Shopped Out
A former product manager on Meta’s Shops ads team named Samujjal Purkayastha filed a whistleblower complaint against his former employer with the London employment tribunal for reporting illegal business practices, Adweek reports.
According to the complaint, Meta inflated the ROAS of its Shops ads campaigns, which incorporated the costs of shipping fees and taxes as part of the attributable sale, despite those never going to the merchant or brand. Meta’s other ad products, and those of other platforms, including Google and Amazon, don’t count taxes or fees in their ROAS calculations.
More damning, when data scientists identified the inflated ROAS, and Shops ads otherwise performed no better than “business as usual” campaigns, higher-ups continued to misrepresent ROAS.
Shops ads were a priority, according to Purkayastha, because Meta needed the first-party data to reignite its ad system, which was malfunctioning after Apple’s iOS 14 privacy overhaul in 2020.
Purkayastha also says undisclosed discounts were used to fudge ROAS numbers while generating more purchase data. AdExchanger reported on Meta’s quiet use of large discounts between 2021 and 2023, which merchants found oddly hard to track. Throughout those years, a series of glitches also plagued Meta Shops advertisers.
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