Good morning. Bots are padding abandoned cart lists (and your Klaviyo bill), Multibanco is freezing one-of-a-kind stock for a week, and the Shopify admin just rearranged the furniture. Black Friday is closer than it looks, so let's get moving.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

• Fake abandoned checkouts are a known bot trick, and the fix is cleanup in Flow and Klaviyo, not a captcha.
• Shopify's retail checklist covers stock counts, staff PINs, and offline payments before the BFCM rush.
• The redesigned admin moves search into a collapsible side nav and parks Sidekick on every page.

SELL & CONVERT

🛍️ Shopify's BFCM checklist for physical stores is worth ten minutes. Shopify published a retail busy season checklist, and it reads like a list of every Black Friday disaster you have already lived through. Count stock before peak, give each seasonal hire their own POS PIN, turn your holiday offers into scannable QR codes, and switch on offline payments before the rush, not during it. Best line in the guide: don't make Black Friday update day.

🤖 Bot checkouts are flooding abandoned cart lists, and your Klaviyo bill. A merchant fed up with hundreds of fake abandoned checkouts asked why Shopify does nothing, and the replies beat the rant. Bots can hit cart links without ever loading your storefront, so a captcha will not stop them. The practical fix: turn off automatic abandoned checkout emails, tag the junk with Flow, and suppress those profiles in Klaviyo, since it bills by active profile.

🐶 A one-product store teardown with a lesson for fit-sensitive sellers. A small dog raincoat brand asked the community to pick its store apart, and the feedback applies to anyone selling products that need to fit. The theme looked oversized on big desktop monitors, but the sharper advice was about doubt: put the size guide right beside the buy button and add a short fast-facts block, because fit worries lose more sales than font sizes do.

MONEY & OPS

💶 Portugal's Multibanco window can freeze one-of-a-kind stock for a week. A Portuguese handmade seller flagged a real inventory trap: Multibanco payment references in Shopify Payments stay open for a fixed seven days, and merchants cannot shorten that. One unpaid order can lock up unique pieces all week. Replies suggest filing a feature request with Support and checking gateway apps for a shorter window. Flow can cancel and restock, but a late payment may still land.

📦 Retailers want wholesale orders to fill in their catalog automatically. A shop owner noticed that Faire can push a wholesale order's products, descriptions, prices, and stock straight into a retailer's Shopify store, and asked why Shopify has nothing similar. Collective is built for dropshipping and B2B handles pricing, not catalog imports. Until that changes, the suggested workaround is a supplier CSV through Products, then Import, reviewed as drafts before any of it reaches the register.

🏪 New product: open a second store or reuse the one you have? A seller moving from a unisex gadget to one made only for women asked whether a fresh store on free trials beats keeping the old one. The thread's answer is simple: if the new product fits the same customers, keep the store, because your email list and order history are worth more than any trial. Either way, prune unused apps, where monthly costs usually hide.

STORE & TOOLS

🎨 How to grey out sold-out products on the Ritual theme. A merchant who switched to Ritual wanted sold-out items to look obviously unavailable in collection grids. Helpers pointed to a short CSS rule that dims any product card carrying the sold-out badge. The catch: the Custom CSS box in theme settings kept ignoring the grey filter, so the version that finally worked went into the theme's base.css file. Duplicate your theme before you edit code.

SHIPPED

🖥️ The new Shopify admin moves the furniture around. Shopify's design team walked through the redesigned admin and what changed. Search, notifications, and the store picker moved from the top bar into a side navigation you can collapse for more room, and each page now leads with what matters most. Sidekick floats at the bottom of every page and expands into a side panel for bigger jobs. Shopify says daily Sidekick use is up 4.8 times on last year.