Welcome back to this week’s Side Income Roundup, Monday, August 24.
The first holiday forecasts are in, and how people plan to pay matters more than how much they’ll spend. There’s also a Shopify change landing Wednesday that makes your ad results look worse than they are.
💳 Why $22 billion of holiday spending won’t arrive as a single payment
🛠 The free app that sells to people who have already paid you
⚡ The Shopify change on August 26 that breaks your ad reporting
📝 Why a 3,000-person list is out-earning a 40,000-person one
🤖 eBay is editing your listings with AI and there’s no opt-out
Let’s get into it.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
📢 Holiday shoppers are budgeting, not just buying
US online holiday sales are forecast to grow around 8% this November and December. Buy-now-pay-later is expected to finance more than $22 billion of that for the first time, which is shoppers telling you they want a $180 gift to feel like $45.
DHL now has 70% of global online shoppers buying from overseas sellers, up from 60% a year earlier, and the reason they give is price. Letting people spread the cost keeps that comparison from ending the sale.
Our Take: Add buy-now-pay-later before November. It’s a checkout setting rather than a strategy project, and it’s the cheapest fix on this list.
TOOLS OF THE WEEK
🛠 Post Purchase Upsell Abakira
Your sale ends the second someone pays, so selling them anything else means buying the traffic all over again. This slots a one-tap offer between payment and the confirmation page, free for the first 100 offers a month.
🔍 BeyondSEO for WordPress
If you’ve put off SEO because the good plugins all want a yearly fee, this one is genuinely free and works without an account.
Our Take: Install Abakira today. A buyer with their card still out is the warmest traffic you will ever get.
TODAY’S QUICK WINS
⚡ Shopify replaces your order confirmation page on August 26
If you ever pasted tracking code onto that page, it stops running Wednesday. Orders keep arriving as normal, so nothing looks broken, but Meta and Google report fewer sales than you actually made.
⚡ FedEx peak season surcharges start September 28
Bulky and awkwardly shaped parcels cost more a month before the rush most sellers plan for. An extra $8.80 lands on anything needing extra handling, $95.75 on anything oversize, so a product that only just fits eats your margin.
Our Take: Move the Shopify tracking today, then go measure your bulkiest box. Both are ten-minute jobs that get expensive in October.
FROM OMC
📝 Why People With Smaller Lists Are Beating You on the Same Affiliate Offer
Two affiliates promote the same offer in the same week, and the one with 3,000 subscribers out-earns the one with 40,000. List size wasn’t what separated them.
Our Take: Before you promote anything else, work out why someone should use your link rather than the eleven other people mailing the identical offer.
AI SPOTLIGHT
🤖 eBay is running AI on your live listings without asking
eBay has been adding AI-written summaries and AI model photos to listings sellers never opted into, and some of those images changed real details like sleeves and collars. You’re still responsible for the accuracy.
Our Take: Open five of your own listings today and compare them to what you actually uploaded. Assume nothing was left alone.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK…
Your moves this week:
✅ Move your Shopify tracking off the order confirmation page before Wednesday
✅ Add a buy-now-pay-later option at checkout
✅ Switch on a free post-purchase upsell
✅ Check five of your eBay listings against what you actually uploaded
Most of that is maintenance rather than strategy, and maintenance is usually what decides what Q4 pays you.
Talk soon,
Aidan
P.S. Next week, the Q4 stock deadlines that moved earlier this year while the fees stayed the same. If you send anything into Amazon, one of them is closer than you think.
