Busy year. It’s hard to choose, but here are some of my favourite stories from @thelogic.co over the past 12 months.

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👉 thelogic.co

Shopify has laid off scores of employees across several rounds of redundancies in the past two years.

The drumbeat of cuts has had a damaging impact on morale as staff become accustomed to the ever-present threat of losing their jobs.

Story by @aleksagan.bsky.social.

thelogic.co/news/exclusi...

“People are being laid off all the time:" A look at the regular drumbeat of layoffs at Shopify where staff have become accustomed to seeing coworkers vanish from Slack.

Messing up Cyber Monday? "It’s catastrophic," one retailer said of their experience being locked out of their Shopify store for hours during an outage on one of the biggest sales days of the year.

Compensation will soon be "100 per cent" tied to the billed revenue salespeople bring in through merchants that use Shopify.

Some Shopify merchants found they were unable to log into their online stores or use the company's point-of-sale system in their physical locations amid a partial outage of Shopify services on one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

Shopify salespeople inflated the value of the deals they were closing amid aggressive quotas and a lack of accountability, sources told me. When management found out, after big deals failed to bring in the numbers projected, they gave staff an ultimatum: own up or be found out.

Are you a retailer who has been prepping their digital storefront so that AI agents, like Chat-GPT, will be quicker to recommend your products? Would love to chat with you for a story. My DMs are open.

Shopify "parted ways" with 3 key executives, said new COO Jess Hertz in an internal message to staff earlier this month, including CRO Bobby Morrison. The departures marked a "turning point" after Shopify drifted too far from its "core."

Scoop: We got hold of the memo new Shopify COO Jess Hertz sent to staff after the sudden departure of three of the firm's most senior execs.

Hertz said their departure was a "turning point" for the firm after it had "drifted" from its "core".

By @aleksagan.bsky.social.

thelogic.co/news/exclusi...

"The AI is just not there," says one merchant who pays for a premium tier that promises 24/7 support and a dedicated service rep, but is now faced w/ an "endless back and forth" with AI. How Shopify's plan to turnaround its struggling customer-service dept. by using more AI has left merchants angry:

Seth Rogen's Houseplant "makes nice things for people who love weed" and sells them using Shopify Payments. Other cannabis accessory retailers say they're barred from doing the same. They're asking Shopify for a level playing field.

If you work(ed) at #Shopify and have been a part of the ongoing quiet layoffs, and want to speak about it securely, reach me at aleksagan.12 on Signal or pop into my DMs.

Amazon has intimidated workers, displayed anti-union messages and frozen pay at a newly unionized Delta, B.C., warehouse, alleges the union representing them. Amazon, which is fighting the unionization in court, says the union is presenting "a false narrative."

Unifor and the Amazon warehouse workers it is now representing in Delta, B.C., are working toward a collective agreement despite Amazon's decision to fight the unionization in the courts.