This week in eCommerce has been a public demonstration of what happens when several billion dollars of assumptions collide with reality in the same seven days.
Lululemon reported a "beat" that was substantially the work of a $134.5 million tariff refund, propping up a quarter in which its signature leggings fell 20 percent and the stock hit an eight year low. Nike has been removed from the S&P 100. Canada has retaliated with tariffs on $27.6 billion of American goods.
There is more. There is, in this mortal coil, always more. Onward, into this publication that retains all the necessary elements needed to be called DTC News.
Tweet of the Week
Every Step to Start an Ecommerce Business Revealed: Operators Build (E1)
Shopify has quietly - no. Shopify has decided, with the confiet-free efficiency of a landlord serving notice, that scriptTagCreate and scriptTagUpdate will stop working on October 1st, which gives most operators about thirty days to discover whether their pixels are held together by modern infrastructure or by a piece of legacy JavaScript nobody has looked at since a 2022 app install.
The genuinely unpleasant part is that nothing will look broken. Dashboards will keep reporting. Attribution will appear intact. And then, at some entirely unscheduled moment, an app update or a reinstall will hit the old ScriptTag API, return nothing, and take a week of Q4 conversion data down with it.
Inside:
Why the failure is silent, and why "the dashboard looks fine" is no longer reassuring
Which apps are still running on legacy script tags without anyone having checked
The two Shopify-sanctioned migration paths, and which one applies to your actual setup
A fifteen-minute audit that determines whether this is your problem or someone else's
This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable way to run tracking infrastructure heading into the highest-spend quarter of the year, provided one has made peace with finding out in February.
In partnership with Agentway
40-hours. Every day. One reconciliation workflow.
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At Big Moods, Agentway automated batches of more than 100 wholesale purchase orders. After launch and tuning, those batches ran with zero failures and zero manual interventions. One retailer alone generated nearly 3,000 copy-and-paste steps in a single week that nobody had to do.
That’s the Agentway model: take one high-volume operational workflow, automate the routine work, and send genuine exceptions back to your team with the context and approvals they need.
The result? Your team stops reviewing everything and focuses on what actually requires its attention.
For members of the private W6 community, Agentway is waiving the implementation fee for your first qualifying production workflow. Once access is in place, we aim to launch in as little as one week, followed by 60 days of monitoring and tuning.
Quick Shots
@theisaacmed Most people don’t intuitively understand this or underestimate which platforms are for what:
@sourfraser 34% thumbstop for an ad that’s just someone eating the product and saying what it tastes like.
Antonio Ventre Read frequency, CPA, CPM, and CTR together:
Barry Hott Meta advertisers: if you don't use this, you're not a Meta ads expert, you're a clown and I don't care about your opinions on Meta ads.
@natelagos If you send traffic to a “5 Reasons Why” page, consider this:
Here for the Memes
Top Headlines this Week
Best from LinkedIn
Meta Will Now Let You Bid 90% Less On Customers You Already Own
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Your prospecting ROAS is propped up by buyers you already paid for
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Value Rules let you price each cohort yourself, from plus 1,000% down to minus 90%.
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→ Tag your customer CSV and the matching pixel event with Meta's existing customer label.
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→ Bid minus 90% on that cohort.
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→ The repeat buyers leaking past your exclusions now cost pennies instead of full prospecting price.
Recommended SaaS & Services
Klaviyo just raised SMS prices. Omnisend recently lowered theirs. 👀 If your BFCM budget is already getting chunky, this might be the moment to question what you’re paying for. Omnisend can cost up to 35% less than Klaviyo, will migrate your paid account free in 5 days, and W6 members get 35% off their first 3 months.
BoxFort Commerce helps clothing & high-sku brands scale with efficient Shopify fulfillment. Unlike the Bobs & Monks of logistics, we ship hundreds of thousands of orders for 3 of our own clothing and jewelry brands, so it’s imperative that our processes are built around saving money & consistency. Learn more here.
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Stat Attack
So that was the week. Nike got banished from the S&P 100 after losing roughly three quarters of its market value since 2021 (which is frankly an impressive statistic), and Canada made $27.6 billion of American goods more expensive out of sheer diplomatic spite.
👆👆👆
They’re reaching 7, 8 and 9 figure merchants.
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