Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
This week, everyone in the Shopify space has been talking about a major security breach uncovered in a few different apps.
Something like this was inevitable, to be honest.
You’ve got:
A flood of new Shopify apps in the app store
A huge number of existing apps potentially pushing features faster, with less care (not saying that any of the named apps in the breach did this - but some developers out there are certainly pushing sloppier code)
More powerful AI agents that are able find bugs and exploits that may otherwise have been hidden.
And, if that’s not enough, 70% of the internet was in panic mode this week after a PHP vulnerability was announced.
Security is just going to become a bigger and bigger issue over time. I don’t believe the scare-mongering from Anthropic and OpenAI that bots are going rogue and hacking sites all over the internet by themselves; but it’s certainly an issue that every store owner (tech vendors too) needs to have top of mind.
We’re in the early days of a new Wild West in software. Stay safe out there.
Here’s what’s in this edition:
Hijacked Shopify apps sent shoppers to fake checkout pages, and Shopify is tightening the rules for app developers.
Meta's Muse passes 10 million setups, shopping is its top use, and Meta plans to charge businesses a fee on the sales it makes.
Walmart opens its doors to AI agents on its own terms, while Amazon keeps blocking them.
Meta switches on in-app product pages in your existing ads on Oct. 28 unless you opt out.
Salesforce buys Braze for $5.66 billion.
Let's get into it.
Store Security
Hijacked Shopify apps sent shoppers to fake checkouts
You’ve probably seen it all over your feed already; but in case the Retention Edge newsletter is your primary source of ecommerce news (if so, thanks), here’s what you need to know.
Over eight days in October, attackers used at least three Shopify apps to put fake checkout pages in front of real shoppers: Hulk Product Options, Selleasy and Swym Wishlist Plus, each confirmed by its developer. A shopper clicked Checkout, landed on a convincing copy of the checkout on an outside domain, typed in a card, then got passed on to the real checkout. The order went through, so a store's orders may not have dropped at all.
For most of the attack, the code didn't live in store themes. It came from the app developers' own servers as app settings, such as a custom JavaScript field, so theme files stayed clean. It also fired once per browser session, so a second test checkout looked normal. Developer Roman Zipp caught it on Oct. 10 when a password manager offered the name on a credit card for the "First name" field. No source says Shopify's own checkout was breached.
Nobody has said how many stores or shoppers were hit, and Selleasy alone runs on more than 49,000 stores. Australian retailer WAGD learned about it from a suspicious customer, then kept its store closed for days on Shopify's advice. "I've received more information from individual app developers than from Shopify itself," owner Carly Clarke told iTnews. After a second wave, Swym paused its app for every merchant at once.
Kurt Elster's write-up (linked below) includes a read-only check you can run in a private window. A clean result today won't cover mid-October, though: customers mentioning an odd extra payment page, or card fraud after buying from you, are the better signal.
Note - plenty of other apps showed up as delisted this week, but only these three have been confirmed by their developers as part of this, and a delisting alone isn't proof of a breach.
Shopify tightens the rules for apps
On Oct. 20, Shopify pinned a post to its developer forum asking every app developer to act "this week": scan their app with Shopify's AI Toolkit, move to expiring access tokens (soon required for all public apps), turn on two-step authentication for every account that touches the app, and treat all rendered data as untrusted, even data from their own servers.
Shopify says it's also tightening the boundaries for storefront app code, adding IP restrictions so API keys only work from a developer's servers, and raising App Store security requirements, with details and timelines to come.
PHP's emergency patch puts self-hosted stores on the clock
On Oct. 21, the PHP Foundation shipped emergency fixes for "php2shell," two critical flaws that let an attacker run code on a web server without logging in. PHP sits under WordPress, which powers roughly 40% of all websites, and Palo Alto Networks counted 22.6 million potentially vulnerable instances. Cloudflare saw tens of thousands of exploit attempts within 45 minutes of word getting out, and AWS says the bug is "being broadly exploited in the wild."
Shopify stores don't run on PHP. As Ecomm Cowboy put it, "Shopify isn't built on PHP, and nothing in the ecosystem looks impacted so far." WooCommerce and other self-hosted stores are a different story, and updating WordPress or its plugins doesn't patch PHP itself. The fix is PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35, and 8.1 and older get no official update, so the question for your host is which patched build is actually running.
The flaw sat in PHP for 14 years until three teams, OpenAI among them, found it in August using AI models. Shopify's developer post made the same point about its own ecosystem: attacks are increasing "as AI gets better at finding vulnerabilities."
The Shopify Beat
Shop Pay evolving beyond Shopify
Anthropic's new Claude Duet agent app, in a waitlist preview for US Pro and Max subscribers, can set up and manage a Shopify store and check out with Shop Pay. Shop Pay also went live on lululemon.com in the US and Canada this week.
Shopify's checkout is becoming a wallet that follows the shopper, into agents and onto big brands' own sites. An interesting part of the ecommerce platform wars going on right now, with Amazon trying to get the same thing going with Buy with Prime.
Agents can open your checkout but can't answer basic questions
Search Engine Journal tested 122 Shopify stores. AI agents could open a checkout on every one, but none met all nine criteria for an agent to finish a buying decision. Each store's policy tool found the return window for 70 of 88 stores, never gave a shipping cost or delivery date, and only two stores said whether orders can be canceled.
The answers were on the policy pages. The tool only found them when a question was phrased like a page title, such as "What is your shipping policy?"
Clearly some gaps still exist on at least one side of the agentic commerce conversation - the agents, the stores, or both.
Fulfill orders in batches
Shopify now lets you group up to 250 fulfillments by product type or shipping destination, then pick, buy labels, print and pack them together. A scan step flags wrong or extra items as you pack. Just in time for peak volume.
Vercel Shop puts an agent-ready storefront on Shopify
Shopify's rebuilt Hydrogen SDK now works across JavaScript frameworks, and Vercel launched Vercel Shop, an open-source storefront template built on it. Pages look normal to people while giving shopping agents structured product data, sitemaps and an LLMs.txt guide. Mostly relevant if you run, or are planning, a headless store.
Agentic Shopping
Meta's Muse passes 10 million setups, and shopping is the top use
More than 10 million people in the US and Canada set up Meta's Muse agent in its first six weeks, Mark Zuckerberg said on the Q3 earnings call. About a quarter use it daily. Shopping is the most popular use: over 25% of users have bought through it, at an average order above $200. Purchase volume ran so far past expectations in week one that Stripe raised its credit limits.
The merchant part comes next. Meta plans to charge businesses a fee when Muse helps complete a sale, and it's working with Shopify and Walmart on a Personal Agent Protocol for how shoppers' agents deal with stores. Muse is expensive to run, so Meta is holding off on a global rollout. It's the first agent with real shopping volume, and Meta intends to take a cut.
Walmart lets AI agents shop, on its terms. Amazon still says no.
Walmart is beta testing Agent Gateway, which uses the Model Context Protocol so approved AI agents can shop for a customer without getting the shopper's personal information or purchase history. Next month it adds Agent Profiles: each agent gets its own profile in the customer's account, and every purchase either needs the shopper's approval or stays under a spending limit they set. Updated terms also keep payment card details away from agents.
Amazon has gone the other way, working to stop agents from Perplexity and Meta. Most retailers are closer to Amazon for now. Agent purchases are growing about 43% a month, but just 3% of the online retailers BrightEdge works with let agents finish a checkout. Walmart's setup is a useful template if you're deciding where you land: agents get in, with limits the customer controls.
The Ad Platforms Change the Defaults
Meta will send ad clicks to its own catalog first, starting Oct. 28
Meta is telling advertisers it will switch on product browsing in their existing Facebook and Instagram ads on Oct. 28 unless they opt out. With it on, tapping an ad opens a full-screen Meta catalog page with your products, prices and descriptions, and the shopper has to tap again to reach your site. Meta says a test with about 117,700 advertisers raised conversions 3% on average, without saying which conversions it counted. You can opt out through the notice, or ad by ad in Advantage+ Creative and Destination settings.
A second change lands Oct. 30. Meta's new terms make advertisers "solely responsible" for anything its AI tools generate or change in their ads, even tools Meta switched on. Agencies say Meta is already translating copy and turning brand photos into AI images without being asked.
ChatGPT Ads will rewrite your ads by default
From Oct. 30, OpenAI turns on creative enhancements for every self-serve ChatGPT Ads campaign, new or existing. It can rewrite headlines and descriptions to fit a conversation, translate text, resize images and send clicks to a different page on your site. Variations run without approval of each one, and there's no preview of every version. Opting out happens in Ads Manager.
The program keeps growing, too: ChatGPT Ads are now in 89 markets with more than 100,000 advertisers. That's two ad platforms switching on AI edits by default within days of each other.
Paid media gets pricier into the holidays
Meta's average price per ad rose 14% year over year in Q3, while ad impressions grew 10% and revenue rose 26% to $64.6 billion. Google search clicks cost 4% more in Q3 than a year earlier, per Tinuiti, after a year of flat prices that followed Amazon's exit from most Google Shopping auctions.
Every BFCM customer you buy will cost more than last year's. That’s to be expected, though. To keep pace, you need to be building a bigger audience each year, so you have a higher share of your BFCM sales coming from people who already know you.
The Holiday Outlook
Forrester: online drives most of this season's growth
Forrester expects US holiday ecommerce to grow 11.6% this year and account for nearly 60% of the season's added retail sales, though online is only about a quarter of the total. Holiday spending across US retail should hit $1.1 trillion, up 5.1%, but more of that growth comes from higher prices than from people buying more. Expect solid sales numbers with slower unit growth.
Deloitte: more than a quarter of holiday budgets are spent by Halloween
Deloitte's survey of 4,000 US consumers found 22% plan to start holiday shopping earlier than last year, and 28% of budgets will be spent by the end of October, the highest in six years. Forty-two percent plan to shop October sales events. Deloitte also counts 38% of shoppers as "holiday value seekers," who plan to spend 12% more than everyone else but research harder: the discount, shipping speed, loyalty points.
Deloitte's Brian McCarthy says retailers "should try to make this concept of value easy to see." If your offer only goes live in late November, a good share of the budget is already gone.
TikTok Shop's Black Friday runs for three weeks
TikTok Shop's US Black Friday-Cyber Monday campaign runs Nov. 11 to 30, with Sephora, Best Buy and Ulta Beauty now selling on the platform. Livestreams are the centerpiece: TikTok Shop says US live shopping sales more than doubled in the first half of 2026.
Last year it topped $500 million over the four-day BFCM weekend, and sellers who went live saw sales jump 84%.
Retrain customers to pay full price
At a Glossy and Modern Retail leaders dinner, fashion and beauty executives talked about weaning customers off holiday discounts. "It's super cheap to afford customers on markdown," one founder said. "But it's not profitable." Another said brands should save discounts for their most loyal customers, not first-time buyers.
Brands are already shifting. LoyaltyLion found that last holiday season, brands offering loyalty members early access to new products rose 66%, while exclusive discounts for members fell 35%.
Retention
Salesforce buys Braze for $5.66 billion
Salesforce agreed to acquire Braze for about $5.66 billion, paying $47.50 a share in cash, a 58% premium. Braze triggers messages across apps, websites, email, SMS and WhatsApp based on what a customer is doing at that moment, for about 2,770 customers including Canva, Instacart, Urban Outfitters and Venmo.
Braze keeps its name and CEO, and its tools will join Salesforce's Marketing Cloud once the deal closes in Salesforce's fiscal 2028.
Google Ads can now target lapsed and loyal customers
Google is rolling out retention goals across Performance Max, Search and Shopping this month. Re-engagement Mode prioritizes customers who haven't bought recently, Loyalty Mode reaches loyalty members with member messaging or pricing, and Retention Only Mode runs campaigns just for existing-customer segments you choose. New Customer High Value Mode, which bids up for valuable new customers, also comes to Shopping campaigns.
All of it depends on the customer data you feed it.
Brand Building
Cymbiotika reaches $150 million and moves into beauty
Supplement brand Cymbiotika has sold more than 200 million single-serve liposomal packets and grown revenue 3,000% in three years to $150 million a year, the company says. It entered Target in 2025, Ulta Beauty in March and Walmart last week. Now it's launching its first beauty supplement, for hair, skin and nails, with its biggest campaign yet.
Ruggable moves Meta money into creators
Since last August, Ruggable has shifted about 10% of its total spend from performance channels like Meta into brand channels like influencers and connected TV, and it plans to grow that by another 15% to 20% next year. Last holiday season it moved upwards of a million dollars from Meta into ShopMy creators. The ShopMy partnership brought in about $3 million in its first month, then doubled the next month and tripled in month three.
"We don't really need to be showing up in the bottom-of-funnel affiliate networks, when ShopMy is working so well as a conversion channel for us," said CMO Lauren Sherman-Kaoud.
TikTok's top sleep brand lands at Target
Mellow Sleep launched in 2025, became the top-selling sleep brand on TikTok, did $130 million in its first year and is on track for over $300 million in year two. It's now in 550 Target stores and goes nationwide by year's end. Target reached out less than a year after launch, as it tries to revive a home category whose sales fell $1.09 billion last fiscal year.
Also This Week
BigCommerce stores turn on WebMCP - Browser AI agents can search catalogs and build carts, on by default, with checkout still on the store's own site. Read more →
Agents pick the same few brands - In 200 answers from five AI agents, Brooks came up in 67% of running-shoe answers, and seven brands took 83% of the picks. Read more →
ChatGPT traffic is still small - Across 100 sites, ChatGPT sent 0.62% as many visits as Google organic. Its visitors converted at 13.8%, but Google still drove 27 times more conversions than all chatbots combined. Read more →
Reviews still close the sale - Only 5% of shoppers buy on the spot when an AI assistant recommends something, per Feedvisor. The rest check Google and Amazon for better prices first. Read more →
Etsy tests capped shipping - On some US orders it caps what buyers pay for calculated shipping and covers the difference, so sellers still get their full rate. Read more →
eBay moves sellers onto eBay balance - US sellers get auto-enrolled Nov. 4, and scheduled payouts switch to manual withdrawals. Read more →
Safari blocks ad ID companies - The Trade Desk, LiveRamp and others are blocked, and ad buyers expect less reach and higher prices on the open web. Read more →
Meta's Ads Super Burst - Reserve 3 to 24 hours of Facebook and Instagram inventory around a launch, with the option to keep category rivals out. Read more →
Stord buys AMS Fulfillment - A nine-figure deal that adds 10 warehouses and the 150-plus beauty, wellness and DTC brands AMS ships for. Read more →
Redo buys Relay Goods - The returns platform adds a resale marketplace for returned running shoes, so brands can make money from returns. Read more →
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
Most of your Black Friday orders come from people who already bought
@alexmcea pointed to ProfitPeak and Klaviyo data showing 68% of last year's BFCM orders came from returning customers. The point: "There are no shoppers walking by your store online." You're either paying a lot to bring shoppers in, or they were coming anyway.
Meta CPMs are up 25%, and the holiday spike came early
Northbeam, which tracks ad spend across thousands of advertisers, says Meta CPMs are up about 25% year over year, the most expensive "normal" selling period in about 18 months. Last year's BFCM spike didn't start until November. This year it showed up in September, and Northbeam says its data can't pin down why.
What happens to subscriptions when an agent does the reordering
@jasonnmyers, co-founder of a Shopify subscription app installed on more than 100,000 stores, bought coffee through an AI agent and set the refill rules in one text. The takeaways: agents make subscription convenience free, find and test every public discount code, and learn the shopper's taste instead of the brand. "Subscribe & Save won't keep anyone" unless subscribers get something nobody else can.
Black Friday clears the funnel, it doesn't fill it
Jimmy Kim walked through a Black Friday email plan on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast: BFCM is "a funnel clearing event, not a list growth event." So ramp send volume in October, segment every send, and launch a product instead of discounting.
Your VIPs think you like new customers more
Ari Murray flagged a gap to fix before BFCM: 70% of monthly repurchasers feel brands care more about new customers, even though 69% of brands split their budget 50/50 between retention and acquisition. BFCM makes it worse when the best deal is for new customers only.
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That’s all for this week.
I’ll be back in touch soon, with an eye on what’s happening in the ecommerce and retail world, so you can keep yours on growing your business.
Until then,
Pietro and The Retention Edge Team
PS: shoot me a DM on LinkedIn if you’re interested in what a custom mobile app could do for your brand.