Disruption in a Month
Amazon Web Services’ Bahrain data center was hit by a fire after an Iranian strike, confirmed by Bahrain’s Interior Ministry. The incident follows a prior outage in the same region last week, marking the second AWS disruption in a month....
Visa and Ramp Expand Partnership to Launch AI Agents that Automate Corporate Bill Pay and Expense Controls
Visa and Ramp have deepened their multi‑year issuing partnership by introducing AI agents that automate corporate bill payment, enforce spend controls, and surface cost‑saving opportunities. The new agents sit on Visa’s global payments network and Ramp’s finance platform, extending the...
TikTok Applies for Brazilian Fintech Licenses to Offer Payments and Lending to 131 Million Local Users
TikTok has filed applications with Brazil's central bank for two financial licences: one to operate as an electronic‑money issuer allowing users to hold balances and make in‑app payments, and another to act as a direct credit company that can lend...
Latitude Raises $8M to Help U.S. Businesses Make Fast International Payments Using Stablecoin Rails
Latitude, a fintech founded by alumni of Stripe, Coinbase, Uber and Meta, closed an $8 million Series A led by NEA with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase, Paxos and the Solana Foundation. Its flagship offering, Global Payouts, converts U.S. dollars into stablecoins...
EBay’s Social Sharing Tool Goes Down for over 24 Hours, Leaving Sellers without a Key Listing Promotion Feature
eBay's Social Sharing tool, which lets sellers post listings directly to Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram from the Seller Hub, has been down for over 24 hours, displaying an error page. Launched in 2023, the feature has already faced setbacks, including...
OpenAI and Anthropic Are Scaling Enterprise Sales Teams in a Hot Market That May Be Producing Order-Takers, Not Salespeople
OpenAI expanded its enterprise sales force from ten to roughly 500 reps in under two years, while Anthropic is targeting $20‑26 billion in revenue by 2026. Both firms are building go‑to‑market teams in a heavily inbound market where demand is so...
EBay Tests Image Search on Desktop Web After Nearly a Decade as a Mobile-Only Feature
eBay has begun beta testing its Search by Image tool on the desktop website, extending a feature that debuted on its mobile app in 2017. Users can upload a photo, drag and drop an image, or paste a link to...
Google Tests AI-Rewritten News Headlines in Search without Notifying Publishers, Drawing Industry Backlash
Google is piloting an AI feature that automatically rewrites news article headlines in Search results, doing so without informing or obtaining consent from publishers. Media executives argue the practice could produce inaccurate or misleading headlines that remain attributed to the...
Shopify Quietly Fixed a Bug That Silently Cancelled All Subscriptions When a Customer Removed a Shop Pay Card
Shopify disclosed that removing a payment method from Shop Pay automatically cancelled every active subscription linked to that card, affecting merchants across its entire ecosystem. The cancellation occurred without any warning, customer intent signal, or recovery flow, effectively disguising involuntary churn...
Shopify Launches Tinker, a Free Mobile App that Builds Brand Assets and Store Visuals From a Plain-Language Prompt
Shopify unveiled Tinker, a free mobile app that bundles more than 100 AI tools from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic into a single interface. Merchants can create logos, product images, social media videos and 360‑degree product views by entering plain‑language prompts,...
Tencent Launches 8 OpenClaw-Based Products to Close Its AI Gap Using WeChat as the Distribution Backbone
Tencent unveiled eight OpenClaw‑based AI products this month, anchoring them to its WeChat platform. The flagship QClaw, a one‑click AI agent, attracted millions of users in its first week and helped lift Tencent’s shares by 7% on March 10. CEO Pony Ma...
ShipMonk Hires Former Amazon and Chewy Executive Hugh Joiner as Chief Technology Officer
ShipMonk, the U.S. e‑commerce fulfillment platform founded in 2014, announced the appointment of Hugh Joiner as its new Chief Technology Officer. Joiner previously held senior technical and program‑management roles at Amazon and pet‑goods retailer Chewy, overseeing large‑scale logistics and data‑analysis...
Amazon Polly Launches Bidirectional Streaming API to Cut Text-to-Speech Latency for Conversational AI Apps
Amazon Web Services introduced a Bidirectional Streaming API for its Amazon Polly text‑to‑speech service, allowing developers to stream text and receive audio concurrently over a single HTTP/2 connection. Internal tests showed a 39 % reduction in latency compared with the traditional...
Lyft Launches 60-Day Gas Relief Program for Drivers Offering up to 98 Cents per Gallon in Savings
Lyft has launched a 60‑day gas‑relief program for its drivers, running from March 27 to May 26. The initiative provides cash‑back on Lyft Direct debit card purchases (1% for Gold/Platinum, 2% for Elite) plus an additional 14 cents per gallon through Upside and...
Google Loses Top India Legal Counsel Amid Antitrust Cases, AI Training Disputes, and New Content Rules
Google’s senior India lawyer Bijoya Roy resigned after 16 months, adding to a series of high‑level exits that left the firm without a government‑relations chief. The departure occurs amid intensifying regulatory scrutiny, including antitrust investigations, a probe into AI‑training data...
Meta Puts CTO Andrew Bosworth in Charge of “AI For Work” As It Pushes to Become AI-Native
Meta has moved oversight of its internal “AI For Work” program to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, previously responsible for the company’s metaverse efforts. The initiative, formerly led by Guy Rosen, seeks to embed generative‑AI tools across Meta’s employee base...
Bazaarvoice Integrates with TikTok Shop to Let Brands Syndicate Reviews and UGC to Product Listings
Bazaarvoice announced a new integration that lets brands syndicate ratings, reviews, photos and videos directly to their TikTok Shop product pages. The feature eliminates the “cold start” challenge by automatically porting existing user‑generated content to TikTok listings. TikTok Shop’s U.S....
