Shopify reacts to DMCA issue

Plus: Updates you might have missed

November 02, 2023

Good morning and welcome back to another edition of Shop Pulse!

We’re back after a break last week and with a small change - from now every edition of Shop Pulse will be published on Wednesday (from next week onwards), so we can get to enjoy the weekend too 😅

Here’s what you might have missed from the last 2 weeks:

  • Shopify reacts to DMCA issue

  • Updates you might have missed

Shopify reacts to DMCA issue

Bad actors would create half-baked stores that would replicate the brand’s design and product pages and then issue fake DMCA notices through Shopify. These would take the real brands who were running their business legitimately either temporarily down or sometimes even get permanently terminated off Shopify.

After a tweet from Boyuan Zhou went viral, things kicked into gear at Shopify. To start with, Boyuan’s store went back online.

But more importantly, Shopify filed a lawsuit against the “John Doe” in question on 16th October (read the full lawsuit here).

While this is a great step and it’s reassuring to see Shopify is on the side of the merchants, it’s not clear how the person in question will be identified and actually brought in front of the courts.

Furthermore, if the John Doe is based in a different country, then the US courts will not have jurisdiction there so it seems unlikely whether anything meaningful will actually come from the lawsuits.

Updates you might have missed

There have been a lot of minor updates and improvements shipped by Shopify in the last couple of weeks. Here’s the ones that we really liked:

  1. Customers paying via Shop Pay will now get redirected to the post-purchase page on the merchant’s domain. This should now allow for consistent post-purchase conversion tracking for all payment methods.

  2. Cart transform API gets the update operation in Developer Preview. This will allow you to override the price, title and/or image of any line item to give you more flexibility on making customizations in the cart, especially for bundles.

  3. Shopify Payments can now capture multiple payments per order. This is very useful in not asking the customer to pay multiple times in cases like shipping an order from multiple locations or even to meet accounting standards.

  4. New POS UI extensions settings will now help you add / remove 3rd party apps to the Smart Grid from your Shopify admin across multiple locations. In other words, your Shopify admin can single-handedly update all your POS terminals.

Pulse Check ⚡️

  1. WorkMagic, a Shopify app helping brands automate tasks with generative AI, has raised $2 million in seed funding

  2. Shein buys Missguided brand from Frasers, just over a year after Frasers acquired it out of administration for $24.2 million

That's a wrap for this week! Join us over on Twitter to chat about all things e-commerce. It's like attending the coolest virtual shopping party – no long lines, pushy salespeople, or shopping cart collisions in sight (@theshoppulse)