Rfid Sleeves For Credit Cards

... life remote scanning of your credit cards is practically mythical. Canadian and... new travel items just for RFID protection? No. My new travel... purse happens to have an RFID protected pocket, but I didn't... really worried, you can buy sleeves for your credit cards.

I keep my contactless credit cards and debit cards in RFID protective sleeves so they can't be read and there is no danger of them clashing.

I didn't think much about RFID protection until my credit card was skimmed on... trip, I bought thin, metallic sleeves for my cards. I use them at home ...

Howdy y’all. I’m a 47-year-old sales rep from Houston, Texas, and I spend a stupid amount of time in airports. Seriously. Some months I feel like I live inside Terminal C. Between work cards, hotel keycards, credit cards, transit passes, and all the tap-to-pay stuff now, my wallet basically turned into a tiny radio tower. I never really thought much about RFID skimming until a buddy of mine got hit with fraudulent charges after traveling last year. Bank caught it eventually, but it still freaked me out. That’s what sent me down the rabbit hole looking at RFID blockers and wallet protection stuff online. Most of it honestly looked gimmicky as hell. Cheap Amazon sleeves. Weird “military-grade” wallets. Random cards claiming to stop hackers with “quantum encryption” or whatever. Then I kept seeing Guardality Safe Card Protection pop up. At first I assumed it was another overhyped Facebook product, but curiosity got me. First Impression The card itself is surprisingly normal-looking. Basically the thickness of a standard credit card, maybe slightly thicker. Slid it into my wallet next to my main cards and forgot about it almost immediately. No batteries. No app. No setup. From what I read, it works by blocking or disrupting RFID/NFC signals used by contactless readers. Guardality says it’s designed for 13.56 MHz contactless cards and passports. Honestly, I’m not an engineer. I just wanted to know if the thing actually worked. The Test That Sold Me I did a simple real-world test at my office. My work badge uses RFID for building access. Normally I hold it near the scanner and the door unlocks instantly. So I tried putting the Guardality card directly behind the badge and scanned again. Nothing. No beep. No unlock. Dead silence. Tried it a couple more times and same result. That’s when I realized: okay… this thing is actually doing something. I also tested it at a grocery store self-checkout with a tap-to-pay card in my wallet. With the Guardality card placed against it, the reader wouldn’t pick up the payment card properly. That lined up with how RFID blocking cards are generally supposed to function. Similar products use shielding or jamming methods to interfere with contactless scanning. What I Personally Liked Biggest thing honestly? Peace of mind. I travel constantly: airports conventions crowded bars public transit hotels And I stopped feeling paranoid about somebody standing too close with some scanner in crowded places. A few other things I liked: ultra slim no charging waterproof no extra wallet bulk works passively in background I also sat on my wallet a million times and the card still looks fine. The Complaints I Saw Online To keep this honest, I definitely saw complaints too. Some people said it “didn’t work,” but reading deeper, a lot sounded like either: improper wallet placement fake versions unrealistic expectations A blocking card isn’t magic. Placement matters. And yeah… there are clearly knockoff versions floating around online already. Even Trustpilot reviews mention confusing sellers and copycat products. I also found some criticism from security researchers saying certain RFID blocking cards can potentially be bypassed depending on the technology used. So no, this isn’t some invisible force field making you immune to every kind of fraud forever. But as an extra layer of wallet protection? It made sense to me. The Real Deal What I liked about Guardality is that it’s simple. No subscriptions. No weird setup. No giant tactical wallet nonsense. Just a slim card sitting quietly in the wallet doing its thing. And honestly, after testing it myself, I do think the shielding works for normal everyday RFID/NFC scans. The biggest thing is avoiding the fake versions online because there seem to be a TON of copycat sites and cheap clones already. TL;DR I tried Guardality Safe Card Protection expecting another gimmicky internet security product, but after about a month I actually ended up liking it. My own RFID tests showed it blocking scans, it added zero bulk to my wallet, and it gave me some peace of mind while traveling. It’s definitely not magic or a guarantee against every type of fraud, but as an extra RFID protection layer it worked better than I expected. I’ll put the link to the official manufacturer site in the comments because there seem to be a lot of fake versions floating around online already. submitted by /u/angry_stupid to r/PokemonCardsDeals [link] [comments]

Bluetooth and NFC (Near Field Communication) are the "invisible handshakes" of the 2026 urban grid. While cellular basebands and OS telemetry (Field Notes 78 & 79) are the primary long-range tracking vectors, proximity-based signals are used to identify your exact physical location within a building or a crowd. In 2026, "Proximity Beacons" are embedded in everything from storefronts to public transit terminals. These beacons don't just wait for you to connect; they listen for the constant "advertisement" packets your phone broadcasts just to maintain its presence in the ecosystem. 1. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Advertisement Leak Even when your phone is not paired with a device, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is constantly broadcasting packets to let other devices know it exists. The Signature: These packets contain your device’s MAC address and "Service Data." In 2026, the Grid utilizes Signal Fingerprinting. Even if your phone randomizes its MAC address, the unique "Clock Skew" (microscopic variations in the radio hardware's timing) acts as a persistent, unchangeable identifier. The Risk: Urban grids use dense clusters of BLE receivers to track your movement through a city with sub-meter accuracy. This data is correlated with facial recognition (Field Note 74) to link a physical face to a specific mobile node. 2. The NFC Relay and Skimming Threat NFC is often considered "safe" because of its extremely short range (usually under 4cm). However, in 2026, NFC Relay Attacks have become a common tool for "Contactless De-identification." The Attack: An adversary with a high-gain antenna can "wake up" your phone's NFC chip from several feet away. They don't need to steal your money; they just need to trigger a response from your wallet app (Apple Pay/Google Wallet). The Handshake: This response contains a unique token that, while not revealing your credit card number, provides a persistent identifier that links your physical proximity to a specific digital wallet ID. 3. Hardening Strategy: Radio Silence Protocols To prevent your mobile node from becoming a proximity beacon, you must enforce a strict "Off-by-Default" policy. Step 1: Disabling Bluetooth Scanning In most mobile operating systems, turning off Bluetooth in the "Quick Settings" menu does not actually stop the radio. It only disconnects current peripherals. Action: You must go into Settings > Security & Privacy > Location > Location Services > Bluetooth Scanning and toggle it OFF. Effect: This prevents the OS from using the Bluetooth radio to "improve location accuracy" by scanning for nearby beacons even when Bluetooth is supposedly disabled. Step 2: Neutralizing "Fast Pair" and "Find My" Features like Google Fast Pair or Apple’s Find My network turn your phone into a beacon that is constantly communicating with other nearby devices. Action: Disable these features entirely on high-risk nodes. If you lose your device, the Find My network might help you find it—but it also helps the Grid find you every second before that. Step 3: Physical NFC Shielding Since NFC is often triggered by hardware-level proximity, software switches can sometimes be bypassed or "woken up" by malicious POS (Point of Sale) terminals. Action: Use an RFID/NFC blocking sleeve or a hardened phone case with integrated shielding. Only remove the device from the shield at the exact moment you intend to make a trusted transaction. 4. Comparison of Proximity Tracking Vectors Vector Max Range Primary Threat Stealth Level Bluetooth (Classic) 100m Eavesdropping / Exploits Low (Visible) Bluetooth (BLE) 50m Persistent Tracking High (Background) NFC 4cm Token Skimming / Relay High (Targeted) Ultra-Wideband (UWB) 10m Sub-meter Positioning High (Always On) 5. Implementation Checklist [ ] Disable "Bluetooth Scanning" and "Wi-Fi Scanning" in the system location settings. [ ] Disable "Ultra-Wideband (UWB)" if your device supports it (found in Connection Preferences). [ ] Set Bluetooth to "Off" (not just disconnected) through the main settings menu. [ ] Audit your "Nearby Share" or "AirDrop" settings: Set to "Hidden" or "Off" at all times. [ ] Use a physical Faraday sleeve for transit through "Smart City" zones where beacon density is high. By killing these proximity signals, you stop the constant "shouting" your device does in the background. In the 2026 urban grid, silence is the only way to remain a ghost in the machine. Stay Shielded. Stay Sovereign. #BluetoothPrivacy #NFCSecurity #ProximityTracking #OpSec2026 submitted by /u/just_vaSi to r/privacychain [link] [comments]

Hi r/Shopify - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter, which I've published weekly since 2021. I was invited by the Mods of this subreddit to share my weekly e-commerce news recaps (ie: shorter versions of my full editions) to r/Shopify. Although my news recaps aren't strictly about Shopify (some weeks Shopify is covered more than others), I hope they bring value to your business no matter what platform you're on. Let's dive into this week's top stories... STAT OF THE WEEK: AI traffic to U.S. retailers increased 393% in Q1 year-over-year and 269% over the previous 12 months, according to Adobe data. Visitors who arrive from AI search spend 48% longer on the website, browse 13% more pages per visit, and generate 37% more revenue per visit than those who arrive from other sources. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Elon Musk, raising concerns about the upcoming launch of X Money. Apparently this upcoming digital wallet that no one uses yet could destroy America as we know it. Warren wrote: “If your track record operating X is any indication of how you’ll operate X Money, consumers, our national security, and the stability of the financial system may be at risk.” She went on to address Musk’s attempt to dismantle the CFPB prior to launching his own financial product, X partnering with Cross River Bank, which she called a “repeat offender” of unsafe and unsound practices, and the fact that X Money preview matterials suggested taht users can earn up to 6% APY on deposit accounts, questioning what “risky investments” or “gimmicks” the company would be employing to offer that. UPS announced that RFID sensing technology is now installed in all U.S. package delivery vehicles, across its domestic delivery facilities, and in all 5,500+ UPS Store locations, automatically tracking packages throughout their journey without requiring manual scanning at each handoff. The company invested over $100M into the project, which could one day save workers from having to manually scan 18M packages per day, which I’d say is well worth the investment! Technically RFID could be exclusively utilized across UPS’ network as of today, but it’ll be a gradual roll out. Most shippers still don’t have the hardware needed to “print” these RFID chips yet, though UPS is working with high-volume shippers to equip them with it. As for smaller warehouses or home-based businesses, it doesn’t quite make financial sense yet, as the RFID printers can cost a couple grand or more, but the costs will likely continue to go down. Newly unsealed court records have revealed what most Amazon sellers already knew and have been saying for years — Amazon punished sellers if their prices were lower on other websites. The documents include internal e-mails, deposition testimony, and confidential corporate presentations that California Attorney General Rob Bonta obtained as part of a civil case his office launched in 2022 accusing Amazon of large-scale price-fixing. The Guardian obtained and reviewed the documents, which contain evidence that Amazon employees have proactively sought to undermine market competition and were aware of the effects of their actions on prices. For years, Amazon has defended that its pricing policies were part of the company’s “commitment to featuring low prices to earn and maintain customer trust.” However, by simultaneously charging sellers higher fees than other platforms and punishing those sellers when they try to offer lower prices elsewhere (because they have the margin to do so), Amazon has effectively set a price floor across the entire Internet. And that my friends, is an abuse of market power. OpenAI is beginning to price some ChatGPT ads on a cost-per-click basis instead of a cost-per-impression model, which is how it launched the offering, according to The Information sources. The source also said that OpenAI plans to introduce ads aimed at getting people to take a specific action like making a purchase or downloading an app, though the company hasn’t put a timeline on when that could happen. (Wait, its original ads weren’t designed to get people to take an action? Does OpenAI know what “ads” are?) To support the shift toward performance-based advertising, Digiday reports that OpenAI is building a conversion tracking pixel that fires a signal back to the ad platform when a user completes an action on an advertiser’s website after seeing an ad. The pixel is already live for select advertisers in the pilot and supports event types including lead created, order created, page viewed, subscription created, and trial started. Amazon has quietly expanded its Amazon Autos car sales program, which launched in late 2024 starting with Hyundai, to now include Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Chevrolet, and Jeep across more than 130 U.S. cities. The platform lets customers browse inventory from nearby participating dealerships and complete most of their financing paperwork without spending the whole day at a showroom. Technically, due to local and state laws, customers can only purchase cars from dealerships in some regions, and Amazon Autos helps streamline the process between the two parties. Why does Amazon care about auto sales? Ads, baby! Car companies are projected to spend over $30B on ads this year, and Amazon Autos is a way for Amazon to capture some of that market. Google rolled out two new features for AI Mode on Chrome desktop including a side-by-side browsing view and the ability to add open tabs, images, or files directly into AI Mode searches. With side-by-side mode, Google says its goal is to make it easier to explore websites, compare details, and ask follow-up questions without losing the context of your search. For example, if you were searching for a new phone, you can click on a link to open the retailer’s website alongside AI Mode and then ask specific questions like, “Does this have a 3.5mm headphone jack?” AI Mode will then use context from the page and from across the web to answer your questions. Google also revealed a new way to search across open Chrome tabs, letting users tap a new plus menu on the New Tab page to add tabs, images, or files like PDFs directly into their AI Mode searches and mix and match multiple sources for more contextually relevant answers. So basically now you never have to leave Google and they can show you ads all the time! As a user, I’ll admit, I love it. As an advocate for an open web, I have concerns. Allbirds, the D2C shoe company that lost 99% of its market value since its 2021 IPO and recently sold its brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group for $39M, announced that it is changing its name to “NewBird AI” and pivoting its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider. The company has obtained $50M in financing to fund the new venture, news of which sent the stock soaring over 500% into “meme stock” territory. It has since settled to around $11.40 per share, or about 350% higher than where it started. To summarize my thoughts on the pivot: “Sure, why not?” I’m a huge fan of pivoting as a business, and have made some successful pivots myself over the years (albeit not as drastic as switching industries altogether). Some of the biggest household names in history have had major pivots themselves including Nokia, which started as a paper mill and rubber boots company, and YouTube, which started out as a video dating website. That said, can Allbirds pull it off? Nah, probably not. They couldn’t even make it in e-commerce. They’re going to get eaten alive in AI infrastructure, especially trying to go at it with just $50M in the bank. Sam Altman eats $50M for breakfast. Salesforce launched Headless 360, a major platform overhaul that exposes its core capabilities as APIs, MCP tools, and CLI commands so that AI agents can access data and workflows directly, without requiring a human to navigate a UI. The launch includes 60+ new MCP tools and coding skills giving AI agents direct access to Salesforce data and workflows, a new Experience Layer that renders interactive agent components natively across Slack, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Teams, and Agentforce Vibes 2.0, an AI development partner with multi-model support including Claude Sonnet and GPT-5. On the governance and deployment side, new tools include a Testing Center, Observability and Session Tracing, Agent Fabric for managing agents across vendors, and the AgentExchange marketplace with 10,000+ apps and 1,000+ Agentforce agents. Salesforce is taking a big bet on agentic commerce — but it’s one they’ll likely get right. Later in this edition, I share a story about how Amazon is dealing with a ton of bloated AI-built software and duplicate data, which is becoming a very real problem for companies leveraging AI to build out functionality. Salesforce Headless 360 aims to solve that problem by making its data directly accessible to your agents so that it doesn’t have to be duplicated across dozens of platforms. Meta is projected to surpass Google in global ad revenue for the first time in 2026, expected to generate $243.46B this year compared to Google’s $239.54B, according to Emarketer. If that happens, it would be the first time that Google has lost the top spot, with Meta’s ad revenue growing 24.1% compared to Google’s 11.9%. Will it actually happen? Let’s check back in January next year and see if they were right. Meta says that its AI-powered recommendation systems and Reels have been the primary growth drivers, with Reels having surpassed a $50B annual run rate and Advantage+ on track toward a $60B run rate. QVC Group, the parent company of QVC and Home Shopping Network, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, entering into a restructuring support agreement to reduce its debt from $6.6B to $1.3B. Good lord… who in their right mind kept lending to QVC?! The company posted an operating loss of $809M in 2024, with sales down more than 30% from their $14B peak in 2020. QVC Group says that it will continue to operate its TV shopping channels and social media presences as normal, with plans to emerge from the restructuring in less than two months, but even if they do, they’re facing an uphill battle after that. Every influencer on the planet has become a mini-QVC, hawking goods on live streams. Although QVC has grown its TikTok presence to over 1M followers, at this point, it’s just another livestreaming account. WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu agreed to a consent order with the FTC and a handful of U.S. states over allegations that the trio has illegally colluded since 2018 to implement brand safety standards that direct advertisers away from certain media platforms and publishers, leading to a boycott of conservative media platforms. Moving forward, the companies agreed not to coordinate with one another on restricting ad spend based on perceived political viewpoints or shared brand safety standards. The order follows a similar consent order applied to Omnicom as a condition of its $13.5B acquisition of IPG last year. The FTC has scrutinized advertising and media groups heavily since 2024 when a congressional investigation found that members of GARM colluded to withhold ad spend from conservative outlets like Fox, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart, which led to Elon Musk’s X suing the organization’s parent company, eventually leading to GARM shutting down. Lovable launched Lovable Payments, enabling builders to add native monetization to their apps through integrated Stripe, Paddle, or Shopify connections, with support for subscriptions, one-time payments, and VAT and tax handling across 200+ countries. Paddle serves as merchant of record for those who choose it, handling global tax compliance automatically, while Stripe offers more flexibility for those who want direct payment processing. The launch aims to position Lovable as an idea-to-revenue platform by reducing the time it takes for builders to begin selling their products after creating them on the platform. Triller, the TikTok alternative that raised over $420M going public in 2024, reported zero revenue from its social media and streaming businesses in 2025, with all of its roughly $22M in revenue coming from a financial services business tied to the Hong Kong firm it merged with. LOL, really? $0.00? You couldn’t sell ONE single ad? Or embed Google Adsense into your platform or something? The company’s app was reportedly unable to load videos as of December, its auditor cited “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” and Nasdaq delisted the stock in December for failing to file its quarterly and annual reports on time. Triller has provided no explanation in its filing for why its media businesses generated no revenue last year or why its app remains unusable, but we can go ahead and conclude that it’s over for the once-promising TikTok competitor. eBay is testing AI-generated fashion model images by adding them to seller listings without the seller’s knowledge or approval, with at least one seller discovering an altered image in their listing that distorted sleeve details and changed the collar from their original photo. Liz Morton of Value Added Resource notes that the tests are the latest in a pattern of eBay inserting AI-generated content into listings without seller consent, including AI-generated FAQs in search results, AI description summaries shown on Facebook Marketplace, and AI item detail highlights added to listing pages, none of which sellers can opt out of. Speaking of unwelcomed AI features… Etsy is developing an unreleased AI Highlights feature that would generate short summaries of item listing details to help listings stand out to shoppers, and is showing some sellers a pop-up asking them to review and rate the accuracy of the summaries for their items. Early testers report the pop-up appears but shows no actual summary content, leaving sellers uncertain about what the feature will look like and raising questions about whether they will be able to correct inaccurate AI-generated details or receive protection from returns and negative feedback when the AI gets things wrong — which it likely will very often. Amazon opened its first Global Warehousing and Distribution center in Shenzhen, China, an all-in-one logistics hub that handles local storage, customs clearance, cross-border shipping, and inventory transfers for Chinese sellers targeting U.S. customers. The company claims it will cut storage costs by up to 45% compared to holding inventory in U.S. warehouses, which could help it keep up with Chinese rivals who operate a similar model. The move comes as Temu’s share of the global cross-border e-commerce market surged from less than 1% to 24% last year, putting it on par with Amazon according to an International Post Corporation survey. Amazon plans to extend the model to the Yangtze River Delta and expand distribution to Europe and Japan. World, the company co-founded by Sam Altman known for its iris-scanning orbs, launched a new standalone World ID app and announced new and expanded integrations with companies including Shopify, Zoom, DocuSign, Tinder, Okta, and VanEck. The expanded platform introduces three new capabilities through its AgentKit developer toolkit including Agent Delegation, which lets users authorize an AI agent to act on their behalf with a verified human identity attached, Human in the Loop, which creates a cryptographic proof that a real human approved a specific action without storing any personal data, and Agentic Commerce, which lets merchants verify that a purchase is backed by a unique human to prevent bot-driven fraud on limited inventory drops. Now it just needs to convince the world that submitting their biometrics to a Sam Altman-owned company is a trustworthy proposition. Uber launched a returns feature through its Uber Eats app that lets customers schedule a driver pickup for items they want to return to a store, with a fee calculated based on the driver’s time and distance, and receive an instant refund for the item as soon as the driver picks it up. The items must have been originally purchased through Uber Eats and have a minimum $20 value to be eligible for returns pickup. The feature builds on Uber’s “Return a Package” option, which launched in 2023 and lets customers send up to five packages to USPS, FedEx, or UPS locations. Initial retailers at launch include Target, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Petco, At Home, and several others, with more to be added over time. Unfortunately for drivers, they are required to go directly from the customer’s home to the store in order to complete the active trip and accept additional gigs. It’d be great if Uber allowed drivers to complete the return within a set timeframe, say 24 hours, so they could fit it in between other rides rather than having to make a dedicated trip to the store. Google is rolling out two new AI Mode features in the U.S. over the coming weeks, including the ability to have its agentic AI call local stores on your behalf to check whether a specific item is in stock and track prices for individual hotels directly in Search. For example, you can describe what you need, such as, “I’m going to a wedding in two hours and I just sharted in my only pair of dress pants. Which stores near me have a pair of 34×32 ivory white dress pants in stock, and can I get there before the ceremony starts?” Google will then make the calls and send you the details afterwards. (Do any businesses actually pick up calls from Google anymore?) Additionally, you can now track the prices of a specific hotel location and receive e-mail alerts if the price changes during your chosen dates. eBay buyers in the U.S. will no longer be able to cancel orders after they win an auction, starting May 13th, reversing a several year old policy that allowed buyers to cancel their order up until the seller shipped the item. The company told sellers that all auction sales will be final moving forward and that it will support them in declining any cancellation requests buyers make directly, as well as protect them from negative feedback if they decline a cancellation. Buyers will still be able to reach out directly to sellers and request cancellations, but the sellers will not be obligated to approve them. Good move for sellers, as many buyers were treating bids like an “Is this item still available?” button instead of a contractual obligation to make a purchase. RedNote, the Chinese social platform that briefly went viral in early 2025 when Americans thought TikTok was going to be banned, is now opening offices in Palo Alto and New York, hiring founding team members, and launching RedShop, a cross border marketplace selling Chinese goods to consumers in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. RedNote, which was founded in Shanghai in 2013, has grown from a shopping and lifestyle app in China to an “everything app,” with more than 300M monthly active users, and reportedly profited over $3B in 2025, higher than the profits of Pinterest and Snap for comparison. However, it’s got an uphill battle ahead of it in the U.S., as English-language content is currently scarce on the platform and Google search interest for the app has diminished since early last year. eBay is planning to close its San Francisco office when its lease expires at the end of September and reassign the 198 software engineers, applied researchers, directors, and financial analysts that work there to the company’s San Jose headquarters. The closure follows eBay’s February layoff of roughly 800 employees, including 28 workers at the San Francisco location and 243 in San Jose. The two cities are about 50 miles away from each other so most employees won’t necessarily have to move homes. They just might end up with a longer commute, or a shorter one depending on where they live. Google is replacing Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets, and campaign-level broad match with AI Max for Search, an AI-powered advertising platform that uses landing pages, keywords, and creative assets to understand user intent in real time rather than relying on manual adjustments. Google says campaigns using AI Max’s full suite of features generated an average of 7% more conversions at a similar cost per action compared to legacy settings by combining an advertiser’s existing assets with better signals and advanced controls, proactively tailoring responses to specific queries so they are aligned with the business’s goals. The rollout began last week with voluntary upgrade tools for DSA users, with a second phase in September that will automatically migrate all remaining eligible campaigns, at which point advertisers will no longer be able to create new DSA campaigns. Amazon’s push for employees to use AI tools internally has resulted in bloated software and data duplication, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The document said that AI “dramatically lowers the barrier to building new tools,” which is “making our tool duplication problem worse. More duplication is being created faster, and less of it is being cleaned up.” The company’s solution — more AI! LOL. The company is exploring ways to use AI to identify and flag the duplicate tools and encourage teams to consolidate them before the overlap becomes too hard to unwind. More than 50 delivery drivers for Pave it Forward Logistics, an Amazon Delivery Service Partner in Lebanon, Tennessee, were left without pay after the company abruptly closed on March 31 with no advance notice, leaving some workers owed up to $2,000 in wages and PTO. Owner Jerame Stout claims Amazon withheld $600,000 in account receivables that left him without funds to pay workers, which Amazon did not directly address, though it provided a statement saying that DSP owners are independent business owners responsible for their own payroll and has been facilitating connections between the affected drivers and other DSPs in the area. Former workers say Stout has been unresponsive to their requests for payment and plan to sue, which Amazon wants no part of. Analysts estimate that enterprise clients account for less than 5% to 10% of Shopify’s revenue, with the vast majority of its business still coming from small and medium-sized merchants, though the company doesn’t publicly disclose the breakdown. Analyst Liam Gallagher notes that although Shopify began its push for enterprise clients in 2023, the slow ramp is partly structural, as the sales cycle for large clients takes 12 to 18 months, and enterprise brands tend to adopt Shopify’s tools à la carte rather than migrating their full operations to the platform, which equates to less revenue for Shopify. Honestly, 5–10% isn’t too shabby for a relatively new enterprise offering. My guess is that graph of enterprise clients is about to see a very sharp spike! A Texas man was sentenced to 23 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution to victims after being found guilty of helping to orchestrate a crypto scam that ultimately defrauded $20M from nearly 1,000 investors. Robert Dunlap served as a trustee of a project that sold the fictional token Meta-1 Coin (unrelated to Meta Platforms), which he claimed was backed by a $1B art collection made up of works by Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh and $44B in gold, and used automated trading bots to artificially inflate the market price and trading volume of the coin. However he never actually distributed the coins and instead used the investor funds to buy a Ferrari and other things for himself. Well, I’m sure it was fun while it lasted. In lawsuits this week… Google is facing up to $218B in mass arbitration claims from advertisers after federal courts ruled it illegally monopolized both the online search and ad tech markets, with the first claims expected to be filed this week. Mass arbitration, where 25 or more claims are pooled together, gives claimants more leverage and a greater likelihood of settlement awards than individual claims, so Google might actually take a big hit on this one. Shein and Temu are facing class-action lawsuits accusing them of pocketing “windfall profits” by raising prices up to 377% to offset tariffs that the Supreme Court later struck down as unlawful, with plaintiffs arguing customers are entitled to refunds. The lawsuits are part of a broader wave of similar litigation hitting retailers including Costco, Lululemon, and EssilorLuxottica, after courts ordered Customs and Border Protection to refund $166B in now-invalidated tariff payments. Two former Amazon employees filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging the company systematically underpaid women by classifying their roles as lower-paying “non-tech” jobs even when they performed identical work to higher-paid male colleagues. The complaint closely mirrors a 2023 class-action filed by three women on Amazon’s Worldwide Communications team that survived a dismissal attempt in 2024 and is still ongoing. Amazon is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that it intentionally made early versions of its Fire TV Stick devices obsolete over time “before the expiration of their useful life.” I have a feeling Amazon is about to face a similar lawsuit for bricking its original Kindles. Aptoide, a Lisbon-based alternative mobile app store, filed a lawsuit against Google for allegedly using its market position to suppress third-party app stores on Android, seeking an injunction against the practices and unspecified damages. The lawsuit follows Aptoide’s 2014 EU antitrust complaint against Google and comes shortly after Google resolved its separate dispute with Epic Games last month by reducing Play Store commission rates to 20% and announcing plans to support sideloading of third-party app stores. Amazon filed a lawsuit against a Telegram-based group called RBK for orchestrating a refund fraud scheme that stole over $4M in products including graphics cards, laptops, and drones by submitting fake police reports about missing packages to trick Amazon customer service into issuing refunds. RBK charged customers up to 30% of the refund value for its services and had over 1,000 Telegram subscribers potentially involved in the scheme. Google, Meta and Apple are urging a federal appellate court to throw out claims that they facilitated online gambling by processing in-app payments for virtual casino currency, arguing Section 230 shields them from liability. A district court judge ruled last year that payment processing falls outside Section 230’s protections as a “generic business activity” rather than a publishing act, which the platforms are now asking the 9th Circuit to reverse. In layoffs this week… eBay laid off the remaining team members from KnownOrigin, an NFT marketplace it acquired in June 2022 for a reported $68M and subsequently shut down by the end of 2024, alongside other Web3 staff in its Manchester office. Wow! Who could’ve guessed that the entire NFT market would quickly collapse? In corporate shakeups this week… Route, a post-purchase platform offering package protection, order tracking, and returns management for e-commerce brands, appointed Arman Panjwani as CFO and Alexandria Orr as VP of Enterprise Revenue. Panjwani previously served as Chief Strategy and Financial Officer at LawnStarter, while Orr comes from enterprise sales roles at Shopify and Salesforce. Google hired Khartoon Weiss, who most recently served as VP and GM of Global Business Solutions at TikTok, to serve as its VP of U.S. Mid-Market Sales, Commerce to oversee the company’s mid-market advertising clients in retail and e-commerce. Google also hired Pete Metcalfe, former chief marketing officer of THG Beauty, as director of retail for the UK and Ireland. OpenAI hired Tom Duff Gordon, who spent nearly four years as Coinbase’s VP of international policy, to lead its policy operations across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Anthropic appointed Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, to its board of directors, as it expands its enterprise push into healthcare. Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, resigned from Figma’s board after reports that Anthropic would be launching a design tool, which it did. Meta’s director of engineering in trust and safety at its London office, Patrik Torstensson, left after nearly four years to join Lovable as head of engineering, telling Business Insider he felt like “more of a passenger than a driver” at Meta. Meta poached its fifth founding member from Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, hiring Joshua Gross, the engineer who built the company’s flagship product Tinker from scratch, to lead engineering teams at Meta Superintelligence Labs. OpenAI’s head of Sora, Bill Peebles, is leaving the company after OpenAI wound down the video generation tool last month, with VP of AI for Science Kevin Weil also departing and his Prism scientific workspace being folded into the Codex desktop app. TikTok Shop appears to be gearing up for expansion into Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Nordic countries, based on job listings for its strategic readiness team that specifically reference those markets, as well as customer solutions manager roles requiring fluency in Dutch or Polish. TikTok has already created references to seller account pages for those regions, though they are not yet live. The expansion would extend TikTok Shop’s European footprint beyond its current six markets, which includes the UK, Spain, Ireland, France, Italy, and Germany, where TikTok Shop captured 15% of consumers within a year of launch in the country. The European Commission is threatening to force Meta to stop using WhatsApp policies that allegedly block competing AI companies from offering their services through the platform. Regulators believe that Meta is using its control over the messaging platform to give its own AI an unfair advantage by making it harder for rivals like OpenAI to reach businesses through the app. Meta’s defense is that the EU is trying to let big tech companies use WhatsApp Business for free, which would shift the cost onto the small businesses already paying for it, but that’s extremely misleading. The Commission is merely asking Meta to revert back to its previous terms, which treated competing AI companies like any other business client and charged them the same rate, not give them free access that would shift the cost to small businesses. Bangladesh, which imports nearly 95% of its petroleum, has been experiencing severe fuel shortages since early March when the U.S.-Iran war disrupted oil tanker shipments, forcing the country’s ride-hailing drivers to spend hours in line waiting to fill their gas tanks. The gas station queues have resulted in drivers spending hours of their work day waiting for gas, cutting their income nearly in half. Platforms like Uber and Pathao have maintained the same commission rates and fares throughout the crisis, leaving drivers to absorb the full financial impact of time lost waiting in line and reduced trip volumes. To help ease the pain, Bangladesh’s government launched a QR code-based Fuel Pass rationing system at seven stations in Dhaka, but drivers say the registration website is frequently inaccessible due to server problems. India’s government decided not to move forward with a proposal to require Apple, Samsung, Google, and other phone makers to preinstall the country’s biometric identification app, Aadhaar, on phones. Aadhaar is a 12-digit biometric ID tied to fingerprints and iris scans held by nearly 1.34 billion Indian residents and used widely for banking, telecom, and airport verification, but has faced criticism from privacy advocates over past data leaks. India’s IT ministry reviewed the proposal and said it “is not in favour of mandating the pre-installation of the Aadhaar App on smartphones,” but gave no reason for the decision. Hokodo, a European B2B buy now pay later platform that served more than 100,000 business buyers across 10 countries, has ceased operations after more than eight years in business during which it facilitated more than €500M in financed invoices, and just one year after raising €10M. The company’s founders attributed the shutdown to scaling before the business had truly earned it, taking too long to narrow focus, and building too much product complexity. Co-founders Louis Carbonnier, Richard Thornton, and Sami Ben Hatit have moved on from the business and announced the launch of Liquidity Labs, a consulting firm helping B2B companies modernize their trade credit and cash flow operations using AI. Wait, were you guys busy launching a new business instead of saving your existing one? 🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… A worker died at Amazon’s distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon on April 6th, and managers instructed employees to turn away from the scene and keep working. While a coworker attempted to perform CPR on the lifeless man, one supervisor told staff to “just turn around and not look, let’s get back to work.” Supervisors reportedly kept the information that someone had died from most employees for several hours, and then eventually sent them home at the end of a 3:45pm break with no explanation and without a full shift’s pay. Amazon was quick to provide a statement attributing the worker’s death to a pre-existing medical condition. Does working under extreme conditions in an Amazon distribution center count as “pre-existing” in this scenario? Plus 8 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Instacart acquiring Instaleap. I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week! PAUL PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments. submitted by /u/adventurepaul to r/shopify [link] [comments]

Hi r/ecommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Every week for the past 5 years I've posted a summary recap of the week's top stories on this subreddit, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition. Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news... STAT OF THE WEEK: AI traffic to U.S. retailers increased 393% in Q1 year-over-year and 269% over the previous 12 months, according to Adobe data. Visitors who arrive from AI search spend 48% longer on the website, browse 13% more pages per visit, and generate 37% more revenue per visit than those who arrive from other sources. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Elon Musk, raising concerns about the upcoming launch of X Money. Apparently this upcoming digital wallet that no one uses yet could destroy America as we know it. Warren wrote: “If your track record operating X is any indication of how you’ll operate X Money, consumers, our national security, and the stability of the financial system may be at risk.” She went on to address Musk’s attempt to dismantle the CFPB prior to launching his own financial product, X partnering with Cross River Bank, which she called a “repeat offender” of unsafe and unsound practices, and the fact that X Money preview matterials suggested taht users can earn up to 6% APY on deposit accounts, questioning what “risky investments” or “gimmicks” the company would be employing to offer that. UPS announced that RFID sensing technology is now installed in all U.S. package delivery vehicles, across its domestic delivery facilities, and in all 5,500+ UPS Store locations, automatically tracking packages throughout their journey without requiring manual scanning at each handoff. The company invested over $100M into the project, which could one day save workers from having to manually scan 18M packages per day, which I’d say is well worth the investment! Technically RFID could be exclusively utilized across UPS’ network as of today, but it’ll be a gradual roll out. Most shippers still don’t have the hardware needed to “print” these RFID chips yet, though UPS is working with high-volume shippers to equip them with it. As for smaller warehouses or home-based businesses, it doesn’t quite make financial sense yet, as the RFID printers can cost a couple grand or more, but the costs will likely continue to go down. Newly unsealed court records have revealed what most Amazon sellers already knew and have been saying for years — Amazon punished sellers if their prices were lower on other websites. The documents include internal e-mails, deposition testimony, and confidential corporate presentations that California Attorney General Rob Bonta obtained as part of a civil case his office launched in 2022 accusing Amazon of large-scale price-fixing. The Guardian obtained and reviewed the documents, which contain evidence that Amazon employees have proactively sought to undermine market competition and were aware of the effects of their actions on prices. For years, Amazon has defended that its pricing policies were part of the company’s “commitment to featuring low prices to earn and maintain customer trust.” However, by simultaneously charging sellers higher fees than other platforms and punishing those sellers when they try to offer lower prices elsewhere (because they have the margin to do so), Amazon has effectively set a price floor across the entire Internet. And that my friends, is an abuse of market power. OpenAI is beginning to price some ChatGPT ads on a cost-per-click basis instead of a cost-per-impression model, which is how it launched the offering, according to The Information sources. The source also said that OpenAI plans to introduce ads aimed at getting people to take a specific action like making a purchase or downloading an app, though the company hasn’t put a timeline on when that could happen. (Wait, its original ads weren’t designed to get people to take an action? Does OpenAI know what “ads” are?) To support the shift toward performance-based advertising, Digiday reports that OpenAI is building a conversion tracking pixel that fires a signal back to the ad platform when a user completes an action on an advertiser’s website after seeing an ad. The pixel is already live for select advertisers in the pilot and supports event types including lead created, order created, page viewed, subscription created, and trial started. Amazon has quietly expanded its Amazon Autos car sales program, which launched in late 2024 starting with Hyundai, to now include Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Chevrolet, and Jeep across more than 130 U.S. cities. The platform lets customers browse inventory from nearby participating dealerships and complete most of their financing paperwork without spending the whole day at a showroom. Technically, due to local and state laws, customers can only purchase cars from dealerships in some regions, and Amazon Autos helps streamline the process between the two parties. Why does Amazon care about auto sales? Ads, baby! Car companies are projected to spend over $30B on ads this year, and Amazon Autos is a way for Amazon to capture some of that market. Google rolled out two new features for AI Mode on Chrome desktop including a side-by-side browsing view and the ability to add open tabs, images, or files directly into AI Mode searches. With side-by-side mode, Google says its goal is to make it easier to explore websites, compare details, and ask follow-up questions without losing the context of your search. For example, if you were searching for a new phone, you can click on a link to open the retailer’s website alongside AI Mode and then ask specific questions like, “Does this have a 3.5mm headphone jack?” AI Mode will then use context from the page and from across the web to answer your questions. Google also revealed a new way to search across open Chrome tabs, letting users tap a new plus menu on the New Tab page to add tabs, images, or files like PDFs directly into their AI Mode searches and mix and match multiple sources for more contextually relevant answers. So basically now you never have to leave Google and they can show you ads all the time! As a user, I’ll admit, I love it. As an advocate for an open web, I have concerns. Allbirds, the D2C shoe company that lost 99% of its market value since its 2021 IPO and recently sold its brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group for $39M, announced that it is changing its name to “NewBird AI” and pivoting its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider. The company has obtained $50M in financing to fund the new venture, news of which sent the stock soaring over 500% into “meme stock” territory. It has since settled to around $11.40 per share, or about 350% higher than where it started. To summarize my thoughts on the pivot: “Sure, why not?” I’m a huge fan of pivoting as a business, and have made some successful pivots myself over the years (albeit not as drastic as switching industries altogether). Some of the biggest household names in history have had major pivots themselves including Nokia, which started as a paper mill and rubber boots company, and YouTube, which started out as a video dating website. That said, can Allbirds pull it off? Nah, probably not. They couldn’t even make it in e-commerce. They’re going to get eaten alive in AI infrastructure, especially trying to go at it with just $50M in the bank. Sam Altman eats $50M for breakfast. Salesforce launched Headless 360, a major platform overhaul that exposes its core capabilities as APIs, MCP tools, and CLI commands so that AI agents can access data and workflows directly, without requiring a human to navigate a UI. The launch includes 60+ new MCP tools and coding skills giving AI agents direct access to Salesforce data and workflows, a new Experience Layer that renders interactive agent components natively across Slack, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Teams, and Agentforce Vibes 2.0, an AI development partner with multi-model support including Claude Sonnet and GPT-5. On the governance and deployment side, new tools include a Testing Center, Observability and Session Tracing, Agent Fabric for managing agents across vendors, and the AgentExchange marketplace with 10,000+ apps and 1,000+ Agentforce agents. Salesforce is taking a big bet on agentic commerce — but it’s one they’ll likely get right. Later in this edition, I share a story about how Amazon is dealing with a ton of bloated AI-built software and duplicate data, which is becoming a very real problem for companies leveraging AI to build out functionality. Salesforce Headless 360 aims to solve that problem by making its data directly accessible to your agents so that it doesn’t have to be duplicated across dozens of platforms. Meta is projected to surpass Google in global ad revenue for the first time in 2026, expected to generate $243.46B this year compared to Google’s $239.54B, according to Emarketer. If that happens, it would be the first time that Google has lost the top spot, with Meta’s ad revenue growing 24.1% compared to Google’s 11.9%. Will it actually happen? Let’s check back in January next year and see if they were right. Meta says that its AI-powered recommendation systems and Reels have been the primary growth drivers, with Reels having surpassed a $50B annual run rate and Advantage+ on track toward a $60B run rate. QVC Group, the parent company of QVC and Home Shopping Network, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, entering into a restructuring support agreement to reduce its debt from $6.6B to $1.3B. Good lord… who in their right mind kept lending to QVC?! The company posted an operating loss of $809M in 2024, with sales down more than 30% from their $14B peak in 2020. QVC Group says that it will continue to operate its TV shopping channels and social media presences as normal, with plans to emerge from the restructuring in less than two months, but even if they do, they’re facing an uphill battle after that. Every influencer on the planet has become a mini-QVC, hawking goods on live streams. Although QVC has grown its TikTok presence to over 1M followers, at this point, it’s just another livestreaming account. WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu agreed to a consent order with the FTC and a handful of U.S. states over allegations that the trio has illegally colluded since 2018 to implement brand safety standards that direct advertisers away from certain media platforms and publishers, leading to a boycott of conservative media platforms. Moving forward, the companies agreed not to coordinate with one another on restricting ad spend based on perceived political viewpoints or shared brand safety standards. The order follows a similar consent order applied to Omnicom as a condition of its $13.5B acquisition of IPG last year. The FTC has scrutinized advertising and media groups heavily since 2024 when a congressional investigation found that members of GARM colluded to withhold ad spend from conservative outlets like Fox, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart, which led to Elon Musk’s X suing the organization’s parent company, eventually leading to GARM shutting down. Lovable launched Lovable Payments, enabling builders to add native monetization to their apps through integrated Stripe, Paddle, or Shopify connections, with support for subscriptions, one-time payments, and VAT and tax handling across 200+ countries. Paddle serves as merchant of record for those who choose it, handling global tax compliance automatically, while Stripe offers more flexibility for those who want direct payment processing. The launch aims to position Lovable as an idea-to-revenue platform by reducing the time it takes for builders to begin selling their products after creating them on the platform. Triller, the TikTok alternative that raised over $420M going public in 2024, reported zero revenue from its social media and streaming businesses in 2025, with all of its roughly $22M in revenue coming from a financial services business tied to the Hong Kong firm it merged with. LOL, really? $0.00? You couldn’t sell ONE single ad? Or embed Google Adsense into your platform or something? The company’s app was reportedly unable to load videos as of December, its auditor cited “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” and Nasdaq delisted the stock in December for failing to file its quarterly and annual reports on time. Triller has provided no explanation in its filing for why its media businesses generated no revenue last year or why its app remains unusable, but we can go ahead and conclude that it’s over for the once-promising TikTok competitor. eBay is testing AI-generated fashion model images by adding them to seller listings without the seller’s knowledge or approval, with at least one seller discovering an altered image in their listing that distorted sleeve details and changed the collar from their original photo. Liz Morton of Value Added Resource notes that the tests are the latest in a pattern of eBay inserting AI-generated content into listings without seller consent, including AI-generated FAQs in search results, AI description summaries shown on Facebook Marketplace, and AI item detail highlights added to listing pages, none of which sellers can opt out of. Speaking of unwelcomed AI features… Etsy is developing an unreleased AI Highlights feature that would generate short summaries of item listing details to help listings stand out to shoppers, and is showing some sellers a pop-up asking them to review and rate the accuracy of the summaries for their items. Early testers report the pop-up appears but shows no actual summary content, leaving sellers uncertain about what the feature will look like and raising questions about whether they will be able to correct inaccurate AI-generated details or receive protection from returns and negative feedback when the AI gets things wrong — which it likely will very often. Amazon opened its first Global Warehousing and Distribution center in Shenzhen, China, an all-in-one logistics hub that handles local storage, customs clearance, cross-border shipping, and inventory transfers for Chinese sellers targeting U.S. customers. The company claims it will cut storage costs by up to 45% compared to holding inventory in U.S. warehouses, which could help it keep up with Chinese rivals who operate a similar model. The move comes as Temu’s share of the global cross-border e-commerce market surged from less than 1% to 24% last year, putting it on par with Amazon according to an International Post Corporation survey. Amazon plans to extend the model to the Yangtze River Delta and expand distribution to Europe and Japan. World, the company co-founded by Sam Altman known for its iris-scanning orbs, launched a new standalone World ID app and announced new and expanded integrations with companies including Shopify, Zoom, DocuSign, Tinder, Okta, and VanEck. The expanded platform introduces three new capabilities through its AgentKit developer toolkit including Agent Delegation, which lets users authorize an AI agent to act on their behalf with a verified human identity attached, Human in the Loop, which creates a cryptographic proof that a real human approved a specific action without storing any personal data, and Agentic Commerce, which lets merchants verify that a purchase is backed by a unique human to prevent bot-driven fraud on limited inventory drops. Now it just needs to convince the world that submitting their biometrics to a Sam Altman-owned company is a trustworthy proposition. Uber launched a returns feature through its Uber Eats app that lets customers schedule a driver pickup for items they want to return to a store, with a fee calculated based on the driver’s time and distance, and receive an instant refund for the item as soon as the driver picks it up. The items must have been originally purchased through Uber Eats and have a minimum $20 value to be eligible for returns pickup. The feature builds on Uber’s “Return a Package” option, which launched in 2023 and lets customers send up to five packages to USPS, FedEx, or UPS locations. Initial retailers at launch include Target, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Petco, At Home, and several others, with more to be added over time. Unfortunately for drivers, they are required to go directly from the customer’s home to the store in order to complete the active trip and accept additional gigs. It’d be great if Uber allowed drivers to complete the return within a set timeframe, say 24 hours, so they could fit it in between other rides rather than having to make a dedicated trip to the store. Google is rolling out two new AI Mode features in the U.S. over the coming weeks, including the ability to have its agentic AI call local stores on your behalf to check whether a specific item is in stock and track prices for individual hotels directly in Search. For example, you can describe what you need, such as, “I’m going to a wedding in two hours and I just sharted in my only pair of dress pants. Which stores near me have a pair of 34×32 ivory white dress pants in stock, and can I get there before the ceremony starts?” Google will then make the calls and send you the details afterwards. (Do any businesses actually pick up calls from Google anymore?) Additionally, you can now track the prices of a specific hotel location and receive e-mail alerts if the price changes during your chosen dates. eBay buyers in the U.S. will no longer be able to cancel orders after they win an auction, starting May 13th, reversing a several year old policy that allowed buyers to cancel their order up until the seller shipped the item. The company told sellers that all auction sales will be final moving forward and that it will support them in declining any cancellation requests buyers make directly, as well as protect them from negative feedback if they decline a cancellation. Buyers will still be able to reach out directly to sellers and request cancellations, but the sellers will not be obligated to approve them. Good move for sellers, as many buyers were treating bids like an “Is this item still available?” button instead of a contractual obligation to make a purchase. RedNote, the Chinese social platform that briefly went viral in early 2025 when Americans thought TikTok was going to be banned, is now opening offices in Palo Alto and New York, hiring founding team members, and launching RedShop, a cross border marketplace selling Chinese goods to consumers in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. RedNote, which was founded in Shanghai in 2013, has grown from a shopping and lifestyle app in China to an “everything app,” with more than 300M monthly active users, and reportedly profited over $3B in 2025, higher than the profits of Pinterest and Snap for comparison. However, it’s got an uphill battle ahead of it in the U.S., as English-language content is currently scarce on the platform and Google search interest for the app has diminished since early last year. eBay is planning to close its San Francisco office when its lease expires at the end of September and reassign the 198 software engineers, applied researchers, directors, and financial analysts that work there to the company’s San Jose headquarters. The closure follows eBay’s February layoff of roughly 800 employees, including 28 workers at the San Francisco location and 243 in San Jose. The two cities are about 50 miles away from each other so most employees won’t necessarily have to move homes. They just might end up with a longer commute, or a shorter one depending on where they live. Google is replacing Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets, and campaign-level broad match with AI Max for Search, an AI-powered advertising platform that uses landing pages, keywords, and creative assets to understand user intent in real time rather than relying on manual adjustments. Google says campaigns using AI Max’s full suite of features generated an average of 7% more conversions at a similar cost per action compared to legacy settings by combining an advertiser’s existing assets with better signals and advanced controls, proactively tailoring responses to specific queries so they are aligned with the business’s goals. The rollout began last week with voluntary upgrade tools for DSA users, with a second phase in September that will automatically migrate all remaining eligible campaigns, at which point advertisers will no longer be able to create new DSA campaigns. Amazon’s push for employees to use AI tools internally has resulted in bloated software and data duplication, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The document said that AI “dramatically lowers the barrier to building new tools,” which is “making our tool duplication problem worse. More duplication is being created faster, and less of it is being cleaned up.” The company’s solution — more AI! LOL. The company is exploring ways to use AI to identify and flag the duplicate tools and encourage teams to consolidate them before the overlap becomes too hard to unwind. More than 50 delivery drivers for Pave it Forward Logistics, an Amazon Delivery Service Partner in Lebanon, Tennessee, were left without pay after the company abruptly closed on March 31 with no advance notice, leaving some workers owed up to $2,000 in wages and PTO. Owner Jerame Stout claims Amazon withheld $600,000 in account receivables that left him without funds to pay workers, which Amazon did not directly address, though it provided a statement saying that DSP owners are independent business owners responsible for their own payroll and has been facilitating connections between the affected drivers and other DSPs in the area. Former workers say Stout has been unresponsive to their requests for payment and plan to sue, which Amazon wants no part of. Analysts estimate that enterprise clients account for less than 5% to 10% of Shopify’s revenue, with the vast majority of its business still coming from small and medium-sized merchants, though the company doesn’t publicly disclose the breakdown. Analyst Liam Gallagher notes that although Shopify began its push for enterprise clients in 2023, the slow ramp is partly structural, as the sales cycle for large clients takes 12 to 18 months, and enterprise brands tend to adopt Shopify’s tools à la carte rather than migrating their full operations to the platform, which equates to less revenue for Shopify. Honestly, 5–10% isn’t too shabby for a relatively new enterprise offering. My guess is that graph of enterprise clients is about to see a very sharp spike! A Texas man was sentenced to 23 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution to victims after being found guilty of helping to orchestrate a crypto scam that ultimately defrauded $20M from nearly 1,000 investors. Robert Dunlap served as a trustee of a project that sold the fictional token Meta-1 Coin (unrelated to Meta Platforms), which he claimed was backed by a $1B art collection made up of works by Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh and $44B in gold, and used automated trading bots to artificially inflate the market price and trading volume of the coin. However he never actually distributed the coins and instead used the investor funds to buy a Ferrari and other things for himself. Well, I’m sure it was fun while it lasted. In lawsuits this week… Google is facing up to $218B in mass arbitration claims from advertisers after federal courts ruled it illegally monopolized both the online search and ad tech markets, with the first claims expected to be filed this week. Mass arbitration, where 25 or more claims are pooled together, gives claimants more leverage and a greater likelihood of settlement awards than individual claims, so Google might actually take a big hit on this one. Shein and Temu are facing class-action lawsuits accusing them of pocketing “windfall profits” by raising prices up to 377% to offset tariffs that the Supreme Court later struck down as unlawful, with plaintiffs arguing customers are entitled to refunds. The lawsuits are part of a broader wave of similar litigation hitting retailers including Costco, Lululemon, and EssilorLuxottica, after courts ordered Customs and Border Protection to refund $166B in now-invalidated tariff payments. Two former Amazon employees filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging the company systematically underpaid women by classifying their roles as lower-paying “non-tech” jobs even when they performed identical work to higher-paid male colleagues. The complaint closely mirrors a 2023 class-action filed by three women on Amazon’s Worldwide Communications team that survived a dismissal attempt in 2024 and is still ongoing. Amazon is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that it intentionally made early versions of its Fire TV Stick devices obsolete over time “before the expiration of their useful life.” I have a feeling Amazon is about to face a similar lawsuit for bricking its original Kindles. Aptoide, a Lisbon-based alternative mobile app store, filed a lawsuit against Google for allegedly using its market position to suppress third-party app stores on Android, seeking an injunction against the practices and unspecified damages. The lawsuit follows Aptoide’s 2014 EU antitrust complaint against Google and comes shortly after Google resolved its separate dispute with Epic Games last month by reducing Play Store commission rates to 20% and announcing plans to support sideloading of third-party app stores. Amazon filed a lawsuit against a Telegram-based group called RBK for orchestrating a refund fraud scheme that stole over $4M in products including graphics cards, laptops, and drones by submitting fake police reports about missing packages to trick Amazon customer service into issuing refunds. RBK charged customers up to 30% of the refund value for its services and had over 1,000 Telegram subscribers potentially involved in the scheme. Google, Meta and Apple are urging a federal appellate court to throw out claims that they facilitated online gambling by processing in-app payments for virtual casino currency, arguing Section 230 shields them from liability. A district court judge ruled last year that payment processing falls outside Section 230’s protections as a “generic business activity” rather than a publishing act, which the platforms are now asking the 9th Circuit to reverse. In layoffs this week… eBay laid off the remaining team members from KnownOrigin, an NFT marketplace it acquired in June 2022 for a reported $68M and subsequently shut down by the end of 2024, alongside other Web3 staff in its Manchester office. Wow! Who could’ve guessed that the entire NFT market would quickly collapse? In corporate shakeups this week… Route, a post-purchase platform offering package protection, order tracking, and returns management for e-commerce brands, appointed Arman Panjwani as CFO and Alexandria Orr as VP of Enterprise Revenue. Panjwani previously served as Chief Strategy and Financial Officer at LawnStarter, while Orr comes from enterprise sales roles at Shopify and Salesforce. Google hired Khartoon Weiss, who most recently served as VP and GM of Global Business Solutions at TikTok, to serve as its VP of U.S. Mid-Market Sales, Commerce to oversee the company’s mid-market advertising clients in retail and e-commerce. Google also hired Pete Metcalfe, former chief marketing officer of THG Beauty, as director of retail for the UK and Ireland. OpenAI hired Tom Duff Gordon, who spent nearly four years as Coinbase’s VP of international policy, to lead its policy operations across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Anthropic appointed Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, to its board of directors, as it expands its enterprise push into healthcare. Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, resigned from Figma’s board after reports that Anthropic would be launching a design tool, which it did. Meta’s director of engineering in trust and safety at its London office, Patrik Torstensson, left after nearly four years to join Lovable as head of engineering, telling Business Insider he felt like “more of a passenger than a driver” at Meta. Meta poached its fifth founding member from Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, hiring Joshua Gross, the engineer who built the company’s flagship product Tinker from scratch, to lead engineering teams at Meta Superintelligence Labs. OpenAI’s head of Sora, Bill Peebles, is leaving the company after OpenAI wound down the video generation tool last month, with VP of AI for Science Kevin Weil also departing and his Prism scientific workspace being folded into the Codex desktop app. TikTok Shop appears to be gearing up for expansion into Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Nordic countries, based on job listings for its strategic readiness team that specifically reference those markets, as well as customer solutions manager roles requiring fluency in Dutch or Polish. TikTok has already created references to seller account pages for those regions, though they are not yet live. The expansion would extend TikTok Shop’s European footprint beyond its current six markets, which includes the UK, Spain, Ireland, France, Italy, and Germany, where TikTok Shop captured 15% of consumers within a year of launch in the country. The European Commission is threatening to force Meta to stop using WhatsApp policies that allegedly block competing AI companies from offering their services through the platform. Regulators believe that Meta is using its control over the messaging platform to give its own AI an unfair advantage by making it harder for rivals like OpenAI to reach businesses through the app. Meta’s defense is that the EU is trying to let big tech companies use WhatsApp Business for free, which would shift the cost onto the small businesses already paying for it, but that’s extremely misleading. The Commission is merely asking Meta to revert back to its previous terms, which treated competing AI companies like any other business client and charged them the same rate, not give them free access that would shift the cost to small businesses. Bangladesh, which imports nearly 95% of its petroleum, has been experiencing severe fuel shortages since early March when the U.S.-Iran war disrupted oil tanker shipments, forcing the country’s ride-hailing drivers to spend hours in line waiting to fill their gas tanks. The gas station queues have resulted in drivers spending hours of their work day waiting for gas, cutting their income nearly in half. Platforms like Uber and Pathao have maintained the same commission rates and fares throughout the crisis, leaving drivers to absorb the full financial impact of time lost waiting in line and reduced trip volumes. To help ease the pain, Bangladesh’s government launched a QR code-based Fuel Pass rationing system at seven stations in Dhaka, but drivers say the registration website is frequently inaccessible due to server problems. India’s government decided not to move forward with a proposal to require Apple, Samsung, Google, and other phone makers to preinstall the country’s biometric identification app, Aadhaar, on phones. Aadhaar is a 12-digit biometric ID tied to fingerprints and iris scans held by nearly 1.34 billion Indian residents and used widely for banking, telecom, and airport verification, but has faced criticism from privacy advocates over past data leaks. India’s IT ministry reviewed the proposal and said it “is not in favour of mandating the pre-installation of the Aadhaar App on smartphones,” but gave no reason for the decision. Hokodo, a European B2B buy now pay later platform that served more than 100,000 business buyers across 10 countries, has ceased operations after more than eight years in business during which it facilitated more than €500M in financed invoices, and just one year after raising €10M. The company’s founders attributed the shutdown to scaling before the business had truly earned it, taking too long to narrow focus, and building too much product complexity. Co-founders Louis Carbonnier, Richard Thornton, and Sami Ben Hatit have moved on from the business and announced the launch of Liquidity Labs, a consulting firm helping B2B companies modernize their trade credit and cash flow operations using AI. Wait, were you guys busy launching a new business instead of saving your existing one? 🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… A worker died at Amazon’s distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon on April 6th, and managers instructed employees to turn away from the scene and keep working. While a coworker attempted to perform CPR on the lifeless man, one supervisor told staff to “just turn around and not look, let’s get back to work.” Supervisors reportedly kept the information that someone had died from most employees for several hours, and then eventually sent them home at the end of a 3:45pm break with no explanation and without a full shift’s pay. Amazon was quick to provide a statement attributing the worker’s death to a pre-existing medical condition. Does working under extreme conditions in an Amazon distribution center count as “pre-existing” in this scenario? Plus 8 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Instacart acquiring Instaleap. I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week! PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments. submitted by /u/adventurepaul to r/ecommerce [link] [comments]

Got my first passport card today! (Not pictured) It comes with an RFID sleeve, but I carry my wallet in my pocket when I work out and it gets pretty sweaty. I’m looking for a credit-card sized waterproof or water-resistant pouch/sleeve that will still fit in a wallet slot and fully encloses the card. All RFID sleeves I’m finding are open on one side, and all pouches I’ve found are too big. Does anyone know of something like this? submitted by /u/GwynLordOfCedar to r/PassportPorn [link] [comments]

Just so you know, I received this wallet as part of their ESR Beta Tester Program. I was asked to use it for a couple of weeks and then share my honest thoughts. Whether it was great, not so great, or just okay, ESR didn’t get any drafts or a chance to read, comment on, or approve this review. I’m using an iPhone 17 Pro Max in Orange. I’ve got a MagSafe case and screen protector that I bought myself. Both are from ESR. The case is the ESR Classic Hybrid Magnetic Clear Case (Camera Control, Stash Stand), and the screen protector is the ESR UltraFit Armorite Pro Screen Protector. The ESR Geo Magnetic Wallet Stand truly shines because it includes an Apple FindMy card right inside the wallet! As you probably know, many minimalist wallets offer the option to purchase a FindMy Card or a special holder to use an Apple AirTag. You can easily manage your Wallet. The FindMy card’s rechargeable battery can last for 5 to 6 months without needing a charge. To check the power level of the FindMy card, simply use the Apple FindMy App on your iPhone and other Apple FindMy devices. When it’s time to charge, the wallet features a Magnetic Charging interface with USB-C to your power adapter. My daughter has an Apple brand MagSafe wallet with Apple FindMy, and she shared her real-world experience with this ESR Wallet. She has the non-Max iPhone 17 Pro model. The first thing she did was easily remove the Apple Wallet and snap on this ESR wallet. I intentionally used the word “snap” because we both heard the ESR snap as ESR’s Halolock magnets grabbed the MagSafe contacts, pulling it into place to make a firm connection. She had to twist the ESR wallet to remove it. She immediately commented on the force it took to get the ESR wallet off. So, I tried her Apple wallet on my iPhone, and it seemed almost loose compared to ESR’s Halolock grip. As it wasn’t even close. Well done ESR! The next thing she pointed out was that the Apple wallet can only hold two cards. She’d be okay with that limit if it could also hold some cash. However it only has the single, 2 card pocket that is attached to the Apple Find My card and MagSafe connection. Okay, so, what’s the card capacity of the ESR wallet? I’ll get to it, but I wanted to share some thoughts first. I’ve switched from my old, bulky wallet to something much simpler. My leather wallet was amazing—it could hold 12 cards, two cash sleeves, and even a secret Apple AirTag! I used to keep old receipts and paper scraps with notes and phone numbers inside, which was like having a personal chiropractor’s office! But, let’s just say it was a real pain for my sciatic nerve! So, I went for a minimalist wallet. If you have an iPhone or Android, you can get rid of some cards in the device’s electronic wallet, and others in the App for your travel partner’s points program. There are still some essential cards you’ll need, though. I’ll need a card type similar to my driver’s license or ID, a medical insurance card, my medical expense spending card, one credit card, a passport card, and some cash. This means a minimalist wallet needs at least room for 5 real sized cards and a few dollars in cash. So, my daughter’s Apple MagSafe wallet with FindMy is a bit of a letdown because it doesn’t have enough card slots or cash space. I’ve chosen a few cards to test out. You might have noticed that the cards we get aren’t all the same thickness. When it comes to minimalist wallets, you often hear about how many cards they can hold. Most of these claims assume the flat, non-embossed, thin cards. But my cards aren’t all the same. The thickest card is the Apple Credit Card, followed by my AmEx card, and the thinnest is my medical card. That’s a titanium card, a plastic with raised letters (embossed), and a flat, thin plastic card with printing. The other cards are somewhere in between these three types. The ESR Geo Magnetic Wallet Stand is definitely the best choice! The card pocket on the outside can hold three cards. I put in my Apple Card, an embossed card, and a flat card. It was a bit snug with the titanium Apple Card, but I managed to fit it in. Then, I thought it was a tad tight, so I added two embossed cards and one thicker, non-embossed plastic card. But, oh no, no room for cash! As it sits, we’re two cards and some cash short, but not finished yet. Great news! The ESR Geo Magnetic Wallet Stand opens up to reveal a second pocket with a clear window perfect for a driver’s license, State ID, or Passport. I grabbed my driver’s license and my slim medical insurance card, and they both fit snugly. That’s two cards in, so I’m halfway there! Alright, let’s tackle the tricky part: the cash! You can’t just shove a flat bill into full credit card pocket. So, I decided to get creative. I took four US currency bills and folded each one in half. Then, I folded them in half again. Now, I managed to fit all four folded bills into the inside pocket behind the two plastic cards. And guess what? You can actually carry five cards with any mix of US currency, from $4.00 to $400! Mission accomplished. You might have seen that the ESR Geo Magnetic Wallet Stand has a friction hinge, which means it can rest almost flat or serve as a phone stand. Perfect for watching videos or chatting with someone via FaceTime! It’s also great when you’re traveling and want to prop it up on your nightstand. I’ve used it like that at night. Besides the stand, the ESR wallet includes a loop that lets you hold your phone without squeezing it too hard. Two awesome features that make it even better! The ESR Geo Magnetic Wallet Stand is a fantastic deal! If you’re searching for a sleek aluminum wallet that can hold 5 real plastic cards, a cash clip, and Apple FindMy, you’re looking at a minimum of $75. However, that $75 wallet won’t connect to your iPhone using MagSafe. The ESR wallet will, but if you prefer to use your iPhone without the ESR wallet, you can easily do so. Simply remove it from your iPhone, and the wallet will fit right into your pocket. That $75 wallet is designed to do one thing, but it can’t do two. Currently, you can find the ESR Geo Magnetic Wallet Stand on their website for $39.99 USD, but please note that prices may fluctuate. This Geo Magnetic Wallet Stand is great value with real functionality! submitted by /u/00_coeval_halos to r/ESR_official [link] [comments]