The TWIMCO notebook
Field notes.
Useful observations from inside the work.
For people building a better way.
385 notes
Google Business Profile AI messaging review: free and quick, and only as right as your profile
Google is quietly inviting local businesses to let an AI agent answer the texts customers send from Search and Maps. It's free, it can offer booking times, and it hands hard questions back to you. Three ordinary messages show where it helps and where it needs you.
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DoorLoop Receptionist Agent review: a capable night desk for tenant messages, if your policies are written down
DoorLoop's new agent answers tenant texts and portal messages from the lease, the ledger and your rules, and it starts by asking before it acts. It's worth turning on for a small portfolio with written policies. If your late-fee and pet rules live in someone's head, write them down first.
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LegalZoom's new assistant answers from the customer's own record. Read the launch line by line for what to copy
Most help assistants answer from the help center. LegalZoom's, launched October 29, starts from the customer's own business record and hands judgment calls to a person. Six lines from the announcement are worth reading closely if you're building an assistant for your own customers.
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Shopify just pulled hundreds of apps nobody installed. If you're commissioning one, choose custom or public first
Shopify unpublished hundreds of App Store apps on October 29 and says limits on submissions are coming. If you're paying someone to build a Shopify app, the bigger question is one most briefs skip: is it for your store, or for everyone's? You can't change the answer later.
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Walmart can suspend a seller account after 455 quiet days. Questions to answer about the one you parked
Lots of brands opened a Walmart Marketplace account for a test, sold a little, and moved on. Walmart now says an account inactive for 455 days in a row may be suspended. Whether you keep it or close it, these are the questions worth answering this month.
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A customer holds up a phone instead of a license on November 18. Decide what your Connecticut counter does
On November 18, Connecticut residents can carry their driver's license in a free state app. Businesses don't have to accept it, and looking at the screen isn't enough if they do. Before someone shows one at your counter, decide what staff say and what you'd buy to check it.
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Walmart folded the WFS Returned to Seller report into Customer Returns. Walk your returns routine through the change
One Walmart Fulfillment Services report went away on October 29. If a person or a script downloaded it every week to check in returned stock, that routine is now reading nothing. Here's how to walk it, step by step, onto the report that replaced it.
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It's May 2027 and your app's urgent fix won't upload. A pre-mortem on Apple's April SDK deadline
Picture next spring: a small bug needs fixing in your iPhone app, and App Store Connect rejects the upload because it wasn't built with Apple's newest tools. Nobody broke anything. The deadline just arrived on the day you needed it. Here's how that happens, and how to avoid it.
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Etsy's new terms make you answerable for the bots you run. A memo to send around before December 16
If a browser extension relists your Etsy items, or a script watches competitor prices for you, Etsy's December 16 terms have something to say about it. The rules on automated agents are short and broad. This is the memo we'd hand a small shop's team.
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UPS will charge some Ground shippers by where the box starts. Five dates to work back from before December 21
Starting December 21, which warehouse a UPS Ground package leaves from can change what it costs. The ZIP list is due in early November, and the 2027 increase lands two weeks before FedEx's. Here's what to do on each date between now and January.
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Shopify's AI connectors review: worth turning on for catalog chores, not for anything that moves money
Ask Claude or ChatGPT to mark forty products as draft and it can now just do it in your Shopify store. The connectors are free, carefully fenced and genuinely useful for catalog work. They also make whoever connects them responsible for every change.
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If your Android app asks for precise location to find a nearby store, Google Play wants a button instead
Most apps that ask for your exact location only need it for a second: to find the nearest branch, tag a photo, fill in a delivery address. From January 27, Google Play expects those one-off moments to use Android's new location button, and Play Console has started flagging apps that don't.
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Shopify's delivery badge is won at the first carrier scan, not in your settings
Under Shopify's updated Shop Promise program, whether your products show Trusted delivery depends on one number: how long it takes from the moment someone orders to the moment a carrier first scans the box. You can't toggle that. You can only shorten it.
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Oregon's land agency won't make anyone reapply when its new portal opens. Plan your applications in flight the same way
When Oregon's Department of State Lands switches on its new customer portal on December 7, nobody with a permit application already in the queue has to start over. That one promise is the hardest part of replacing a public system, and the part most vendor proposals skip.
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Your Discord help channel is about to become a search result. Use the two dates to decide what it says
If your product's community lives on a public Discord server, the answers your members give each other in #help will start turning up in web search from mid-December. That's free reach and a new support risk at the same time. Here's what to do before November 16, and what to do before December.
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Invoca Messaging Agents for Google Ads review: three businesses, three different answers
Someone searching for a home loan at 11 p.m. can now message the lender straight from the ad, and an AI agent answers. Invoca launched that in beta on October 28. Whether it's worth it depends less on the agent than on what it's allowed to look up, so here are three kinds of business and how each one fits.
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The FTC wants nine companies to explain how they set prices per person. Write your own answer now
On October 28 the FTC asked Walmart, Uber, Delta and six others to explain whether personal data shapes the prices they show and the pay they offer. You're probably not on that list. If your platform sets a price or a payout per person, the questions are still worth answering, in writing, this month.
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Macs get touchscreens on November 6. Ten things in your web app to tap first
For years you could assume anyone on a Mac had a mouse or a trackpad, so a menu that opens on hover was safe. From November 6 some of those people will reach up and tap the screen. These are the ten places in a web app where that goes wrong first.
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Shopify moved the facts AI agents read about your store into the admin. Spend twenty minutes reading them
Somewhere in your Shopify admin there's now a page of facts about your store that AI shopping agents can read: your return window, your shipping times, your contact details. Some of it was published for you. Here's how to read it in one sitting.
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Amazon's new hazmat questions wait for your next listing edit. Find out which tool will make it
Nothing happened to your pool chemicals, pens or shock absorbers on October 26. The change shows up later, when someone fixes a typo in a title and Amazon won't save it until the dangerous goods questions are answered. Often that someone is a piece of software.
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Tell us where you want to go. We’ll find the first thing worth changing.
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