Welcome back to the Retention Edge.
Shopify released their Fall ‘26 Edition update this week, bringing together everything the platform has been shipping for merchants over the recent months.
Every piece of news lately should be giving Shopify merchants the confidence that they’re working with a platform that’s at the front of every change, every modernization that’s going on in ecommerce.
I don’t have any horse in the race; no ties to Shopify or interest in their success. But there’s a reason they’re steadily growing their market share. We’re seeing it with some of the brands we work with - migrations are almost always to Shopify, not away from it. And I think we’ll see more it that, as Shopify opens up more tooling for brands to build custom sites, powered by Shopify’s backend.
We’re doing a similar thing at MobiLoud. Brands increasingly want their customer-facing surfaces to be truly unique to their brand, and AI is giving them everything they need to do it, without the baggage that used to come with building custom features.
We’ve been moving more and more towards a sort of headless model; custom on the front end, powered by the same Shopify backend the brand’s website runs on.
That’s where I’m seeing ecommerce tech going. Interfaces need to be unique, customized, personalized, possibly even agentic. Custom front end - organized on the backend.
Shopify’s doing it - building the wiring for AI-driven, agentic storefronts. And I think this approach is going to be standard for anyone building in ecommerce before long.
Here's what's in this week’s Retention Edge:
Everything you need to know from Shopify's Fall '26 Edition: new fraud and chargeback tools, control over the product data each channel gets, Black Friday marketing tools and a new-look admin.
Amazon now lists 250 million products sold on other sites, and brands are in unless they opt out.
54% of shoppers cut off at least one brand last holiday season, most often because there were too many messages.
USPS can now bill you for unpaid foreign duties, even on parcels that come back.
Lush quit social ads five years ago and is still growing.
Let's get into it.
Shopify's Fall '26 Edition
Shopify's Fall '26 Edition landed on Oct. 28. There's more AI shopping news in it: Shop Pay in more agents, one checkout for carts from several stores in the Shop app, and Shop.com as Shop's new home on the web.
Here are the top things you need to know.
Shopify Protect blocks risky orders and writes your chargeback responses
Shopify Protect brings Shopify's fraud and dispute tools together in the admin. High-risk orders get blocked before payment is authorized at checkout, and the orders page shows which factors raised an order's risk level. The signals come from across Shopify's network, so a card flagged on one store is already known at the next.
For disputes, Shopify drafts an AI-generated response to every chargeback, written for the customer's bank and the reason code, and automatically attaches the carrier's proof of delivery when a customer says an order never arrived.
Shopify says merchants win 60% more "product not received" disputes with Protect. With the Shopify Protect app, you can also write your own fraud rules, backtest them against past orders and get alerts when their performance drifts. Some features are still rolling out, and chargeback protection for orders not paid with Shop Pay is marked "coming soon."
New marketing tools for the Black Friday push
Campaign Autopilot is now open to all merchants, under the Growth tab. Set a budget and guardrails, and it builds a campaign across Meta Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Snapchat, Shop and Shopify Messaging, with X Ads coming soon, then shifts spend toward what's working. It also suggests SEO changes for you to approve.
Shopify Messaging adds WhatsApp automations for abandoned browse, cart and checkout, building on the WhatsApp consent at checkout added in September. There's also a pre-built Black Friday email campaign you can preview, customize and schedule.
Control the product data each sales channel gets
A new channel mapping page shows the product data Shopify sends to each sales channel and lets you change where each field comes from. You can combine fields, like adding your brand name to product titles, override a field for a single product on one channel, and bulk edit many products and variants at once. Each field shows a coverage percentage, so missing values are easy to spot and fix.
Check what AI agents and the Shop app see about your store
A new view in the admin shows whether your store is eligible for Shopify Catalog, the product data ChatGPT, Copilot, Meta, Instinct and other AI agents pull from, and links to fixes for anything in the way.
The knowledge base, now at Sales channels > Agentic, is where you review and publish the facts agents get about your store, like return windows, shipping destinations and gift services. Shopify drafts them from your storefront, but nothing reaches an agent until you publish it.
Last week we covered a test of 122 Shopify stores where AI agents couldn't find basic shipping and cancellation details. The knowledge base is where you spell out facts like these for agents yourself.
Shop Promise, Shopify's free delivery and returns badge for US stores, is also open to 20x more merchants, and badged products rank higher in Shop app search and in the Catalog data agents use.
A new-look admin, with Sidekick on every page
The Shopify admin has new colors, type and icons, a collapsible side navigation, and Sidekick as a floating chat at the bottom of every page. The rebuilt Sidekick can run calculations, write code, search the web and remember what you teach it. You can ask it why a payout came in lower or what's driving your chargebacks.
It can also suggest storefront changes, build a draft and compare it with your current store using AI-simulated shoppers.
More ways for international shoppers to pay
Shopify Payments adds seven local payment methods: Alipay, WeChat Pay, MB WAY, OXXO, Satispay, Scalapay and GrabPay. All work in online checkout, and most also work with Shop Pay and the Shop app. If you use another payment provider, you can now add Shop Pay and local payment methods alongside it in the same store.
The Shopify Beat
The app security cleanup, two weeks on
About 480 apps left the App Store between Oct. 15 and 23, and about 41 have come back. Shopify hasn't explained most of the removals, and delisted doesn't mean hacked. A delisted app also isn't switched off on stores that already have it installed. Shoppers who paid with Shop Pay, PayPal or Google Pay mostly dodged the fake-checkout attack.
The Fall '26 Edition adds a security check for app developers, plus more detail on every collaborator request: how long the partner has been on Shopify, where the request came from and roughly how many stores it works with.
Shopify pulls hundreds of apps from the app store
Something had to give, with the flood of vibe-coded Shopify apps we’ve seen recently.
Shopify just unpublished hundreds more apps from the App Store on Oct. 29. Blair Beckwith from Shopify's partner team said they came from a small group of high-volume submitters and had no merchant installs; basically apps that aren’t creating anything but noise.
Shopify will soon announce limits on how many apps can be submitted at once, in an effort to maintain a certain level of standards in their ecosystem.
Schedule BFCM catalog changes ahead of time with Rollouts
Rollouts now handles catalogs, so you can set product availability and pricing per market to switch on at a set date and time, and launch them in the same rollout as theme and checkout changes. You can also run experiments between catalogs on your online store.
Managed Markets now sets your international shipping rates
Managed Markets can now set Standard and Express shipping rates for each destination, with part of the cost folded into duty-inclusive product prices and the rest charged at checkout. Buy qualifying prepaid FedEx or DHL Express labels through it and you won't be billed for later carrier cost adjustments. You can't edit the rates yourself, but you can turn the feature off per market.
Amazon
Amazon now lists 250 million products sold on other sites
Amazon's Shop Direct, which lists products sold on other websites, has grown to 250 million listings, about 2.5 times its March total, according to The Information. Amazon is showing them more prominently and has added Warby Parker and Alo Yoga, which could give shoppers less reason to reach for an outside agent like Meta's Muse.
Brands are included unless they opt out. Eleven merchants and agency staff said they got no warning when their products appeared, saw few sales from them, and sometimes found wrong details or links to unauthorized resellers. Amazon says it's building reporting so brands can track the traffic.
Amazon's holiday return window is now permanent
Items bought on Amazon from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31 can be returned through Jan. 31, 2027 (Apple products through Jan. 15), for both seller-fulfilled and FBA orders. For the first time, Amazon told sellers, "This policy will apply every year." Walmart goes further: most items bought from Oct. 1 can be returned through Jan. 31.
The Holiday Outlook
Walmart stretches Black Friday and Cyber Monday to 14 days
Early Black Friday deals run Nov. 12-15, the main Black Friday sale Nov. 23-29 and Cyber Monday Nov. 30-Dec. 2. That's 14 days of deals, up from 10 in 2025, with early access to some deals for Walmart+ members.
Fewer brands plan to focus on their own sites over the holidays
In Glossy's survey of 90 brand and retail marketers, 46% plan to focus on selling through their own ecommerce sites this holiday season, down from 69% in 2025.
Ritual's chief growth officer Laura Brodie said the right channel "depends almost entirely on purchase frequency." Driving shoppers to your own site costs more over the holidays, when acquisition costs spike, making more brands decide to double down on promoting through marketplaces and retailers.
Brodie says the story shifts when customers buy often, because the value of keeping them in a channel you own - your site, your own store, or your app - outweighs the higher cost of acquisition.
Retention
54% of shoppers cut off at least one brand last holiday season
Acoustic's 2026 Cyber 5 Gap Report found that 54% of shoppers unsubscribed, opted out or otherwise cut off at least one brand last holidays.
53% of them said the main reason was too many messages. Only 22% of shoppers said most of the messages they got were relevant, against 46% who said theirs were.
The timing is off too. Nearly three-quarters of shoppers who bought something over Cyber 5 did most of their holiday buying outside those five days, yet 69% of marketers build their plans around Cyber Week.
Across Acoustic's senders in August and September, behavior-triggered emails got a 5.5% click-through rate, against 1.42% for scheduled sends.
This is your reminder that brute forcing your marketing probably won’t work. Customers expect more effort these days, and they’ll cut you off if you don’t come to play.
Lush quit social ads five years ago and is still growing
In 2021, Lush stopped posting on and paying for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat, and it left X in 2023. The marketing money now goes to their own app, which has 2.8 million users, plus email that reaches more than 6 million people, creators, events and brand collaborations. The collaborations alone drove about £34 million in sales.
Revenue rose to £736.2 million in 2025, up from £672.7 million in 2024. To be fair, Digiday notes paid social was never a big part of Lush's ad budget, even before they walked away.
The Ad Platforms
Meta tells advertisers to stop tweaking holiday campaigns
Meta's holiday guide says to set a clear goal for each campaign and stop reacting to short-term swings, because that cuts short the time its system needs to learn. Each ad set needs roughly 50 conversions a week, and Meta says ad sets below that paid about 28% more per purchase.
Instead of changing creative, targeting or budgets mid-campaign, it wants advertisers to judge results with A/B tests or Conversion Lift studies, which means leaving spend running through slow stretches.
Google takes AI Mode ads global as Search growth slows to 12%
Google is expanding ads in AI Mode to international markets for the first time, and adding new multi-turn ads in the US. Search revenue grew 12% in Q3, down from 17% in Q2 and 19% in Q1.
Google says click-through rates for sponsored product listings in AI Mode are already comparable to organic listings, and that AI Mode queries run three times longer than traditional searches.
Shipping Costs
USPS can now bill you for unpaid foreign duties, even on returned parcels
A USPS rule that took effect Oct. 19 lets it invoice US merchants when foreign duties, taxes or fees go unpaid. You have to pay even while you dispute the charge, and you still owe it if the parcel is returned, lost or damaged. Past-due invoices build up interest at 6% a year. Switching carriers doesn't get you out of it, since UPS and FedEx have to make sure those charges get paid too.
USPS's Delivered Duty Paid service, run through Zonos, lets you prepay duties at the time you buy postage for 18 countries, including Canada and the UK. In the EU, a flat €3 duty now applies to each product type in a parcel.
USPS shipping costs will change every week from January
From January 2027, USPS plans a fuel surcharge on Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, Ground Advantage and Parcel Select that moves every week with diesel and jet fuel prices. It replaces the temporary 8% increase that expires Jan. 17. Each week's rate will be announced only three to five days ahead, and USPS hasn't said where the percentages start or whether the swings will be capped.
Funding and M&A
Intake Breathing raises $62 million from the Kind founder's firm
Camino Partners, founded by Kind's Daniel Lubetzky, is backing the nasal-strip brand as it moves into mass retail. Intake has sold more than 100 million pairs of breathing tabs since launching in 2023, through its own site and Amazon. Camino's president said 74% of Intake's customers had never bought from the category before, and CEO Alex Hauck says about 90% of its ads are simply people wearing the product while out and about.
Bose is buying Skullcandy
Bose announced a deal on Oct. 21 to acquire fellow headphone brand Skullcandy, which moved its ecommerce site to Shopify in 2022. Bose CEO Lila Snyder said Bose is expanding how it reaches people, "not only through Bose products, but through technology partnerships and a growing portfolio of brands."
Also This Week
Banks want liability rules before AI agents shop - PNC's CEO wants "a massive liability shift" onto tech companies, and a Stripe product lead says "we don't have case law on liability." Read more →
Returns become a selling point for TikTok Shop and DoorDash - Happy Returns drop-offs on TikTok Shop, $7.99 return pickups on DoorDash, and Gartner says 35% of US consumers pick a platform for its returns policy. Read more →
Brands double down on CTV this holiday - 45% plan streaming ads, up from 23% last year, while gift-guide use drops 19 points. Read more →
Meta Ads Manager now breaks down results by creative variation - see how each image, video and text variation in an ad performs on its own. Read more →
Etsy bans AI-generated patterns and recipes - and most listings now need one unedited photo of the real item. Read more →
Vera Bradley's turnaround runs on shoulder bags and TikTok Shop - more than 24,000 units sold on TikTok Shop as of Oct. 26. Read more →
What DTC's been talking about on social media this week.
Bots are gaming your discount codes
Ecomm Cowboy passed on a warning from Magic Mind CMO Rob Webb: AI is helping fraudsters find every discount code a brand has released, test which ones stack and exploit the combinations nobody intended. Webb's fixes: ask Claude, through the Shopify connector, for the top 10 issues that look like fraud; shut down old, unlimited and stackable codes; and watch for lookalike domains. "Agentic shopping may still be a while away," Ecomm Cowboy wrote. "Discount fraud is happening now."
A third of Meta-click customers took more than a week to buy
Rok Hladnik, looked at about 1,400 new-customer orders for one subscription brand. 53% converted on their first tracked visit, but among customers with a recorded Meta click, roughly 32% bought more than seven days after that first click. Plenty of advertisers still make big budget calls on yesterday's ROAS, and "if your customer journey is longer than your decision window, you're going to make some very bad decisions."
Show shipping costs and dates before checkout
Kurt Elster's holiday tip: show your free-shipping threshold and processing time before checkout, and if BFCM volume will slow fulfillment, "update delivery dates now, not after the angry emails start." A commenter added a catch: Shopify's processing-time setting changes what checkout shows, but the delivery text on the product page, cart and shipping policy page is set separately.
Subscription and replenishment are two different jobs
Jimmy Kim made the case that most brands add a Subscribe & Save widget, watch nobody use it and decide subscriptions don't work for them. Subscription is automatic. Replenishment is "a perfectly timed nudge to someone who's about to run out," and most consumable brands need both. The people reordering off those reminders are the ones most likely to subscribe.
The billing reminder that keeps subscribers
Max Sturtevant compared two versions of the same subscription billing reminder. The basic one says "Your order is processing," runs on the subscription platform's default template and puts the manage-subscription button at the top. The one that keeps people is rebuilt in Klaviyo, leads with the benefits and a free gift, maps out what unlocks at orders 3, 4 and 5, changes by order number and moves the manage button to the bottom.
A new way to build ecommerce mobile apps
The Retention Edge newsletter is brought to you by MobiLoud.
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The same used to be true for mobile apps. You needed a separate codebase, a whole new framework, to have a native app. You could launch an app, but it would be at the cost of maintaining a separate storefront in parallel to your site.
Not anymore. MobiLoud lets you keep one source of truth, shipping to three unique channels at once: desktop, mobile web, and a native app.
You get all the benefits of a custom, fully native app, with a modern UI built exclusively for app users - without the overhead of running a separate storefront.
It’s the engine behind the VIP channels from brands like John Varvatos, Jack & Jones, Tadashi Shoji and many more.
If you want to learn more about how it works, and see what’s possible, get in touch and book a free preview and consultation now.
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.