☕ Your Ecommerce Coffee Break (Issue 191)

👋 Happy Thursday! Here’s your latest ecom news roundup: AI enters shopping, Black Friday deals disappoint, Shopify lands inside ChatGPT, Amazon issues a major security alert, and TikTok ads keep surging.

Grab your coffee. Skim in ∼60 seconds or deep-dive in 3 min.

In Today’s Edition:

📰 Top Headlines: Marketplaces, AI trends, and platform updates
🎧 On the Pod: Ecommerce: Friendly Fraud: The Silent Killer
🗨️ Claus's Hot Take: ChatGPT Shopping Research

Don’t keep us a secret: Share with a fellow seller → Subscribe here 

📰 WHAT’S HAPPENING

📈 General Ecommerce News

• Black Friday discounts fail to offer cheapest prices [read more]

• Where Investors See Ecommerce Heading [read more]

• New Shopping research tool in ChatGTP [read more]

• Target is launching a shopping experience within ChatGPT [read more]

🛒 Platforms & Marketplaces

• Amazon: 300 million customers are at risk of cyber threat [read more]

• Amazon’s New Prompt Ads: What You Need to Do Now [read more]

• Shopify stores are now live on ChatGPT [read more]

• What’s New at Shopify? [read more]

📱Social Media & Advertising

• TikTok delivers 70% higher click-through rates [read more]

• Key Trends for Social Media Marketing in 2026 [read more]

• Meta Integrates More AI-Powered Options Into Its Ad Flow [read more]

• 7 Ecommerce Blog Examples [read more]

🎙️ ECOMMERCE COFFEE BREAK PODCAST

Friendly Fraud: The Silent Killer Putting Your Ecommerce Margins At Risk

In this episode, we dive into the silent profit killer known as friendly fraud and chargebacks.

Simon Wijckmans, Founder and CEO of cside, shares how these false chargebacks risk your margins and payment accounts.

He explains what friendly fraud is, why it's so hard to fight, and how client-side security intelligence, combined with new programs like Compelling Evidence V3, can drastically reduce fraudulent chargebacks and potentially save your business from losing its payment processor.

🎧 Listen on: [Website] [Apple Podcasts] [Spotify]

Don’t forget to rate the ECB Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

🗨️ CLAUS’S HOT TAKE

ChatGPT just declared war on your entire ecommerce marketing stack.

64% of shoppers already use AI for discovery. Now ChatGPT does the research, comparison, AND decision-making in 3 minutes flat.

• Your $50K/month Meta ads?

• Your SEO agency?

• Your 47 product pages?

• All obsolete overnight.

Here's the brutal math:

• Customer: "Find me the quietest cordless vacuum under $300"

• ChatGPT: Reads 50 sites, compares 15 models, delivers personalized guide

• Your store: Gets 1 organic visitor who bounces in 8 seconds

The brands that survive 2026 aren't the ones with better ads. They're the ones that get allowlisted in ChatGPT's brain first.

Action items for 2026 (do these TODAY):

1. Get allowlisted → Follow OpenAI's merchant process NOW

2. Optimize for AI prompts → "Quietest cordless vacuum small apartment" beats "best vacuum 2025"

3. Structured data everywhere → ChatGPT scrapes what Google indexes

4. Kill your homepage → AI wants product-level specificity, not hero banners

The dirty secret?

This isn't competition—it's the new Google Shopping.

Brands that master ChatGPT's algorithm will own 80% of discovery traffic by Q2 2026. Everyone else becomes 'that other option' in the comparison table."

P.S. Your $10K Shopify theme? Worthless. AI buyers don't care about design—they care about matching 17 constraints perfectly.

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