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Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days reached $9.86B in online spend; Zalando opens a 140,000 sqm French warehouse; Moloco earns IAB Europe retail media certification.
Amazon's October sale just crossed $9.86 billion — proof Q4 now starts early. Plus Zalando makes a massive physical bet on France, and a certification that could reshape how European brands buy retail media.
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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 has some genuinely meaty numbers to dig into.
Klara: Amazon's October sale just hit almost ten billion dollars in spending. Zalando is making a massive physical bet on France. And a certification that could change how European brands buy retail media just landed.
Marco: Three stories, all pointing in interesting directions.
Klara: Let's get into it.
Marco: Amazon's October sale just hit nearly ten billion dollars in online spending across two days — and that number rewrites how brands should think about Q4.
Klara: To understand why that matters, you have to remember what October used to look like for online retail. A few years ago, it was basically dead space between back-to-school and Black Friday. Amazon changed that by running a second big sale event in autumn, and it turns out consumers were very willing to go along with it.
Marco: So here's what Adobe Analytics found. Over October 6th and 7th this year, shoppers spent nine point eight six billion dollars online. That beats the same event in 2025, which means this isn't a one-off — it's a growing moment year on year. And crucially, Adobe tracks all online retailers during that window, not just Amazon. So that ten billion reflects the whole market moving, not just one platform.
Klara: That last detail is the one I keep coming back to. Amazon created the event, but the spending spilled across the entire internet. Other retailers who ran competing deals picked up real money during those two days. Brands that were simply asleep to it — no promotions, no ad budget, no stock ready — left sales on the table.
Marco: Which is why I'd argue Q4 now starts in early October, full stop. Black Friday still matters, but waiting until November to flip the switch means you've already missed a ten-billion-dollar wave. For any brand selling online — whether through Amazon, Zalando, or your own website — October needs to be in the plan from the start of the year.
Klara: My slight pushback is that not every category sees the same lift. Some products simply don't move in October sales events. So the lesson is to check your own data before assuming you should follow the crowd.
Marco: Fair — but if you haven't checked, that's the first job. Now, let's move to our next story.
Klara: Zalando has just opened its first warehouse on French soil — and it's a big one.
Marco: Until now, if you ordered from Zalando in France, your parcel was most likely travelling from Germany. That cross-border journey adds time, adds cost, and makes it harder to compete with retailers who are already operating locally. France is one of Europe's three biggest ecommerce markets, so the gap between Zalando's ambitions there and its logistics reality was always going to need closing.
Klara: The new facility sits at 140,000 square metres — roughly the size of twenty football pitches. It took five years from planning to opening, which tells you how complex and expensive this kind of infrastructure investment actually is. The idea is straightforward: French orders get fulfilled from France, which means faster delivery and fewer expensive cross-border returns.
Marco: For fashion brands, this changes the Zalando pitch significantly. Local fulfilment gives Zalando the ability to make credible next-day or two-day delivery promises to French shoppers. That's the baseline consumers now expect, and without French infrastructure, Zalando simply couldn't match Amazon or local players like Cdiscount on speed.
Klara: There's also a marketplace angle here. Zalando has been building out its platform so third-party brands can sell through it — not just brands Zalando itself buys stock from. A French distribution centre makes it much easier to bring French brands onto that marketplace in a meaningful way, because the logistics actually work now.
Marco: My read is that this is Zalando's clearest signal yet that it's playing a long game in European fashion, even as Shein and Temu are squeezing the market from the value end. Building physical infrastructure is expensive and slow — but it's also very hard to copy quickly.
Klara: Which makes it a real competitive moat. The brands that get in early as Zalando scales in France are likely to benefit most from that faster fulfilment.
Marco: Our third story is up next — let's get into it.
Marco: Moloco has just become the first ad tech company to earn IAB Europe's retail media certification — and that's a more significant moment than it probably sounds.
Klara: To understand why, it helps to know what retail media has looked like until now. Retailers and tech vendors have largely been marking their own homework — setting their own metrics, making their own claims about performance, with no independent body checking whether any of it holds up. For brands spending serious money in this space, that's been a real problem.
Marco: IAB Europe — that's the main industry body setting digital advertising standards across Europe — has been building out a certification programme for retail media. Until now, the companies earning that certification were retailers themselves. Moloco is different. They're an ad tech company, meaning they build the technology that powers retail media networks, rather than running a retailer's own media operation. They're the first vendor of that type to pass the certification.
Klara: What I find interesting is the timing. European brands and agencies have started using IAB Europe's standards as a checklist when they're deciding which retail media partners to work with. Certification is shifting from a nice credential to something that actually influences procurement decisions. Moloco going first is a deliberate move — they're betting that trust becomes the differentiator as advertisers get more demanding about ROI.
Marco: And the competitive pressure this creates is real. Other ad tech vendors will now have to answer the question: are you certified or not? That's a conversation that didn't exist six months ago.
Klara: My slight reservation is that certification checks a box — it doesn't automatically mean better results for brands. It raises the floor, but smart advertisers still need to interrogate the actual performance data, not just the badge.
Marco: That's the right instinct. Use certification as a filter, not a final answer.
Marco: The single biggest thing from today — retail media is growing up fast, and the brands that treat it like a serious discipline now will have a real edge over those still figuring it out later.
Klara: Ask yourself honestly: are you evaluating retail media with the same rigour you'd apply to any other major budget decision?