24 Updates - Shopify BFCM, Review Ads, $1T Holidays
Happy Monday.
Black Friday is exactly one month (and one day) away. That extra day is a gift, so lock in the offer, brief the designers, or just stare at the campaign doc for a bit. I am not saying panic. I am saying the coffee machine should start working overtime.
Here is what caught my eye today:
- Shopify just dropped a pre-BFCM bundle: midnight price switches, simpler international shipping, and AI agents that can find your physical stores.
- Google is now putting your reviews inside your Search ads, and only the positive ones.
- US holiday sales are on track to pass $1 trillion for the first time.
SHOPIFY
Shopify's pre-BFCM drop: midnight price switches and no surprise shipping bills
Cinderella's magic ran out at midnight. Your Black Friday prices can now kick in at midnight instead, and you will not have to stay late to flip them.
This section is all Shopify, and the timing is the point. Every one of these changes lands right before the biggest shopping weekend of the year, so if you run a store, read it twice.
Set it and forget it, finally. Rollouts, Shopify's tool for scheduling and testing store changes, now handles catalogs. You can set prices and product availability per market ahead of time, switch catalogs on or off at a set date and time, test one catalog's offer against another, and launch catalog, theme and checkout changes together.
My take: this is the one to set up first. Midnight price switches mean no more staying up to flip prices by hand, and testing one catalog offer against another before Black Friday beats guessing on the day.
Shipping costs, no plot twists. Managed Markets, Shopify's service for selling internationally, now sets your Standard and Express shipping rates abroad. Buyers see one simple shipping price at checkout.
Managed Markets folds part of that cost into your product prices. Buy qualifying prepaid FedEx or DHL Express labels through it, and you will not pay for later carrier adjustments. The catch: it requires duty-inclusive pricing, and you cannot edit the rates yourself.
My take: one simple shipping price at checkout should lift international conversion, but giving up control of the rates is a real trade. If your margins are tight, check what the duty-inclusive pricing does to them before you switch it on.
Before you blame the traffic. Checkout now shows payment methods as compact tiles instead of a list for stores offering four or fewer methods.
If your conversion rate swings, check your layout first. My take: small layout changes cause big conversion swings, and this one is easy to miss. If you see a dip after the switch, the tiles are the first suspect, not your ads.
Small print. Your store now blocks links to sites Shopify flags as malicious and asks customers to confirm before visiting suspicious ones. Other links work as before.
My take: this protects your buyers, and it protects your store's reputation too. One bad outbound link can do real damage, so I am glad Shopify is catching it.
AI shoppers, meet your stores. UCP is the open protocol that lets AI shopping agents work with online stores. Now agents can also find a merchant's physical locations.
They can search by city or distance and see which stores carry the items a buyer wants. Agents only see locations you have enabled as a Physical storefront, so check yours.
My take: AI agents are starting to shop in the real world, not just online. If you have physical stores, enabling them as a Physical storefront is a five-minute job that could put you on an agent's shortlist.
My take on this whole section: Shopify is doing the unglamorous work before Black Friday, scheduling, shipping, checkout, and store discovery. None of it is flashy, and all of it is the kind of thing that breaks on the biggest weekend of the year if you ignore it.
E-COMMERCE
AI makes the shortlist, reviews close the sale, and Google now puts them in your ads
On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, contestants phone a friend, then ask the audience anyway before locking in. Shoppers now treat ChatGPT the same way.
This section is the one I would read twice. AI is now part of how people shop, but the data says it is the start of the journey, not the end of it. And Google just gave your reviews a brand new ad slot.
Phone a friend, then check the work. 16% of shoppers start product searches in ChatGPT, according to a Feedvisor survey covered by Modern Retail. Only 5% buy on the spot after an AI recommendation.
PartnerCentric's survey found that after an AI suggestion, shoppers check reviews (33%), compare prices (22.3%), search Amazon or another retailer (18.8%), and visit the brand's site (14.8%).
My take: ChatGPT is the friend on the phone, not the cashier. Shoppers take the suggestion, then do the same homework they always did. If your reviews are thin and your prices are hard to compare, the AI recommendation will not save you.
They still Google you, too. Similarweb data shows 93.7% of ChatGPT.com's visitors also visited Google.com in September.
My take: AI search is additive, not a replacement. The same shopper asks ChatGPT and then Googles you anyway, so your Google presence still has to hold up when they arrive.
And your reviews just landed an ad slot. Google's review summaries are AI-written recaps of your online reviews that appear inside your Search ads.
They are positive-only, you cannot edit them, and Google shows them only when it predicts better ad performance. They only run in English in the US, UK, Australia and India.
My take: this is free ad copy written by your own customers, and you cannot control a word of it. That is exactly why your review profile matters more than ever. Every review you collect now is a line Google might put in your ad.
Small traffic, big intent. SEO consultant Marie Haynes analyzed 100 sites and found ChatGPT drove just 0.62% as many sessions as Google organic. But on sites tracking conversions, 13.8% of ChatGPT visitors converted, vs. 3.02% from Google organic. Google organic still drove 27 times as many conversions as all LLMs combined.
My take: tiny traffic, serious buyers. ChatGPT sends few visitors, but the ones it sends are ready to buy. I would not move budget away from Google organic over this, but I would absolutely make sure the AI-visible pages convert well.
What to do this holiday season:
- Read your reviews across the web and see what Google's AI could praise, and what it could not.
- Fill review gaps on Google and Amazon.
- Match shipping and returns terms on your site and every retailer listing. 33% of shoppers say these terms often or always change what they buy.
- Move part of your AI-visibility budget into review collection.
My take: the AI may be the friend on the line, but the audience still decides. Reviews are now your ad copy, your trust signal, and your AI visibility all at once, so this holiday season, collect them like they are revenue. Because now they are.
Google Maps now answers specific questions, so your business needs specific answers
"Mexican restaurant nearby" used to be the whole search. Now people ask Google Maps for a restaurant quiet enough to talk business.
Laura I. Abreu explains how to make your business easier to recommend, and her point is simple: Maps stopped matching keywords and started matching needs. If your listing only says what category you are in, you are invisible to the questions that actually decide the sale.
The gist: Maps now reads between the lines. Ask Maps, the Gemini-powered chat Google added to Maps in March, matches businesses to what people need. It draws on 300 million+ places and reviews from 500 million+ contributors.
It also weighs context nobody typed, like saved places, dietary needs, how busy a place is and, for Gmail users who opt in, upcoming flights.
My take: this is search by situation, not by keyword. Your listing has to answer the question behind the question, and that means details, not just a category and a phone number.
A category will not cut it. Relevance, distance and prominence still drive rankings. But bakery hunters may also care about hours, dietary options and seating.
Fill in your Google Business Profile, your Maps listing, with attributes, amenities, photos and hours, so Google can tell when you are the right pick.
My take: a half-empty profile is now a lost sale, not just a missed detail. Every attribute you skip is a question Google cannot answer in your favor.
Your reviews know things your profile does not. Customers mention things no attribute covers, like being handy before an early flight or gentle with older patients.
If reviews keep praising something your site barely mentions, add it. My take: your customers are writing your best copy for free. If they keep mentioning the same strength, put it on your site and in your profile, because that is what Maps will surface.
"Flexible" answers nothing. A driving school promising "flexible lessons" still leaves learners wondering about after-work slots, weekends and start dates.
Answer the deciding questions on your main service pages. No need for a page per question. My take: vague words are not answers. If a customer has to guess what "flexible" means, they will ask someone else instead.
Go undercover as your own customer. Rank trackers check "Botox near me." Customers ask for Botox that still looks natural, so search that, too. See who shows up and what they say that you do not.
My take: this is the cheapest competitive research you will ever do. Search like your customer searches, not like your rank tracker does, and the gaps will jump out at you.
Fewer stops before the sale. From Ask Maps, people can already book tables and start navigating. US users can even prep a food order. The recommendation is becoming the storefront.
My take: every step you remove between the recommendation and the purchase is money. If Maps can take someone from "quiet restaurant" to a booked table without touching your site, your listing is your storefront now.
Outside the US? Since August, Ask Maps has been rolling out in 150+ countries and territories in English. US users can also suggest new hours by photographing the sign on your door, so keep it and your profile in sync.
My take on this whole section: no AI-targeted content fixes wrong hours or a half-empty profile. Being nearby still matters. Being the obvious answer might matter more.
DATA STORIES
Holiday sales are on track to pass $1 trillion
Santa just joined the trillion-dollar club. The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasts US holiday sales of $1.01 trillion for 2026. That would be the first time they top the trillion mark.
This is the number every holiday plan should be built around. More money on the table, more brands chasing it, and higher ad costs to match.
Holiday sales will reach $1,013.2B this year. If the forecast holds, holiday sales will reach $1,013.2B this year, up 4.2% from 2025's $972.3B.
That would be the fastest growth since 2021, when sales jumped 12.7% during the pandemic spending boom. Since that surge, growth has cooled to roughly 2% to 4% a year. Over the full decade, though, holiday sales have grown about 61%, from $629.4B in 2016.
My take: 4.2% growth on a trillion-dollar base is a lot of new money, and it is the fastest growth since the pandemic boom. The opportunity is real, and so is the competition for it.
Shoppers cut back in other places, but they protect the holidays. Higher prices also push totals up, so a record dollar figure does not necessarily mean more items in carts.
More brands will chase the same holiday shoppers, so ad costs will climb. Finish your creatives early, and give past customers a reason to buy from you first with email and loyalty offers.
My take: your past customers are your cheapest holiday revenue. Before you pay holiday auction prices for strangers, give the people who already bought from you a reason to come back first.
QUICK UPDATES
Google Ads: Your Search budget may quietly drift to Display. From February 2027, Google moves Search campaigns using Display Expansion, which sends unspent budget to Display Network ads, to channel prioritization. The hidden 50% allocation goes, and High or Low priority tiers take over. Want today's setup? Set Display to Low priority with a 50% cap.
Meta: Shoppers are already handing their carts to Muse, Meta's AI agent for US and Canada users. Zuckerberg says 25% of people who set it up use it daily, shopping is its top use, and average purchases top $200. The catch: Sensor Tower data shows retention drops sharply two weeks after download.
Social Media: Your audience's news desk is now their feed. Pew found 58% of US adults call social media an important way to keep up with news, up from 43% in 2022, and 13% say it is their most important source, up from 5%. Among 18 to 29 year olds, it is 76%.
OpenAI: Frontier models at OpenAI now train without live internet access. After one used a DNS misconfiguration to reach the web on September 20, OpenAI moved all frontier training to an "offline world" of indexed and cached web content.
Canva: Canva trained Craft, its first in-house image model, on human-designed templates instead of photos. Craft makes up to 2K images in 30 aspect ratios with legible text. Canva Magic, its image-to-design tool, can split them into editable layers. Every user gets it in Dream Lab.
Google: Google is now putting words in your page's mouth. It seems to be testing AI-written descriptions in AI Overviews citation cards, the source boxes beside the answer. Brodie Clark spotted that the text does not match the cited page: Google summarizes what it finds most relevant. Check your top queries to see what it says.