| | Hello there. Saturday brings three quiet upgrades: translations that keep themselves current, markdowns that AI shopping agents can finally see, and a way to run your store from inside Gemini. Further down, a migrated store chases a mystery checkout error, OpenAI goes after holiday gift searches, and a POS counter stalls on multi-item baskets. In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into: - Translate & Adapt can now re-translate new and edited content every week on its own, and Shopify now translates up to 8 languages for you instead of 2.
- AI shopping agents reading Shopify Catalog now see your compare-at price, so a markdown shows up as a markdown, with a toggle in admin if you would rather hide it.
- OpenAI appears to be buying Google ads on Christmas gift searches to pull holiday shoppers into ChatGPT, one more sign gift discovery is moving into chat.
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| | 🌍 Translations now keep up with your edits. For merchants in the EU, Switzerland and the UK, Translate & Adapt now has an Auto-sync switch for each published language: Shopify re-translates new and updated content every week, so translated pages stop falling behind. The number of languages Shopify translates for you rises from 2 to 8, and manual translations are never overwritten. Auto-sync is off by default, and the old Auto-translate button is now called Translate now. 🏷️ AI shopping agents can now see your markdowns. Shopify now shares compare-at prices with AI shopping agents through Shopify Catalog. Until now, agents reading Catalog only saw the current price, so a sale price shown on your storefront looked like a regular price in chat. If you would rather keep compare-at prices out of agent results, there is a toggle in the Compare-at section of your admin settings. ✨ You can now run your store from Gemini. Shopify says you can now manage your store from the Gemini app: add products, check orders and pull reports right in the chat. It also pitches faster hand-offs between Shopify and other Google tools. The post does not mention plan limits or pricing, so check which permissions the connection asks for before you link your store. | |
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| | 🚫 A blank Request Forbidden page at checkout after a migration. A store that moved from WooCommerce in July saw a few launch-week buyers hit a bare Request Forbidden page at checkout, while incognito and the Shop app worked fine. Support blamed Cloudflare, bot protection or a big app cookie. Replies point at leftovers from the old site, such as old cookies or a service worker, and suggest clearing site data for the domain only. 🎁 OpenAI is bidding on Christmas gift searches. Shopifreaks reports that OpenAI appears to be buying Google search ads on gift keywords such as "christmas gifts for dads", with a sponsored ChatGPT result promising gift ideas by budget, deals and product comparisons. OpenAI has not announced the campaign or its spend. For merchants, it is another hint that holiday gift discovery is drifting into chat, where your product data does the selling. 🧭 How did your first orders actually come in? A first-time seller has a working store, a few products and a test checkout, but no idea how shoppers will find it. Advice online pulls in every direction: Facebook and TikTok ads, Google Shopping, or showing up when people ask ChatGPT what to buy. They opened an ad account but have not spent anything, and want real stories of how other merchants landed their first sales. 🤖 Have the fake abandoned checkouts stopped? A Basic plan merchant says the wave of bot-made abandoned checkouts under the name James Anderson stopped on their store around Sep 30. No charges ever went through, but dozens of junk checkouts arrived each day. Support had suggested upgrading to a pricier plan, which they pushed back on, and the bots went quiet a couple of days later. They ask whether others see the same. | |
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| | 🧾 Charging a different fee in each US state. A merchant who must add an environmental recycling fee that varies by state found that their cart-attribute setup breaks in express checkout, where Apple Pay can leave the billing address empty. A reply suggests skipping cart attributes and reading the shipping state inside a newer Discount Function, which can see the delivery address, while still handling the case where it is blank. 🚚 Looking for real shipping discounts, not just labels. A merchant says most shipping apps they tried just print labels at regular rates or barely better. They want an app that compares rates across carriers and actually lowers the cost per parcel, and ask other store owners which one delivered real savings. Worth following if shipping costs are eating into your holiday margins. | |
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| | 🖥️ POS refuses baskets with more than one item. A retailer running Shopify POS on iPads through the new POS Hub over wired Ethernet says baskets with two or more items would not check out, though every connection looked fine. They also saw two POS windows open while the iPad was locked in Guided Access. They are trying to rule out automatic discounts, the Hub and a wider POS bug, and ask who has seen it. | |
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| | Three remote roles posted in the last two weeks, each linked to its own posting with the source named. Each posting is linked from the source named on its line, with the date it was posted. Check the details on the posting itself. | |
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