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DoorDash launches a nationwide returns service, Kroger uses AI to predict ad conversions, and European ecommerce growth slows to 5% in 2026.
DoorDash is coming for UPS and FedEx's returns business. Kroger is predicting which ads will sell before they go live. And Europe's 5% ecommerce growth figure is hiding a much bigger story underneath.
In this episode:
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 — three stories worth your time today.
Klara: DoorDash is making a serious play for ecommerce logistics. Kroger is quietly building a measurement model the rest of retail will want to copy. And European ecommerce growth is slowing — but the headline number hides a more complicated picture underneath.
Marco: All of that matters for where you're putting your attention right now. Let's go.
Marco: DoorDash — yes, the food delivery app — is now building a nationwide returns service and expanding its retail marketplace.
Klara: To understand why that's significant, you need to know what DoorDash actually has. It's spent years building a dense network of drivers who can pick up and drop off almost anything, quickly, at the local level. Until now, that network was mostly used for burgers and groceries.
Marco: Returns logistics — the business of getting a product back from a customer to a warehouse — is currently dominated by companies like UPS and FedEx, and increasingly by Amazon's own infrastructure. It's expensive. Most direct-to-consumer brands pay somewhere between eight and twelve euros per return label. That adds up fast.
Klara: So what changed? At its Dash Forward event on the 29th of September, DoorDash announced a new nationwide returns service. At the same time, it's bringing new retail partners onto its marketplace. The two moves together tell a clear story — DoorDash wants to be more than a food app. It wants to be a full commerce and logistics platform.
Marco: My read on this is straightforward. DoorDash already has the driver density. They're not building expensive new infrastructure — they're just pointing existing capacity at a different problem. That's a real cost advantage.
Klara: I'd slow that down slightly. Driver density for same-day food works differently to returns logistics, which needs tracking, retailer integrations, and reverse warehousing — getting products back into the right place. Those are hard operational problems. Speed to market doesn't automatically solve them.
Marco: Fair challenge. But the pressure on return costs is real, and any brand watching their logistics bills should keep a close eye on what DoorDash's pricing looks like once this rolls out at scale.
Klara: Moving on — our next story is also about platforms making a bigger play for retail territory.
Marco: Kroger — the big US supermarket chain — is using AI to predict which ads will actually drive sales, before those ads even go live.
Klara: To put that in context, most retail media networks — the advertising businesses that retailers run on their own platforms — still work on a fairly old-fashioned model. You spend the money, the ads run, and then you measure what happened. The problem is you've already burned your budget by the time you find out something didn't work.
Marco: What Kroger is doing differently is building a predictive scoring layer into its advertising business, Kroger Precision Marketing. The system looks at which creative assets — which images, messages, and formats — are most likely to convert shoppers before the campaign launches. It's using Kroger's own purchase data to make those predictions. So instead of guessing, brands get a signal upfront about what's worth spending on.
Klara: That loop between purchase data and creative performance is the genuinely interesting part. Most brands brief their creative teams based on gut feel or past performance on other channels. Kroger is essentially saying: we know what our shoppers actually buy, so we can tell you whether your ad is likely to work in our environment before you commit a single euro.
Marco: For European brands running campaigns on retail media networks — Tesco, Zalando, dm, whoever — this is worth paying attention to. If this model spreads, the brief you hand your creative agency will need to include much more specific performance expectations upfront. Creative production cycles will need to get faster and more data-driven.
Klara: My hesitation is that this kind of capability takes years to build. Kroger has the purchase data because it's enormous. Smaller retail media networks don't have that foundation yet — so don't expect this to arrive everywhere quickly.
Marco: Watch it closely anyway. Now, let's move to our third story.
Marco: Our final story today is about the overall health of European ecommerce — and why one number is doing a lot of work to hide a more complicated truth.
Klara: For years, European ecommerce grew fast. The pandemic accelerated it dramatically. But markets don't grow at that pace forever — and now the forecasters are putting a number on what the slowdown actually looks like.
Marco: Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce have published their forecast for 2026. They're expecting online consumer spending across Europe to grow by 5% this year. That sounds reasonable — until you look at what's sitting underneath that figure.
Klara: Because 5% is an average. And averages can be deceptive. What that number is actually blending together is near-flat growth in mature markets like Germany and France — where most households already shop online regularly — with much faster expansion in Southern and Eastern Europe, where online retail is still building its base.
Marco: So Germany and France are approaching something close to saturation. The easy growth has already happened there. But markets in Southern and Eastern Europe still have significant headroom — and that's where the real momentum is.
Klara: My view is that the 5% headline could actually lull brands into a false sense of stability. If you're allocated budget across Europe as one block, you might look at that number and feel comfortable. But you could be significantly underinvesting in the markets that are still growing fast, while over-resourcing the ones that have plateaued.
Marco: Which is the core strategic question right now — not "how is Europe doing" but "which Europe are you actually operating in?" Because those are very different businesses. A brand leaning into Poland or Italy has a different growth story to one that's primarily focused on the German or French market. The data makes that case clearly, and budget planning for next year should reflect it.
Marco: The thread running through today — the gap between who has data and who doesn't is widening fast, and that gap is starting to determine who wins.
Klara: So look at one measurement you rely on this week and ask honestly: do you actually understand where that number comes from?