| | Hello there. Tuesday's Shopify news is about where the money goes: Google is letting more merchants take checkout inside AI Mode, Prime Big Deal Days set a fresh October benchmark, and two merchants found out the hard way how payouts can quietly change. In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into: - Google is rolling out a Merchant Center hub that lets US merchants add a checkout button to listings in AI Mode and Gemini.
- October's Prime Big Deal Days drove $9.86B in US online sales across all retailers, up 8.5% on last year.
- One merchant found Capital repayments buried under payout Adjustments, and another lost their payout account to a hacker.
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| | 🔎 Google opens checkout inside AI Mode to more merchants. Google started rolling out a UCP integration hub in Merchant Center, Shopifreaks reports, so US merchants can add a checkout button to product listings in AI Mode and Gemini. Shoppers finish the purchase without leaving Google. Until now that checkout was limited to a smaller group. If your catalog already feeds Merchant Center, check the hub to see whether your store qualifies before holiday traffic starts. 🧱 POS extensions can now report which version is running. Shopify's developer changelog says shopify.extension.version now returns the running version of a POS extension, using the same name shown on the Versions page in the Dev Dashboard. It is an opaque name, not a number, so compare it for equality only. For stores with custom POS tools, this makes it easier for your developer to confirm every register is on the release you expect. | |
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| | 📈 October deal days hit $9.86B in US online sales. US shoppers spent $9.86B online across all retailers during Amazon's two-day Prime Big Deal Days, according to Shopifreaks, up 8.5% from $9.09B last October and just under Adobe's $9.9B forecast. Discounts of up to 20% nudged buyers toward pricier items. It is a useful early read on how deal-hungry shoppers will be when your own BFCM offers go live. 🏷️ B2B buyers cannot see that their catalog price is a discount. A Shopify Plus merchant asks for an option to keep retail compare-at prices visible in discounted B2B catalogs. Right now wholesale customers see only their price, with no sign it is below retail, so some assume they are not getting a deal at all. If you sell B2B on Plus, add your vote and consider spelling out the discount in your onboarding emails meanwhile. 📱 The mobile app makes abandoned cart reviews slow going. A merchant who checks abandoned carts on the train wants a swipe or tap to move to the next one in the Shopify mobile app instead of backing out to the list every time. It is a small request, but a real one for anyone who works recovery on the go. Add your voice if you also work abandoned checkouts from your phone. | |
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| | 💸 Capital repayments now show up as plain Adjustments. A merchant says Shopify labels Capital repayments as Adjustments on payouts, the same label used for chargebacks, with no clickable breakdown. One payout held seven deductions totaling $1,797.41, and it took a support ticket to tell them apart. If you carry a Capital balance, reconcile payouts against your repayment schedule so a chargeback does not hide in the noise. 🔐 A hacker changed one store's payout account, and fixing it is stuck. A merchant got hacked and had their payout account switched to the attacker's details. Changing it back asks for the current bank details, which are now the fraudster's, so they are locked out while a ticket sits open. They have since reset email, password and two-step login. It is a good prompt to review who has staff access and turn on two-step authentication today. 📦 What is your stock actually worth at cost? A community post digs into inventory valuation: Shopify stores quantities and a cost per item, but never multiplies them for you, so the number comes from a report, an app or a spreadsheet. The answer swings on how your tool treats units with no cost entered. Worth checking before year-end, when a blank cost field can quietly understate what is on your shelves. | |
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| | 🤖 Do store chatbots do anything beyond reciting the product page? A store owner counted 1,460 chatbot apps in the App Store and asks whether any are worth it, since the ones on bigger stores mostly summarize product text and answer where-is-my-order. The thread is collecting what merchants actually use and what moved sales. Read it before you add another widget to your storefront. 🧪 Custom stores may have lost access to cart validation functions. A developer can no longer enable a cart validation function as a checkout rule on a custom store, even though the same setup worked on earlier stores. They are asking whether custom stores were blocked from using functions and when. If your checkout rules rely on a custom app, confirm they still install before you change anything ahead of the holidays. | |
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| | 📅 Shopify Editions gathers every product change twice a year. Shopify's Editions hub collects everything new across the platform every six months. Keep it bookmarked for the full list of changes in one place instead of piecing them together from scattered posts. | |
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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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