The Digital Commerce Daily

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 24, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• A PE-backed UK logistics provider snapping up a Dutch fulfilment specialist signals that cross-border ecommerce infrastructure in Europe is consolidating fast.

• Digital Commerce 360's 2026 data reveals which retail model has pulled decisively ahead in online sales growth — and the answer has direct implications for where brands and platforms should be placing their bets.

• Sovendus acquiring Berlin-based 35up is a quiet but significant consolidation move in European post-purchase monetisation — a channel that's gaining urgency as customer acquisition costs stay elevated.

Fun fact: Amazon's recommendation engine — the 'Customers who bought this also bought' feature — is responsible for an estimated 35% of the company's total revenue, meaning more than a third of everything Amazon sells is driven not by search or ads, but by algorithmic nudges between purchases. That single feature generates more revenue annually than the entire GDP of many small countries.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 23, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• TikTok Shop is releasing its first major small business performance data, showing 66% sales growth in 2025 — a number that reframes the platform as a serious revenue channel, not just a discovery tool.

• OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT's ad formats to give brands visual customisation options — a meaningful step that turns ChatGPT from an experimental ad surface into a real performance channel.

• e.l.f. Beauty closed fiscal 2026 with another quarter of double-digit growth driven by ecommerce and its fast-growing Röti brand — but is now weighing price cuts, revealing the pressure even high-performing DTC brands face in the current consumer environment.

Fun fact: Amazon's search algorithm gives a measurable ranking boost to listings that receive their first sale within 24 hours of going live — meaning brands often run steep launch discounts not to make money, but purely to trigger that initial velocity signal and unlock organic visibility. That brief window of artificial demand can determine whether a product surfaces on page one or disappears entirely.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 22, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• UK retail media spend is rising but measurement chaos and internal turf wars are preventing brands from unlocking its full upper-funnel potential.

• German premium fashion retailer Breuninger is pushing into three new European markets, signalling that mid-to-luxury ecommerce expansion in Europe is back on the agenda.

• Just Eat Takeaway is the first European platform to enable food ordering directly through WhatsApp, turning Meta's messaging app into a live commerce channel in two key markets.

Fun fact: Amazon's search bar processes more product searches than Google does — and roughly 56% of U.S. consumers now start their product search directly on Amazon rather than a search engine. That means Google, despite owning the broader internet search market, has effectively lost the product discovery battle to a retailer.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 21, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• ASOS has become the first UK retailer to make its products discoverable and shoppable directly inside ChatGPT via video — a signal that conversational AI is becoming a live commerce channel, not just a search alternative.

• Google has launched a native checkout layer — the Universal Cart — that lets shoppers buy from any merchant without leaving Google properties, making it a direct structural challenge to Amazon's closed commerce ecosystem.

• Klarna has launched a dedicated AI shopping and search app inside ChatGPT, turning the payments provider into a product discovery engine and signalling that fintech players are now competing directly with Google and Amazon for the top of the purchase funnel.

Fun fact: Amazon's checkout flow deliberately omits a traditional shopping cart review page for one-click purchases — a design choice that was so controversial internally it required Jeff Bezos's personal sign-off, yet it now accounts for a disproportionate share of impulse buys, with some merchants reporting that removing friction at that single step lifted conversion rates by over 30%. The patent Amazon held on one-click purchasing was so valuable that Apple licensed it just to sell iTunes songs.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 20, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• Germany's Wolt Ads is opening its in-app retail media inventory to programmatic buyers via Koddi, marking a significant step in European commerce media infrastructure.

• The EU's revised General Product Safety Regulation now applies to all merchants selling into Europe — including US-based sellers — creating urgent compliance obligations for cross-border ecommerce.

• German DTC brand Sallys Shop used community-led language and AI-powered personalised search to achieve a 70% lift in conversions — a concrete playbook for content-to-commerce in Europe.

Fun fact: Amazon's affiliate program, Associates, pays out commissions as low as 1% on video games and consoles — but influencers promoting the exact same products through Amazon's separate influencer storefront can earn up to 10x more per sale through bonus structures. Thousands of creators have been unknowingly leaving money on the table by using the wrong link type for years.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 19, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• Amazon has quietly slashed affiliate commissions by up to 50% while gutting reporting tools, forcing publishers to urgently rethink their commerce revenue models.

• German marketplace giant Otto is piloting access for Polish sellers next month, signalling a deliberate cross-border expansion strategy inside the EU single market.

• New benchmark data shows Google Ads CPCs continued climbing in 2025 but conversion rates also rose, forcing ecommerce advertisers to rethink whether rising costs are actually eroding returns.

Fun fact: Shopify merchants collectively sold more on Black Friday 2023 than the entire GDP of Iceland — hitting $9.3 billion in a single day. At its peak, that was $4.2 million in sales processed every minute across the platform.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 18, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• A $2.2 billion deal that puts the world's largest ad holding company in control of the data clean room infrastructure that ecommerce advertisers depend on for attribution and audience matching.

• Anthropic's Project Deal experiment showed AI agents autonomously buying and selling in a controlled marketplace — and it's the clearest preview yet of what ecommerce infrastructure needs to look like when the shopper is a machine.

• Edible Brands has cracked measurable AOV growth in a high-frequency gifting category by expanding delivery options and bundling — a concrete DTC case study at a time when acquisition costs leave brands no choice but to squeeze more from every order.

Fun fact: Amazon's Prime Day actually drives more sales for Walmart and Target than a typical day — because the flood of comparison shoppers who start on Amazon frequently end up converting elsewhere after seeing the deals aren't as steep as expected. In 2023, Walmart reported its biggest online sales day of the year coincided directly with Prime Day.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 17, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• A $30M Series A into an AI-powered social marketing OS signals that brands are willing to pay serious money to centralise and automate their social commerce operations.

• Meta projecting $240 billion in ad revenue for 2026 is a landmark number that redraws the map for every performance marketer allocating budget this year.

• Vessi's director of D2C reveals how the footwear brand is using data to make faster operational bets and lift conversion — a practical DTC growth playbook in a high-CAC environment.

Fun fact: Amazon's 'Buy Box' — the default purchase button on a product page — is won by third-party sellers, not Amazon itself, roughly 82% of the time, yet most shoppers assume they're buying directly from Amazon. This means billions of dollars in annual sales flow through independent merchants while Amazon collects a fulfillment and referral fee without ever touching the inventory.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 16, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• Google is forcing ecommerce advertisers to change how they feed offline sales data into their campaigns — a quiet but operationally significant infrastructure shift.

• Marks & Spencer is acquiring an ASOS distribution centre for €77.5 million — a direct signal that M&S is betting hard on ecommerce fulfilment capacity as ASOS continues its retreat.

• JD.com's net profit dropped more than 50% despite strong revenue growth — because it's deliberately burning cash on expansion bets that could reshape how global ecommerce competition plays out.

Fun fact: Amazon's Prime Day generates so much demand that competing retailers like Target and Walmart have learned to run their own simultaneous sales events — and some studies show those rivals actually see higher-than-normal conversion rates during Prime Day because deal-hungry shoppers comparison shop across multiple tabs before buying. In other words, Amazon essentially trained consumers to spend more broadly, not just on Amazon.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 15, 2026

Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing.

In today's episode:

• Google is embedding an AI-powered advisor directly inside Merchant Center, which could fundamentally change how sellers optimise their product listings and Shopping campaigns.

• Albertsons is integrating lifetime value into its retail media analytics stack, signalling a maturity shift in how grocery retailers measure and sell advertising.

• Ecommerce has crossed the 25% share of global retail for the first time, but the headline masks a striking divergence between categories that are thriving and those that are stalling online.

Fun fact: Amazon's Prime Day generates so much simultaneous demand that the event has repeatedly caused measurable slowdowns on competitor websites — not through any attack, but simply because millions of shoppers open multiple tabs to price-compare in real time, overwhelming servers at retailers like Target and Walmart. In 2021, Target's website crashed within hours of Amazon's sale launching, even though Target was running its own competing sale called 'Deal Days' at the same exact time.

Hosted by Marco and Klara.