Nobody asked before switching this on

Good morning.

Amazon's Big Deal Days start next Tuesday, with Target's event running alongside it. Whatever you priced back in August gets tested in six days.

This week: an AI agent can now complete checkout on your Shopify store, the shopper who's supposed to fund your Q4 is in a worse mood than she's been all summer, Amazon offered to run your other marketplaces and finance your inventory, and Costco cashed a tariff refund you're still waiting on.

Let's get into it.

Shopify turned on agent checkout Sunday. An AI agent running inside a shopper's browser can now read your checkout, change the shipping address and delivery option, and place the order through Shop Pay. It's rolling out to all eligible merchants, which means it's arriving for people who never asked for it.

Most stores got the other half of this and never noticed. Google matched Shopify catalogs to Merchant Center and enabled native checkout in AI Mode and Gemini, with no opt-in required at any step. The way out is in your Shopify admin under Sales channels, then Agentic. The way in required nothing from you at all.

Every platform is racing to be the agent your customer talks to, which is why this is happening at you rather than with you. Meta spent its Connect keynote Thursday wiring shopping connectors into Muse for Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Ulta, Gap, Wayfair, and DICK'S, with Shop Pay and PayPal built in so the purchase never leaves the conversation. Amazon went the other way and blocks agents from buying anything at all, which suggests Amazon would rather keep the shopper than close the sale.

Your customer is not the one driving this. ACI Worldwide asked more than 3,300 people, and 7% of fashion shoppers said they would let an AI finish a purchase on its own. What they wanted was price alerts and comparison shopping, which are research tools, not a proxy for a card. A survey found a third of shoppers already regret something AI talked them into buying, mostly electronics and apparel.

The gap between what the platforms built and what the shopper wanted results in returns for you. No model pays the shipping label or restocks the item. Sizing, fit, materials, and compatibility are the four things an agent guesses at when your product page leaves them blank, and the guess comes back as a refund about three weeks later.

Open your Shopify admin today to see what's enabled. Selling through agents can be a strategy. Learning you did it from a January returns report is not.

Consumer sentiment dropped to 48.1 in September, a four-month low, and the forward-looking half of the index fell twice as fast as the read on how people feel right now. The survey director pointed to fuel prices and trade, noting that the drop shows up across the political spectrum, which is unusual enough to take seriously.

Retail has already placed its bet on that mood. Challenger expects the weakest seasonal hiring since 2008, and as of Wednesday, Amazon, Target, and Kohl's still had not released numbers, which, for companies that normally announce in September, is its own kind of announcement. Retailers are leaning on automation, existing staff, and on-demand labor before hiring anyone new. The loudest exception is Spirit Halloween, which is hiring its biggest crew ever for a season that ends in five weeks.

Starbucks is closing about 250 North American cafes, the second wave of a restructuring its board approved last year. Nobody shuts a quarter of a thousand stores in September because they like the look of Q4.

People are not spending less this season so much as spending differently, and Adobe's holiday forecast shows the shape of it. During the discount weeks, purchases of basic clothing run more than triple their normal rate, with hygiene, baby, and pet supplies close behind. Your Black Friday is turning into somebody else's restocking trip.

That should change what your promo is built around. Find the item in your catalog that people buy twice, add it to the bundle, and add a reorder prompt behind it, because the shopper stocking up in November is the one who will still be ordering in February. And if you are hiring seasonal help, a hiring freeze across big retail means the labor pool is looser than it has been in years, which works out in your favor.

Amazon's seller conference came with an offer. Seller Central will now manage your eBay, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and Shopify business too, for free. Listings sync across all of them, orders from every channel land in one queue, and you can fulfill any of them from Amazon's warehouses.

Amazon spent years making it expensive to use its network for orders placed anywhere else. It is now building the control panel for those orders. Ninety-five percent of Amazon sellers already sell somewhere besides Amazon, and Amazon appears to have decided it would rather own the software you run your business in than tax every order that passes through it.

A profitability dashboard comes with it, broken out by product and by channel. Most sellers can't answer which channel makes money on which SKU without a spreadsheet and a free afternoon, so that screen alone justifies the login. The cost is that Amazon reformats your descriptions for each destination, and your order volume across four competing marketplaces ends up in a dashboard built by a company that competes with you.

Amazon also opened its lending program to all sellers. The invitation-only gate is gone; you apply inside Seller Central, and the menu now includes lines of credit and SBA-backed loans up to $5 million, with multiple loans allowed at once. Cheap inventory financing tied to the platform that stores your sales history is a different kind of relationship than a dashboard is.

Supply chain agents landed in Seller Assistant for inbound planning and aged inventory, alongside a consolidated compliance view for selling into other countries. Sellers piloting that compliance tool in the toy industry reported cutting compliance costs by more than half.

Export your listings from every other channel before you switch sync on. Getting your own copy back after the reformat means you'll have to retype it.

Costco's quarter included a fifteen-cent-per-share benefit from IEEPA tariff refunds, with part of it reinvested into lower member prices. Last week we wrote about refund money stuck between Customs and the courts. Some of it is unstuck, and it is being spent on price cuts you'll be shopping against in November.

The U.S. and China extended their trade truce to January 10, pushing back the November 10 expiration that many importers had already planned around.

Days later, a joint trade board proposed cutting tariffs on about $60 billion of goods, including toys, household goods, medical devices and farm products. The announcement contained no percentages or dates, and both governments still have to run it through their own legal processes. One analyst in that piece said the paperwork is vague on when any of it reaches a shelf.

Price off the duty rate on your current entry summary. Then send your broker your top ten HTS codes and ask whether any of them appear on the proposed list.

Google Ads will now take your customers' IP addresses without scrambling them first.
When you upload a customer list to build an audience, the file can now include two new columns: the shopper's IP address and the time of their last interaction with you. Emails and phone numbers get encrypted before they leave your computer. These two go up as plain text. Google has blocked the feature for anyone in the UK, the EEA, or Switzerland, which is a clear hint that you should read your own privacy policy before uploading anything.

Shopify starts charging tax on return shipping fees on October 23.
The changelog says tax will apply to return shipping the same way it already applies to outbound shipping. If you charge customers to send something back, the amount you refund them will change, and it changes three weeks before your heaviest returns month. Shopify also added the option to set different return windows for individual products or collections, which is the final-sale setting many merchants have wanted before Q4.

Google ran a spam update on Thursday.
The September update went out worldwide in every language, and Google said the rollout takes up to two weeks. Rankings shift unpredictably while one of these is in progress, and search watchers clocked a sharp spike in volatility over the weekend. If your organic traffic dipped this week, let the rollout finish before you conclude anything is wrong with your site.

Walmart promised it will never charge you a different price than it charges your neighbor. The CEO published an open letter saying the company won't set prices based on who a shopper is or what time they're buying. The letter arrived after an advocacy group pointed out that Walmart holds a patent on shelf labels that change price depending on what's already in your cart. Walmart has not explained why it patented a thing it says it will never do.

Search Console will finally show you how much traffic comes from image search. People who shop by picture rather than by keyword have always been invisible in your reports, and a new filter now surfaces them, covering Google Lens, Circle to Search, and regular image results, with clicks and rankings per page. If your product is something people recognize at a glance before they know its name, this is a channel you've been earning for years without being able to measure it.

Sephora opened its TikTok Shop with a single livestream.
Mikayla Nogueira hosted; roughly 2,300 products went up at launch, and one holiday set was sold there and nowhere else. Last week we wrote that live video is where expensive purchases earn their trust, and this is the same play run by a retailer with real money behind it. The exclusive product is the part worth stealing, because it gives the livestream a reason to exist.

Hanna Andersson is joining Amazon with a catalog that barely overlaps its own site. The children's clothing brand goes live October 1 with about 90% of its assortment unique to Amazon, sending everyday playwear and pajamas there while keeping the nicer dresses on its own website. The goal is to catch the parent who needs an outfit by Thursday, without teaching anyone to buy expensive items from a marketplace. It's the cleanest answer I've seen to selling on Amazon without turning into an Amazon brand.

Dollar General just became a delivery app.
Instacart is putting roughly 7,000 Dollar General and pOpshelf stores online over the next few weeks, heading toward 20,000 by the end of fall. That means one-hour delivery of household basics in many small towns that had no delivery option at all a month ago. Those shoppers are being trained to expect same-day right now, and they will expect it from you next.

That's the week.

If you only do one thing after reading this: open your Shopify admin, go to Sales channels, then Agentic, and find out whether an AI agent can already buy from you. You may have opted into that in your sleep.

And if you need help finding a better or new 3PL, we’d love to help you at FulfillYN, the #1 3PL matchmaking service.

See you next Wednesday.