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Today Shopify’s checkout switchover happened this morning — and nothing will look broken
Every remaining Basic, Grow and Advanced store auto-upgraded to checkout extensibility today. Here is the part worth knowing: your storefront will not visibly break. The first symptom is your ad platforms, affiliate tracking and post-purchase apps quietly under-reporting conversions. It presents as a performance dip rather than an outage — which means the natural reaction is to go and adjust bids against numbers that are simply wrong. Do this week: reconcile the conversions Meta and Google Ads report against Shopify’s own order count for the next few days. If they diverge, it is a measurement failure, not a demand problem. We covered the wider picture in our recent piece on checkout constraints. |
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The agent layer arrives |
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Google put a buy button inside AI Mode and Gemini Sundar Pichai introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF, built with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart and endorsed by twenty-plus others. Shoppers will buy from eligible retailers without leaving Google’s chat — Google Pay first, PayPal later — and the retailer stays merchant of record. Read that alongside OpenAI retiring in-chat checkout earlier this year and a pattern emerges: the agents want discovery, and they are handing the transaction back to you. Google |
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One in five holiday visits, from an agent Salesforce forecasts roughly 20% of 2026 holiday ecommerce traffic will come from AI chat agents, and that one in three ecommerce sites will run its own site-specific shopper agent by Cyber Week. Treat the number with the scepticism a forecast from an agent-software vendor deserves — but the direction is corroborated elsewhere: Adobe measured AI-driven traffic to US retail up 693% year-on-year across the 2025 holidays. Salesforce |
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What just got more expensive |
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The de minimis escape hatch has closed The headline is old news — the US suspended its $800 exemption for all countries back in August 2025 — but two things changed quietly since. CBP made the suspension indefinite by regulation in June, and the temporary flat-rate postal option of $80–$200 per parcel ended on 1 March. Duty is now strictly ad valorem. In the EU the €150 exemption is gone, replaced by a flat €3 per tariff heading, with a further handling fee of roughly €2 expected around November. If your landed-cost model still has a flat per-parcel fee in it, it is five months out of date. Avalara |
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Meta’s ad prices rose another 12% Average price per ad was up 12% year-on-year in Q2, with ad revenue up 27% to $59.36bn on 14% more impressions. Worth noting the other half of that release: Meta’s own earnings per share fell 13.4% as infrastructure and legal costs bit. You are paying more per impression to a platform whose own margins are compressing — not a combination that historically resolves in the advertiser’s favour. Meta Q2 |
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Where the value is going |
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Private label set a record, and Target is spending a windfall on price US store brands hit $282.8bn in 2025, up $9bn, growing 3.3% against 1.2% for national brands — and taking dollar share from 19.1% to 21.3% over five years. In the same fortnight Target booked a $994m pretax tariff refund, worth $1.65 of its $4.11 earnings per share, and said it will keep “investing in price” having already cut more than 10,000 items since early 2025. One of those is a slow structural shift; the other is a giant resetting what a fair price looks like in every category it touches. PLMA, Target |
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One to action this week |
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Amazon now wants AI people declared
Any listing image or video containing a photorealistic AI-generated person must now carry a |
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