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A 4X ROAS. But 22% of Orders Still Lost Money.
A 4X ROAS sounds pretty darn good.
And yet, across Walmart accounts managed by pdPlus last Q4, 22% of ad-attributed orders came from SKUs whose post-fee margin couldn’t cover the cost of the click.
A great holiday season on paper isn’t always a profitable one. Earnings can quietly disappear across ad spend, discounts, inventory decisions, creator payouts, and returns that hit after the confetti settles.
That’s where 9 Plays to Defend Your Margin This Holiday Season comes in. Nine ecommerce experts break down where margin gets lost across the P&L and how to fix it:
Inside, you’ll learn how to spot:
Healthy ROAS hiding money-losing SKUs
Discounts on products shoppers aren’t price-comparing
Ad dollars going toward inventory at risk of stocking out
Creator payouts capped by first-order math
Returns that turn into refunds instead of exchanges
Plus learn four more plays for keeping more of what you earn this Q4.
Anthropic is putting 5% of its shares into a public benefit fund, and Stripe's data shows AI agents spent far more through Link in September.
📰 AI & tech news
Anthropic commits 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund · techcrunch.com
Anthropic laid out the plan in a post on its site titled "Investing in the public benefit".
AI agent purchases through Stripe Link rose 38x in September · upstartsmedia.com
Payment volume grew 20x, retail led on both counts, and the average spend was about $100.
Intel unveils its D-series GPUs for data centers · techradar.com
They carry up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory, an unusually large amount meant for heavy inference workloads.
Sam Altman's World launches a World ID suite for banks · theblock.co
It bundles tools to verify both humans and AI agents, and it is World's first product built for one industry.
US cybersecurity job postings fall to a four-year low · securityweek.com
CyberSN counted about 236K roles from January to September, down 26.4% on last year, while demand for AI security engineers rose more than 200%.
What UK finance shows about AI and jobs · bloomberg.com
A Bloomberg Opinion piece looks at Britain's banks, from back offices to high finance, as a case study in automation.
Nvidia's Vera team says agentic AI is driving CPU demand · wccftech.com
They say agents are pushing CPU design back toward single-threaded speed over adding more cores.
AI weather forecasting faces a big test this El Niño · ft.com
Some scientists question how accurate the models will be as a historic El Niño plays out over the coming months.
🔥 Trending on GitHub
anomalyco/opencode · +1,414★ today
The open source coding agent is trending again days after its maker reported an OpenCode Console breach that affected some users' API keys.
Kruk2/jasna · +115★ today
An open source video restoration tool written in Python.
finereli/whatsapp-mcp · Show HN · 108 points
An MCP server that connects your AI agent to WhatsApp and runs free on Cloudflare.
🧩 New AI skills
huashu-motion · by alchaincyf
Makes motion graphics, launch videos and explainers as editable code, and you point at a frame to change it.
webperf-core-web-vitals · by nucliweb
Measures your site's LCP, CLS and INP and walks you through debugging whichever one is slow.
zoho-analytics-skill · by zoho
Lets your agent manage Zoho Analytics workspaces, tables, data, formulas and charts for you.
lucian-uxui · by Seokwoooo
Builds sites, pages and components from a library of dependency-free UI elements with light and dark themes.
⚡ Quick links
Linux 7.3 is out · lwn.net
I also set AI up for small businesses and train the team to use it. If you want that, reply SETUP and tell me what you're working on.
Every guide from my videos is in the library.
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