RIP Project Management

Howdy!

So here’s a fun one. I opened the newsletter tool last week to start writing this edition, and right at the top it said “NET 30 - September ’26. Sent.” Sent?! I panicked a little, scrolled through my own sent history like I was checking if I’d drunk-texted an ex.

Turns out that’s the label I slapped on last month’s issue when I filed it. I looked one month ahead and called August’s newsletter “September.” My own tool told me September was already done, a month early, and I believed it for a solid four minutes.

RIP project management.

Here’s the actual kicker: none of you ever saw that label. It lives in the backend, not the email. Nobody caught the mistake, including me, for almost a month. That’s roughly where our collective attention span has landed as a species. Way to go, Cocomelon.

New house rule: this one is genuinely called September, sent in the actual month of September, verified by me looking at a calendar app, which is apparently a tool I need now.

Anyway. Onto the stuff you’re actually here for.

Shopify made net terms actually automatic

Back on June 17, Shopify shipped a Flow action that auto-charges vaulted payment methods for B2B customers, triggered by fulfillment, a due date, or invoicing. Shipped quietly enough that I’m only flagging it now, three months late, which tracks for this newsletter apparently. Net terms stop being a manual invoice-and-pray routine and start being a thing that just happens on schedule. If you’ve got a bookkeeper who dreads the 30th of every month, forward this along. They’ll either thank you or block your number. Changelog here.

a16z just funded the professional way to hide a fire sale

Andreessen Horowitz led a $30M Series A into Highstock, an AI marketplace that routes brands’ excess inventory to a vetted network of off-channel wholesale buyers, live sellers, international resellers, places the brand’s own customers never shop. That’s the actual trick: the inventory clears without ever surfacing where anyone would recognize it as a markdown. The pitch, straight from a16z’s own announcement, is moving overstock “without the fire-sale optics.” Highstock’s already sitting on more than $1B in listed inventory from 100-plus brands. Somewhere, a merchandising VP is very relieved this isn’t showing up on their own P&L as a discount. a16z’s writeup.

Deadline Desk

Shopify and BigCommerce changes with an actual date on them, after which your store behaves differently whether you were paying attention or not.

Oct 1, 2026: Shopify blocks apps from creating or updating ScriptTags. Existing ones keep limping along until March 1, 2027, when Shopify stops injecting them into storefronts at all. If a tracking pixel or an old integration depends on one, that’s your runway. More details here.

BigCommerce merchants have their own quiet one. Storefront GraphQL tokens created after June 30, 2026 already lost server-to-server support. Tokens created before that date get a grace period, cut off March 31, 2027. If your middleware calls Storefront GraphQL server-side, check which bucket you’re in before it stops working on you mid-quarter. Go check yours.

Only two this month, both checked against the actual changelogs. If you’ve seen a November 1 webhook deadline going around, I couldn’t find it anywhere official either.

Fax Machine of the Month

New month, same premise: one B2B workflow still running on a person, a phone, and a lot of trust.

This month: building materials procurement in the Gulf.

A Saudi startup called BRKZ just raised $31M to scale an AI pricing engine trained on roughly 40,000 RFQs, built specifically to replace the traditionally manual process of pricing quotes for contractors and factories. The system predicts buy and sell prices within 5% accuracy 84 to 89% of the time. They’ve already run $1.37B in RFQs and sold $133M in materials across 1,500 contracting companies and 150 factories. Read it, per Arabian Reseller.

Somewhere in that $1.37B, a procurement guy who used to eyeball a stockpile and call a plant manager just got very quietly automated. Godspeed to him.

Rumor Mill (allegedly, wink wink)

Two rumors going around procurement Twitter this month. Filing both under “definitely happening, source: a guy.”

Amazon is reportedly assembling a secret internal team, codename rhymes with “Stratum,” built specifically to hunt down the wholesale brands that fled to Shopify’s B2B stack. My take: welcome to the fight, Amazon. Enjoy building net terms and company hierarchies from scratch. We’ll wait.

Faire, meanwhile, is allegedly piloting a headless “restocking trigger” that reorders inventory inside your Shopify store without you fully noticing, while its CEO keeps giving keynotes about how much Faire loves the little guy. Sources say this. Sources also said Y2K would end civilization.

Unconfirmed. Unverified. Too fun not to print.

Right. What we shipped.

Extend B2B Credit Limits. New app. Set credit limits by company, by location, or by individual buyer, then block the order or just warn at the threshold, your call. Split payment between net terms and pay-now instead of an all-or-nothing decision. Comes with an invoice summary right inside the customer’s account so “what do I owe you” stops being a phone call. $79/month, 7-day trial, live now. Check it out here.

Extend POS for B2B & Wholesale got a real upgrade: reps now see live catalog pricing the moment they add a product at the register, plus full barcode scanner support. Worth saying plainly, Shopify POS does not do this natively. Every product rings up at retail price regardless of who’s standing at the counter, which is why we built the fix ourselves. This one’s earning its keep, traction’s been strong enough that we’re seriously considering a price increase. Currently $199/month. No promises on that number past this email. If you’ve been meaning to grab it, this is the newsletter telling you to stop meaning to. Grab it while it’s live.

Dad Joke of the Month

A man is washing the car with his son. The son asks, “Dad, can’t you just use a sponge?”

That’s the joke. It’s also a decent metaphor for how we’ve all started using AI: perfectly good tools sitting right there, and we ask the robot to explain what a sponge is.

Real talk: a 2025 study in Societies (Gerlich, “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking”) ran 666 participants and found a significant negative correlation between AI tool use and critical thinking scores (r = -0.68), mediated by cognitive offloading. Participants aged 17 to 25 showed the heaviest AI reliance and the lowest critical thinking scores. Participants 46 and older showed the opposite on both counts. The study is here.

🖖🏼 Live long and prosper!

Fahad from Extend Commerce