Welcome back to this week’s Side Income Roundup, Monday, August 3.
This week is about the gap between where people find you and where they pay you. Most sellers nail the first half and lose the sale in the handoff.
🛠 Meta’s new app writes your listing from one photo
🛒 Shopify’s pay-only-when-it-sells campaigns reach more countries
⚡ Reels now dubs your voice into five more languages, free
📝 The Whatnot categories with more buyers than sellers
🤖 Square put its sellers inside ChatGPT and Claude
Let’s get into it.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
📢 Social gets you found, your own checkout gets you paid
New research covering 23,000 shoppers across 18 markets found that around half of consumers now discover new products on social media, comfortably ahead of the 38% who find them through search.
However, only 6% of shoppers actually prefer to buy inside a social app, just a quarter of US consumers trust social checkout at all, and close to a third would rather complete the purchase on a brand’s own website. For baby boomers that number climbs to 52%.
Our Take: Stop trying to close the sale inside Instagram or TikTok. Use those posts to get discovered, then send people to your own checkout.
TOOLS OF THE WEEK
🛠 Meta launches Seller, an app for Facebook Marketplace
Photograph an item and Meta AI writes the title, description, category, and suggested price, then puts it live on Marketplace.
🛒 Shopify expands Shop Campaigns to the UK and more markets
One campaign promotes your products across the Shop app, Meta, Google, Pinterest, ChatGPT, and the open web, with no creative to produce. You set what a new customer is worth to you and only pay when a sale completes.
Our Take: Download the Seller app tonight, photograph five things sitting unsold, and let the AI write the listings. That’s the “I need a website first” excuse gone.
TODAY’S QUICK WINS
⚡ Reels will now dub your voice into five more languages
Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Italian have been added, taking Instagram to 14 languages. It dubs your audio in your own voice and syncs your mouth movements to match.
⚡ Google is turning AI Max on inside Standard Shopping campaigns
AI Max adds query matching for long conversational searches, ad text pulled from your Merchant Center feed, and Final URL Expansion, which can route traffic to pages you didn’t choose.
Our Take: Turn translations on for your next Reel (five more markets, no extra cost). Then check your Shopping campaigns for the new AI Max controls.
FROM OMC
📝 The 3 Whatnot Categories Growing Fastest (And Barely Anybody Is Selling In Them Yet)
Buyers are piling into some Whatnot categories faster than sellers show up, and almost nobody checks which ones before spending on stock.
Our Take: Before you buy another pallet, check whether what’s in your garage belongs in one of these three categories. Cheapest inventory test you’ll run this month.
AI SPOTLIGHT
🤖 Square just put its sellers inside ChatGPT and Claude
Shoppers can find a Square seller, browse the catalog, and order without leaving the AI assistant, and it lands in the seller’s existing register.
Our Take: Check whether your store platform feeds your catalog into ChatGPT and Claude yet. If not, tighten your product titles and details now so you’re ready when it does.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK…
Here’s your move this week:
✅ Let social get you discovered, then send the sale to your own checkout
✅ List five unsold items in Meta’s new Seller app
✅ Switch on Reels translations for your next video
✅ Check whether AI Max is already on in your Shopping campaigns
Nearly everything above pulls in the same direction: get found where people are looking, then bring them somewhere they’re comfortable paying you.
Talk soon,
Aidan
P.S. Curious about Whatnot but don’t want to gamble on inventory? Run the category check in that post first.
