This Week in M&A Issue #256
September 28, 2026
Hey champ!
Today’s trend of the week is “school supplies”. 📒
Back-to-school shopping kicked into high gear in August.
According to the latest Shopify data shared with Retail Brew, sales of label clips jumped 606%, while graphic calculators were up 56% and kids’ desks rose 47%. Desk calendars increased 31%, while sticky notes climbed 25%.
This creates opportunities to target specific back-to-school needs with focused products, bundles, or niche ecommerce stores.
There’s also potential to reduce the seasonality. With the right design and positioning, products such as desk calendars, sticky notes, and organizational supplies can appeal to adults as well as students, opening up opportunities to sell into the office and home workspace markets year-round.
These products are lightweight and cheap to produce, so it could be worth doing a little homework on these categories.
Today we have for you:
- Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse from its marketplace
- Google brings AI checkout to Shopify stores
And:
- Case study: What if sites charged AI Agents to crawl them?
- Amazon sellers face new $1m insurance rules
- Why you shouldn’t recommend your most expensive product
Alright, let’s dive in.
Amazon
Image Source: Giphy (HBOMax)
Amazon and Meta Fight Over Who Controls AI Shopping
Amazon has blocked Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, from accessing its marketplace.
Muse launched on September 8 as a personal AI agent that can handle multi-step tasks, including shopping. When a website doesn’t offer a direct API, Muse can browse it using credentials provided by the user.
The agent has already reached the top of Apple’s App Store rankings, passing ChatGPT just 10 days after launch.
Amazon has asked Meta to remove Amazon.com from Muse’s shopping experience. Users trying to access Amazon through Muse now see a message saying that unauthorized AI agents violate Amazon’s Conditions of Use.
Amazon says Meta didn’t tell it Muse would access Amazon and that the agent doesn’t identify itself as an AI agent while browsing. It also raised concerns about access to customer accounts, order histories, and sensitive credentials.
Meta says Muse cannot see users’ passwords or payment information, which are stored securely for the agent to use.
There’s an obvious irony here. Amazon is objecting to Muse doing something its own AI shopping agent, Buy for Me, does to other retailers.
Buy for Me lets Amazon customers purchase products from brands that don’t sell on Amazon, with Amazon completing the transaction in the background. Some retailers only discovered the feature when their products appeared in the Amazon app. Amazon has confirmed that retailers who want to opt out must email the company.
Amazon has also taken other steps to limit third-party AI shopping. It sued Perplexity over its Comet shopping agent, while also making order confirmation emails less detailed to reduce information that AI systems could scrape.
Meanwhile, Shopify has taken a vastly different approach, announcing a partnership with Meta to support Muse-powered checkout through Shop Pay.
None of this appears to be slowing consumer adoption. PYMNTS estimates that around 132 million Americans have made a retail purchase with AI assistance, while 22% now start online retail research in an AI tool.
ecommerce
Shopify Merchants Can Now Sell Through Google AI
Google is making it possible for Shopify merchants to sell products directly through its AI tools.
Eligible Shopify stores can now let customers discover products in Google AI Mode and the Gemini app, then complete their purchase without being sent to the merchant’s website.
The feature uses Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which is designed to let AI tools interact with ecommerce systems. That includes finding products, checking availability, placing orders, and handling parts of the post-purchase process.
For shoppers, the experience is pretty straightforward. A product can show up during an AI conversation, and the customer can click to buy, use their shipping and payment details, and check out without leaving the AI experience.
There’s an important detail for Shopify merchants, though. Direct checkout is turned on by default for eligible stores. Merchants can switch it off if they would rather send customers to their own website to complete the purchase.
The rollout is currently limited to eligible Shopify stores based in the U.S. that sell to U.S. customers. Stores also need a valid Google Merchant Center account and must meet Google’s other requirements. The feature is still rolling out, so it won’t be available to every store or shopper yet.
That gives merchants another thing to think about. Product information, pricing, inventory, shipping policies, and other store data need to work well in places where customers may never visit the merchant’s website.
It also raises a practical question: what happens to the customer relationship when an AI platform sits between the shopper and the store?
case study
What Happens When AI Agents Have to Pay for Web Content?
What if AI agents had to pay a tiny fee every time they read a page on your website?
That’s what SEO consultant Suganthan Mohanadasan decided to test. He added a one-cent charge to pages on his site, then watched to see whether an AI agent would pay for access.
When an agent requests a protected page, the website returns an HTTP 402 “Payment Required” response. The agent can then pay one cent in USDC and receive the content.
He ran the experiment five times, including one test where Claude Code paid for access. The payments were made with testnet USDC, so no real money changed hands, but the transactions were recorded on the blockchain.
It’s a small experiment, but it raises an interesting question as AI agents consume more web content.
Today, publishers generally have a few options. They can allow AI crawlers to access their content for free, block them, or work with AI companies on licensing deals.
Pay-per-crawl offers another possibility: charge AI agents directly for access.
The system uses x402, a protocol that gives HTTP 402 a practical way to handle payments. An agent requests a page, the site tells it how much access costs, the agent pays, and the site delivers the content once the payment goes through.
Cloudflare is also working on this idea with tools including Pay Per Crawl and its Monetization Gateway.
There are still plenty of questions. Regular search crawlers aren’t currently arriving with wallets, and this particular experiment used testnet funds. It also doesn’t solve the bigger issue of how much a piece of content should be worth.
But the basic idea is pretty straightforward: instead of trying to figure out how much an AI company owes a publisher after using its content, websites could potentially set a price upfront and let AI agents decide whether the content is worth paying for.
Read All About It!
🎯 Super niche businesses making millions in 2026: founder insights
🧑💻 Building a $20K/month SaaS business: what it really looks like
🌐 Top 100 most visited websites in the world: how web traffic has changed
🤝 Best SaaS affiliate programs in 2026: earn repeat revenue from your content
sales
The Best Product to Recommend May Not Be Your Most Expensive
If you have a few pricing options on your website, you might want to think twice before putting a “Recommended” label on the most expensive one.
New research looked at how people respond to product recommendations and found that the most expensive option isn’t always the one customers are most likely to choose when it gets the recommendation.
Across eight experiments involving more than 6,200 people, researchers tested how different recommendation strategies affected buying decisions.
In one experiment, participants were choosing between drinks at different price points. When the mid-priced drink was labeled as recommended, sales of that option increased by 58%.
The researchers also found that people were 24% more interested in buying when the cheapest option was recommended. When the most expensive option was recommended, purchase interest fell by 8%.
Why?
People know businesses have a financial incentive to sell more expensive products. So when a company recommends its priciest option, customers may wonder whether the recommendation is actually about what’s best for them or simply what makes the business more money.
A cheaper recommendation can come across as more genuine for that reason.
How you frame the recommendation matters, too. Instead of simply saying “Recommended,” labels based on customer behavior, such as “Bestseller,” can provide a more objective reason for choosing an option.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should stop selling premium products. It’s more a reminder that customers pay attention to why you’re recommending something, not just what you recommend.
Amazon
Amazon Makes Insurance Mandatory for More Sellers
Thinking of selling on Amazon? New insurance rules could make some product categories more expensive for sellers, even if they’re just getting started.
Amazon is changing when some sellers need product liability insurance.
Starting November 2, 2026, sellers on Amazon with products in categories subject to enhanced safety requirements will need at least $1 million in commercial liability coverage, regardless of how much they sell. The requirement applies to both new and existing listings.
The affected categories include children’s products, cosmetics and ingestible products, and lithium battery products, among others.
Previously, Amazon generally required sellers to obtain insurance within 30 days after exceeding $10,000 in gross sales in a single month, although Amazon could request coverage earlier. The $1 million minimum itself is not changing. The important change is what triggers the requirement.
That means a seller can have a product that generates very little revenue, or no meaningful sales at all, and still need insurance simply because of the category it is listed in.
For smaller sellers, that adds another fixed cost before a product has proven demand. It also makes product classification more important, since Amazon’s categorization can determine whether a listing falls under the new requirement.
Amazon says the change is intended to protect customers and sellers from financial losses related to product incidents.
Money Nomad
Looking for a side hustle?
Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.
Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:
Listing #10170 – $15,000.00
display ads, affiliate, digital product| lifestyle, crafts & DIY
A 16-year-old natural essential oil lifestyle brand generating $290/month profit through display ads, affiliates, and digital products. Features 503 Page-1 Google rankings, 10,000 email subscribers with 25%+ open rates, and 250,000+ monthly Pinterest views. Learn More
Subscribe to the This Week in M&A Newsletter
to Get Content like This in Your Inbox Every Friday
