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UK retail media crosses £2bn with 32% H1 growth, Amazon holds 63% of German online retail, and Prime Day unlocks Amazon DSP and video budgets.
UK retail media just hit £2bn in a single half-year. Amazon controls nearly two-thirds of Germany's online retail. And Prime Day is quietly getting upper-funnel Amazon ad spend past CFO scrutiny. Three structural shifts every ecommerce brand needs to act on.
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The Digital Commerce Daily is a concise briefing for ecommerce, retail media and digital commerce professionals, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Your 8-minute briefing on the platforms, players, and profits driving digital commerce today. Hosted by Marco and Klara.
Marco: Good morning — today's show is packed with numbers that actually matter.
Klara: We're looking at UK retail media crossing a major milestone, Amazon's grip on the German market, and how Prime Day is quietly reshaping the way brands spend on advertising year-round.
Marco: Big structural stuff — the kind of things that should change how you're planning, not just how you're thinking.
Klara: Let's go.
Marco: UK retail media just crossed £2 billion in the first half of this year alone.
Klara: To put that in context — retail media means ads that brands buy on retail platforms. Think sponsored product listings on Amazon, or paid placements on a supermarket's website. A few years ago, this was a niche add-on. Most brands treated it as optional.
Marco: Not anymore. In the first six months of 2026, UK online retail media grew 32% year-on-year. That's faster than social media ads, faster than search, faster than programmatic display — which is the automated buying of banner ads across the web. Faster than everything.
Klara: And £2 billion in a single half-year is a serious number. This isn't a channel that's testing the waters. It's arrived.
Marco: My take is straightforward. If you're a brand selling through any UK retailer — whether that's Tesco, Boots, Amazon, or a fashion platform like Zalando — retail media is no longer something you evaluate. It's something you budget for. The question is whether you're moving fast enough.
Klara: I'd add some nuance there. The 32% growth is impressive, but growth also attracts more competition. More brands piling into the same sponsored placements means costs per click are going to rise. So the window where retail media feels affordable and effective — that window may be shorter than the headline number suggests.
Marco: That's a fair tension. Getting in early matters, but getting in smart matters more. Throwing budget at placements without understanding which ones actually convert — that's just burning money in a new place.
Klara: The brands who've already been testing this channel for the last two years are sitting in a much stronger position right now. Everyone else is catching up at full price.
Marco: Worth keeping that in mind. Now, let's move to our next story.
Marco: Amazon owns nearly two-thirds of all online retail in Germany — and that number should stop every European brand in its tracks.
Klara: Germany matters more than most markets in this context. It's the largest economy in Europe, and it has one of the continent's most developed online shopping cultures. Historically, German consumers were cautious online shoppers — they took time to trust digital retail. But that trust has now largely landed with one platform.
Marco: The specific number is 63%. Amazon holds 63% of Germany's online retail market, including its marketplace — meaning third-party sellers operating through Amazon's platform. And almost every German online shopper buys from Amazon at least occasionally. That's not a dominant platform. That's an infrastructure.
Klara: So what does that actually mean if you're a brand thinking about selling into Germany? Because I think a lot of brands still frame this as a choice — "do we go on Amazon or do we build our own direct-to-consumer store?" In Germany, that conversation is essentially settled before it starts.
Marco: Completely. You don't decide whether to be on Amazon in Germany. You decide whether to also exist somewhere else on top of it. The DTC question — selling directly to customers through your own website — becomes a secondary conversation, not the primary one.
Klara: And I'd push back slightly on the doom framing here. Amazon in Germany is a real constraint, but it's also a very large, very motivated customer base already looking for products. The issue isn't being on Amazon — it's what you give up when Amazon becomes your main channel. You lose your customer data, your margins take a hit, and you become dependent on their algorithm and their fees.
Marco: Which is why smart brands treat Amazon as the floor in Germany, not the ceiling. Build presence there, but invest separately in channels you actually own.
Klara: Now, let's move to our next story.
Marco: Prime Day is turning into something much bigger than a sales event — it's becoming the key that unlocks entirely new advertising budgets inside Amazon.
Klara: To set the scene: most brands start their Amazon advertising journey with sponsored products — the basic paid listings that show up in search results. That's the entry point. Upper-funnel advertising — meaning video ads and programmatic buying, which is automated ad purchasing across Amazon's network of sites and streaming platforms — has always been harder to justify internally. It costs more, and the returns are less obvious.
Marco: What's happening now is that Prime Day is changing that internal conversation. Advertisers are telling Digiday that Prime Day is acting as a catalyst — once brands prove strong results on sponsored ads during Prime Day, Amazon's sales teams use that momentum to pitch video and DSP spend. DSP stands for Demand-Side Platform — it's Amazon's tool for buying ads programmatically across the web and on streaming services like Prime Video.
Klara: And the phrase doing the most work in this story is "defensible to the CFO." Brands are saying that Prime Day gives them the performance data they need to walk into a budget meeting and justify spending on formats that are harder to measure. Amazon's closed-loop measurement — where they can show you the ad, then show you the sale — makes the whole pitch feel watertight.
Marco: This is a genuinely clever piece of platform architecture. Amazon has built a ladder. You climb the first rung with sponsored products, prove results, then the next rung — video, streaming, DSP — suddenly feels like the obvious next step.
Klara: My concern for European brands is this: once you're three rungs up that ladder, leaving becomes very expensive. You've built your measurement, your audience data, and your budget cycles around one platform. That's a dependency, not a strategy.
Marco: The performance numbers are real. But so is the lock-in. Know which one you're optimising for.
Marco: The single biggest thing from today — retail media is no longer a nice-to-have line in the budget. In the UK and Germany, it's the infrastructure brands sell through now.
Klara: So look at where your ad spend sits. If it's not connected to where people are actually buying, that's worth a hard conversation this week.