[Shopify] Add nested and/or collection logic for smart collections

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:** TikTok Shop is now the size of eBay in terms of total sales after selling an estimated $19B worth of products globally from July though September this year compared to eBay's $20.1B in sales during the same period. The United States, which is TikTok Shop's largest market, accounted for almost $4.5B in sales, marking an increase of about 125% compared to the previous quarter. TikTok Shop only launched in the U.S. in September 2023, while eBay has been around for over 30 years. ___ Last week **Amazon** filed a lawsuit against **Perplexity** after sending a cease and desist letter demanding that they block their AI browser Comet from shopping on Amazon-com or its mobile app. Following receipt of the letter, Perplexity released a public statement in which they called Amazon's actions a “threat to all Internet users" and claimed Amazon's sole motivation was to keep you shopping directly on their website so that they can continue to serve you ads and protect their $60B advertising business. Amazon released its ceased and desist letter, and as it turns out, they had tried multiple times to block Perplexity's AI agents, and even spoke to the company about its wishes to do so, but instead of complying, Perplexity took concerted effort to disguise Comet as a Google Chrome browser, which Amazon claims is in violation of multiple Internet and computer fraud laws. Throughout the letter, Amazon references the risks that third-party AI agents bring to the customer experience and security of their shoppers, as well as multiple laws that Perplexity is breaking by not abiding my Amazon's request and attempting to circumvent its firewalls. After much debate, I side with Amazon on this one. How about you? ___ **Apple** is planning to pay Google about $1B a year for an ultrapowerful AI model to help overhaul its Siri voice assistant, according to Bloomberg sources. Well that one definitely wasn't on my 2025 Bingo Card! Apple had previously considered using other third-party models like ChatGPT and Claude, but ultimately decided that Google's 1.2 trillion parameter custom Gemini model would best serve its users, at least as an interim solution until Apple's own models are powerful enough, which could be years from now or never. The custom Gemini model is a major advancement over the 150 billion parameter model that Apple currently uses today for its cloud-based version of Apple Intelligence. The Gemini model will run on Apple's own Private Cloud Compute servers to ensure that user data remains walled off from Google, and the partnership won't be visible to Apple users, but will instead be a fully white label solution, unlike the two companies' Safari browser deal, which made Google the default search engine. ___ Remember **Amazon Haul** — the low-cost direct-from-China marketplace it launched in November 2024 to compete with Temu and Shein? After piloting the budget marketplace in the US one year ago, Amazon subsequently launched Haul in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan and Australia. Amazon then took its budget marketplace model to Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, this time launching under the name **Bazaar** to better resonate with local languages and cultures. Now, the Bazaar marketplace is expanding to 14 additional countries with a new mobile app including Hong Kong, Philippines, Taiwan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Nigeria. Most items on Bazaar are priced under $10, with many as low as $2, and free shipping for hitting a local spend minimum. ___ **Commerce**, the newly rebranded parent company of BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift, launched two apps for Shopify merchants to help maximize reach, enhance data, simplify operations and scale. Feedonomics for Advertising is an app to sync your Shopify prodcut catalog with Feedonomics and prepare it for advertsing across hundreds of channels, while Feedonomics Listing & Orders is an app to syndicate your product catalog, streamline order processing, keep inventory and pricing updated, and optimize product data across your Shopify store and hundreds of other channels with Feedonomics. I'm not sure why there are two apps instead of one unified "Feedonomics" app, however regardless, I think it's smart for Commerce to move towards better serving the Shopify ecosystem, and Feedonomics is their best play at doing so. ___ **Meta** knowingly serves users 15 billion ads for fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products every day and earns about 10% of is annual revenue (or $7B) from the scam ads, according to internal documents viewed by Reuters. The documents also revealed that Meta only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud. If their algorithms are less certain, but the advertiser is still flagged as a likely scammer, Meta simply charges higher ad rates as a penalty. So basically if Meta has any plausible deniability that it's working with a scammer, rather than investigate the situation further, Meta instead gouges the scammers, who will likely pay the higher rates because they don't have many options of other platforms to advertise on (because those other platforms don't allow scams). ___ **Amazon** is introducing a new fee structure for its Selling Partner API (SP-API), marking the end of the free access that developers have enjoyed since introduction of the API in 2009 (formerly called Marketplace Web Services). Starting January 31, 2026, all developers will be charged an annual subscription fee of $1400 and then need to choose from four tiers -- Basic, Pro, Plus, and Enterprise — which range from an additional $0 to $10,000 per month and include packages of GET Calls ranging from 2.5M to 250M. PPC Land notes that sellers and vendors using SP-API directly for only their own businesses will not face additional SP-API fees. The new API fees apply exclusively to third-party developers who build applications serving other selling partners. ___ **OpenAI** reached a deal with **Amazon** to buy $38B in cloud computing services over the next seven years, with plans to immediately start using AWS compute and all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026. The deal follows OpenAI's restructuring last week, which opened the company up to be able to buy computing services from other firms besides Microsoft without their permission. OpenAI is currently on an unsustainable spending spree. In 2024, the company burned through $5 billion, and during the first nine months of this year, has already lost over $25.5 billion. No tech company has ever burned through so much cash in this little amount of time. And yet ChatGPT still can't commit any instruction to memory for more than a few prompts! Another $300B in computing power should fix that issue though, right? ___ **OpenAI** is facing seven new lawsuits claiming that ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues. The lawsuits filed Thursday in California on behalf of six adults and one teenager allege wrongful death, assisted suicide, involuntary manslaughter, and negligence. One lawsuit filed by the family of a 17-year-old who committed suicide says ChatGPT advised the boy on the most effective way to tie a noose and how long he would be able to “live without breathing.” OpenAI called the situations “incredibly heartbreaking” and said it was reviewing the court filings to understand the details. ___ **Lastly in OpenAI news this week...** The company is also potentially facing billions in damages and sanctions after authors and publishers suing the company secured access to Slack messages and e-mails discussing the deletion of a dataset containing pirated books. If they succeed, the communications could demonstrate willful infringement, resulting in enhanced damages of as much as $150,000 per work. Additionally if the court finds that OpenAI destroyed evidence anticipating litigations, the judge could issue monetary penalties, limit OpenAI's defenses, or issue a default judgement in the plaintiffs' favor. The ruling follows a $1.5B settlement by Anthropic in a similar case. ___ **Shopify** introduced an Offers Feed into its Shop App, giving shoppers a dedicated space to browse discounts, price drops, and other promotional offers from brands. Merchant promotions will now show up in a banner on top of their Shop storefront, on product detail pages, and in the new Offers Feed. Shop App currently supports percentage discounts, fixed-amount discounts, free shipping offers, and BOGO deals. ___ **Walmart** added AI-generated audio summaries to product pages on its app for more than 1,000 premium beauty products, offering short, conversational soundbites that help customers compare items and make purchase decisions by summarizing product details and reviews. You can see examples in action by navigating to a beauty product, such as Paul Mitchell Original Shampoo, within your mobile app and then clicking the “Hear the Summary” button below the image gallery. The move follows a similar feature launched this past May by Amazon called “Hear the Highlights” that lets shoppers listen to AI-generated audio clips in which two virtual hosts discuss a product's features and reviews. ___ **Shopify** is now the biggest company to launch a Substack newsletter after publishing the first installment of its brand new newsletter called “In Stock,” which aims to feel more “unbuttoned” than the company's other communication channels, while also complementing Shopify's existing newsroom. The newsletter will offer recurring features like “Decoded,” a series about the real life strategies powering the businesses of various Shopify merchants, as well as editions featuring Q&As with brand founders. ModernRetail's Allison Smith writes, “Shopify’s entrance is the latest sign that brands, including large, publicly traded companies, are taking Substack seriously as a marketing channel.” ___ **Amazon prices** have risen 12.8% this year on average as of the end of September, while Target and Walmart prices were up 5.5% and 5.3% respectively, according to a DataWeave study that reviewed 16,000 items on each retailer's website. The sharpest increase came from Amazon between January and February, when prices on surveyed SKUS rose 3.7% on its marketplace, ahead of the majority of President Trump's tariffs, which were announced in April. Target and Walmart increased prices by an average of 0.97% and 0.85% during that same time period. ___ **Shopify** says that traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT to its online stores is up 7x since January and purchases attributed to AI searches have increased by 11x. Meanwhile Juozas Kaziukėnas reports that **Walmart's** traffic from ChatGPT has almost doubled in two months, now up to 37% of total referral traffic for the retailer, up from 32% last month and 21% in August, according to SimilarWeb data. He commented, “I don't believe Walmart is doing any SEO-for-AI optimizations yet. They are getting a lot of clicks because Amazon is absent (because they block ChatGPT scrapers), they have a lot of SKUS and people trust Walmart.” ___ **A UPS cargo plane** crashed on Tuesday evening, shortly after taking off from the Louisville, KY airport, tragically killing 14 people. After departing the airport in route to Honolulu, the plane's left engine detached after a “large plume of fire” erupted from the plane's left wing. The aircraft's last reported altitude was 475 ft, or about 100 ft above ground level. Following the plane crash, UPS and FedEx are grounding dozens of MD-11 aircrafts at Boeing's recommendation. MD-11s represent about 9% of UPS' air fleet and 4% of FedEx's fleet. ___ **Etsy CEO Kruti Patel Goyal** defended the company’s growing use of AI during an Ask Me Anything event, saying it could help “make Etsy feel even more human” by freeing sellers' time and improving product discovery. Many sellers disagreed, expressing frustration in the live chat and on Reddit over AI-generated listings, scams, and the further dilution of handmade goods on the platform, arguing that Etsy is ignoring the platform's core values. (Although I'd argue that those core values were abandoned in 2015 after its IPO.) Patel Goyal compared AI tools to past technological shifts like knitting looms, saying Etsy would remain inclusive of all creators while improving transparency about how products are made — comments that sellers viewed as tone-deaf and investor-focused. ___ **Netflix** began testing dynamic ad insertion for live programming in six countries, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the U.K., ahead of its “NFL Christmas Gameday” broadcast, allowing advertisers to deliver different commercials to individual viewers during live events. This type of advertising is par for the course on traditional TV, but relatively new for streaming. Streaming services including Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, Disney, and others have utilized DAI for several years on live TV streams and other sports casts, but Netflix's upcoming NFL broadcast will be one of the first mass-audience live streaming events to leverage the technology across multiple countries simultaneously. Netflix also introduced a new more accurate ad measurement standard called Monthly Active Viewers (MAV), defined as members who watch at least one minute of ads per month multiplied by household viewership estimates, claiming to have 190M.  ___ **Microsoft** announced the formation of its new MAI Superintelligence Team, which will focus on developing practical AI applications such as digital companions, medical diagnostics, and renewable energy systems. The group will be led by Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the Microsoft AI division that includes Bing and the Copilot assistant. The move comes months after Meta spent billions to hire talent for its Meta Superintelligence Labs unit that's working on research and products. Exciting news, but did Microsoft have to follow Meta's rhetoric and use the word “Superintelligence” in its name? It seems like the name draws unnecessary comparison and scrutiny to the stigma surrounding Meta's “superintelligence” team efforts.  ___ **Etsy** is testing an Instant Transfer feature, giving some U.S. sellers the option to receive their funds within 30 minutes for a 1% fee, initially with a $500 maximum. (Shouldn't they call it “30 Minute Transfer” then?) The move catches them up to PayPal, Shopify, Square, Stripe, eBay, and other marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, and payment processors that have offered similar for many years. Personally, I'm tired of being asked to pay 1% to receive my own funds faster. It's about to be 2026 — instant money transfers should be the free norm across platforms, not an upsell. ___ **TikTok Shop** is fighting a new type of scam where fraudulent sellers use generative AI tools to make fake brands and products in an attempt to get users to pay for goods that don't actually exist, according to Nicolas Waldmann, who leads the platform's governance and experience external affairs team. Waldmann said, “It's organized crime, to be honest. They're trying to basically go through and sell, and of course, never deliver anything, and then run with the money.” This type of scam has existed for years, but generative AI is now making it even easier to do at scale, causing TikTok to have to develop in-house detection tools, as well as partner with third-party firms to fight the fraudsters. TikTok says it has rejected 70M products and removed 700k sellers for policy violations in the first six months of 2025. Wow, that's rampant! ___ **Amazon** introduced Kindle Translate, an AI-powered tool that automatically translates books between English, Spanish, and German for self-published authors on Kindle Direct Publishing, with additional languages on the horizon. Books that use the service will have a clear “Kindle Translate” label, which will serve as a warning to customers in case the translations go completely haywire. Amazon says that “all translations are automatically evaluated for accuracy before publication” and that authors can preview the content before publishing it — but what good is showing me a preview of my book in German? I don't speak German. Major literary works often take years to translate into additional languages to properly reflect the nuance, intent, and cultural significance of the author's words, versus producing some literal word-for-word translation. I'm confident this won't end well. ___ **Best Buy** is expanding its holiday campaigns this year in a big way to include partnerships with major YouTube creators such as “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans and “Binging with Babish” creator Andrew Rea, alongside over 1,000 influencers in its new Creator Program. The company will feature custom content integrations, influencer-led connected TV ads, and creator storefronts on its website’s holiday Gift Center page, aiming to reach more consumers within the creator economy. Jennie Weber, CMO of Best Buy, said, “We've partnered with influencers in the past, but we're… partnering with them even more this year.” ___ **Anthropic** raised its growth forecasts by up to 28%, projecting $70B in revenue and $17B in free cash flow by 2028, compared to OpenAI’s projected $47B cash burn that same year. The company, valued at $170B after a $13B raise in September, could target a $300–$400B valuation in its next funding round. Anthropic expects API sales to businesses to remain its primary driver, which are already double OpenAI’s projected API revenue this year, and to generate over 80% of total revenue through 2028. Its Claude Code assistant is nearing $1B in annualized revenue, with overall annualized revenue at $7B. ___ **The Motion Picture Association** is demanding that **Meta** stop referring to content shown to teen accounts on Instagram as “guided by PG-13 ratings,” claiming that it is misleading and could erode trust in its well established and trusted movie ratings system. A lawyer on behalf of the MPA sent Meta a cease-and-desist letter and says that Meat never contacted them for permission to use the rating system for its content. The letter reads, “Meta’s attempts to restrict teen content literally cannot be ‘guided by’ or ‘aligned with’ the MPA’s PG-13 movie rating because Meta does not follow this curated process. Instead, Meta’s content restrictions appear to rely heavily on artificial intelligence or other automated technology measures.” Meta says it never intended to suggest that it partnered with the MPA or that the material on Instagram had been rated by the movie association, and that it hopes it can work with them to find a resolution.  ___ **Shopify** released a long-anticipated update to its smart collections, now allowing merchants to exclude products based on tag, whereas previously they could only include them. For example, an apparel merchant can create a Featured Collection that includes the tag “featured” but excludes the tag “womens” so that the collection only shows featured items for men. Thanks Shopify, but now can we please finally have nexted and/or collection logic?! ___ **TikTok** is expanding access to its Bulletin Boards feature to more users, allowing brands and creators to share text, image, and video updates directly with followers through a messaging format similar to Instagram’s Broadcast Channels. The tool lets users join a profile’s board to receive notifications for new posts, offering creators another way to share announcements and engage their most active audiences. Bulletin Boards were first tested in June and are now appearing on more profiles, but TikTok hasn’t disclosed eligibility criteria or global rollout details. ___ **Walmart** added a new Brand Manager tab in Seller Center, giving trusted sellers the ability to request roles as Authorized Resellers or Acting Brand Owners for specific brands, as spotted by GeekSeller. The feature streamlines brand relationship management by letting sellers upload proof of authorization and track approvals directly within Seller Center, while brand owners can review and approve requests through the Brand Portal. Acting Brand Owners can create brand shops and update product content, while Authorized Resellers have limited editing rights. Walmart emphasized that it remains neutral in reseller disputes and only verifies submitted documentation. ___ **Meta product managers** are vibe coding apps to show Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta leadership using internal tools like Metamate and Devmate, rather than waiting on engineers to turn ideas into demos. Joseph Spisak, a product director in Meta's Superintelligence Labs, said, “We can literally vibe code products in a matter of hours, days, and explore the space.” Business Insider says the practice is shedding new light on how Meta and other tech companies are recognizing product development around AI assistants and speeding up the development process of new features. ___ **Google**, **Microsoft**, and **Meta** have abandoned their decade-long practice of publishing diversity data such as the gender and racial makeup of their workforce, according to spokespeople for the companies who spoke to WIRED. Other tech giants including Apple, Amazon, and Nvidia all released new diversity data this year. Google did not comment and a Meta spokesperson confirmed but did not elaborate on the decision. Microsoft chief spokesperson Frank Shaw said that the company is not doing “a traditional report this year as we’ve evolved beyond that to formats that are more dynamic and accessible,” including “stories, videos, and insights that show inclusion in action.” ___ **Male drivers for Uber and Lyft** are suing the ride-hailing companies over a feature that lets users request only women drivers, alleging that the functions have limited the economic opportunities for men and discriminated against them because of their gender. Lawyers are arguing that male drivers “receive fewer and different rides than they otherwise would” and that the policy “reinforces the gender stereotype that men are more dangerous than women.” The lawsuit seeks $4,000 in damages per male driver in California for violating the Unruh Act, a law that prohibits sex discrimination by businesses. Uber first introduced the feature in 2019 in Saudi Arabia and later expanded it to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit earlier this year. Lyft's program launched across the U.S. in 2023. ___ **Four ex-eBay security staffers** settled civil claims tied to the 2019 cyberstalking of journalists Ina and David Steiner, while eBay and former executives Devin Wenig, Steve Wymer, and Wendy Jones will move forward in the upcoming 2026 trial. Prior criminal cases resulted in guilty pleas, and eBay entered a deferred prosecution agreement with a $3M fine, but the Steiners’ civil suit continues, with Judge Patti Saris still weighing whether to accept ex-security chief Jim Baugh’s settlement and scheduling motions. If approved, the new deals could leave only David Harville and Brian Gilbert for any second trial, and damages sought have been reduced from an initial $700M to roughly $100M or less. Liz Morton at Value Added Resources has been following this case for years and has the absolute best coverage on it. Check out her case archives for more information. The case is wild! ___ **Spotify** is being sued in a new class-action lawsuit for allegedly ignoring widespread fraudulent streaming activity on its platform from the rapper Drake. The suit, filed in California by rapper RBX, alleges that the inflated play counts between 2022 and 2025 diluted royalties for legitimate artists under Spotify's pro-rata payment model and that Spotify “knew or should have known” that a substantial share of Drake's 37B streams were inauthentic, citing irregular VPN patterns, abnormal listening activity, and 24-hour streaming accounts. Spotify denied wrongdoing, saying it invests heavily in detecting fake streams and does not benefit from artificial streaming. I hope Drake or his management company (or whoever else was involved in the stream heist) gets sued too because that's pretty screwed up. ___ **Target** has over 200 corporate jobs available, of which 130 have been posted since the company laid off 1,800 corporate employees on October 23rd. The newly posted positions include engineers, product designers, and data analysts. A Target spokesperson confirmed the open positions and told Modern Retail that the roles are important for the company moving forward for various reasons, even though some overlap with departments affected by layoffs. Jeff Sward, founding partner of retail consultancy Merchandising Metrics, notes that while Target may be replacing higher-cost staff with lower-cost new hires, they could also be replacing underperforming staff. ___ **In corporate shakeups this week…** **Owner-com**, an online ordering and restaurant marketing system, appointed Darrin Henein as Chief Design Officer. He previously worked at Shopify for almost 10 years, mostly recently serving as VP of Design. **Nostra-ai**, an e-commerce intelligence platform, appointed Ray Chau as Head of Marketing, where he will lead brand strategy, communications, and demand generation for the company.  ___ **Tesla shareholders** approved Elon Musk's almost $1 trillion pay plan, which was introduced in September, with 75% support among voting shares. The pay package for Musk consists of 12 additional awards of shares to be granted if Tesla hits certain milestones over the next decade, increasing his ownership from 13% to 25%, as well as gives Musk increased voting power over the company, which he's been publicly demanding since early 2024. The first tranche of stock gets paid out if Tesla hits a market cap of $2 trillion (it currently sits at $1.54 trillion) and the next nine would be awarded if Tesla's value increased by increments of $500B to $1 trillion, up to $8.5 trillion. I've got to hand it to Elon Musk. Literally no other CEO could pull this off. ___ **Amazon Web Services** announced Fastnet, a dedicated high-capacity fiber-optic cable connecting the US and Ireland, marking its first independently built and operated transatlantic fiber-optic cable. The cable system, which is expected to be operational in 2028, provides 320 Tbps of capacity and is designed to deliver fast and reliable data transfer across the Atlantic, supporting Europe's growing demand for cloud computing and AI services on AWS. Talk about same-day delivery! ___ **A German court** ruled that Amazon’s 2022 Prime price increase was unlawful, finding that the company’s terms allowing unilateral adjustments violated consumer protection laws. The decision means Amazon may have to reimburse millions of German customers who paid higher fees since the increase from €69 to €89.50 per year, as well as revert back to its old price. The regional consumer protection authority of North Rhine-Westphalia plans to file a class action lawsuit that could result in hundreds of millions of euros in refunds. Amazon said it is reviewing the ruling and may appeal. ___ **Klarna** is expanding its debit card offering to 15 new European markets in partnership with Marqeta and Visa's Flexible Credential technology, building on its U.S. launch of the Klarna Card in June 2025, which enables consumers to pay immediately or pay later with the same card. The Klarna Card is currently rolling out in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Poland, and is already available in Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. ___ **🏆 This week's most ridiculous story…** Target is forcing their employees to smile at you! The company said it is leaning into “Minnesota Nice” and requiring employees to smile, make eye contract with, and greet or wave to customers if they come within 10 feet, as well as ask whether they need help or how their day is going if they come within four feet. This sounds like an introvert shopper's nightmare! Actually it sounds like everyone's nightmare. Can you imagine getting high right before you go shopping at Target and having every employee you walk past look, greet, and wave at you? I'd be paranoid out of my mind and probably abandon my shopping cart mid-store and leave. ___ Plus **9 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions** of interest including Richard Socher, You-com CEO and former chief scientist at Salesforce, and former OpenAI researcher Tim Shiseeking seeking $1B to launch a new AI research startup focused on automating AI research. ___ 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.