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Amazon reports 400M Alexa shoppers spending 50% more; Spain's Persa Flores gets 1 in 5 orders from ChatGPT; Nordic Vend Advertising builds its own retail media stack with Kevel.
Amazon's 400 million Alexa shoppers spend 50% more than the rest — and a Spanish florist just proved ChatGPT is already a top acquisition channel. If you sell online, today's episode is required listening.
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: Morning. Packed show today — and all three stories connect in ways that'll make sense by the end.
Klara: We're starting with a number that's hard to ignore — four hundred million Alexa shoppers. Then we've got a Spanish florist whose ChatGPT orders are telling us something the whole industry needs to hear.
Marco: And we're finishing with a Nordic retail media story that's quietly a big deal. Let's go.
Marco: Amazon just revealed that more than 400 million customers used Alexa to shop in the past year — and that number should stop every online seller in their tracks.
Klara: To put that in context, Alexa has been around for over a decade. For most of that time, voice shopping was treated as a curiosity — something people used to reorder washing powder or add milk to a list. Nobody really took it seriously as a sales channel.
Marco: But the scale here is hard to ignore. Four hundred million shoppers in twelve months. And here's what makes that number even more striking — customers who shop via Alexa spend fifty percent more than customers who don't. That's not a marginal difference. That's a fundamentally different type of buyer.
Klara: And when you think about what that fifty percent uplift actually means — these are people who've already trusted the technology enough to let it make purchase decisions for them. That's high intent. That's habit-driven buying. These aren't browsers. They're buyers.
Marco: Which is why I think most brands are completely unprepared for this. The vast majority of seller effort goes into visual search — the right images, the right sponsored placements, the right keywords for someone scrolling on a screen. But when someone asks Alexa to buy something, none of that visual work matters. What matters is how your product is described, how well it matches a spoken query.
Klara: Though I'd push back slightly on the urgency. Most European sellers are still building the basics — product content, pricing, fulfilment. Asking them to also optimise for voice feels like adding a fifth priority when they haven't nailed the first four.
Marco: That's a reasonable counterpoint. But the sellers who get ahead of this now won't have to scramble later.
Klara: Agreed — and Amazon hasn't even given sellers proper tools for voice optimisation yet, which is its own problem.
Marco: Something worth watching very closely. Now, let's move to our next story.
Marco: A Spanish florist is now getting one in five of its orders directly from ChatGPT — and that single data point might be the wake-up call that AI referrals actually needed.
Klara: For context, most brands have been treating AI assistants as a vague future concern. Something to think about eventually. The assumption has been that Google is still where customers start when they want to buy something — and that's where you invest your time and money.
Marco: That assumption is looking shakier by the day. Persa Flores, based in Spain, published data showing that twenty percent of its orders now trace back to ChatGPT referrals. Not traffic — orders. And there's a detail buried in there that I think is the real story: most of those ChatGPT-referred customers landed on city-specific delivery pages. Meaning they were typing hyper-local questions into ChatGPT — things like "flower delivery in Valencia" — and ChatGPT was sending them straight to a page that answered exactly that.
Klara: Which tells you something important about how people are using these tools. They're not browsing. They're asking very specific questions with clear intent — and they want a precise answer, not a list of ten options.
Marco: And here's what most brands are missing. Your dashboards probably show Google traffic, Meta ad clicks, email opens. ChatGPT referrals may not even appear as a tracked source. So the revenue is arriving, but you can't see where it came from.
Klara: Though I'd note this is one business, in one category, in one market. Flowers are a local, high-intent product — someone needs them for tomorrow. That might make florists unusually well-suited to AI referrals. I'd want to see data from, say, a fashion retailer before drawing wider conclusions.
Marco: Fair challenge. But the tactical lesson holds regardless — specific, structured content wins. If ChatGPT can't find a clear answer on your site, it'll send that customer to someone who has one.
Klara: Worth stress-testing sooner rather than later.
Marco: Our third story is coming up next.
Marco: The Nordics' biggest marketplace group just built its own advertising technology stack — and it's a signal that European retail media is shifting in a meaningful direction.
Klara: To set the scene — retail media means selling ad space inside a marketplace or retailer, so brands pay to appear prominently when shoppers are already browsing and ready to buy. Right now, that conversation in Europe is dominated by Amazon and the large grocery chains. Everyone else has largely been on the sidelines.
Marco: That's changing. Vend Advertising — which brings together some of the most-used Nordic marketplaces, including Blocket in Sweden, FINN in Norway, Tori in Finland, and a handful of others — has partnered with a company called Kevel to build its own ad serving infrastructure. Kevel is essentially the technical engine that decides which ads appear, when, and to whom. Vend is now running that engine themselves, rather than plugging into an existing platform owned by someone else.
Klara: What strikes me about this is the data question. By using an independent ad server — one built on open technology — Vend keeps full ownership of its customer data. It doesn't hand a cut of revenue, or visibility into user behaviour, to a US tech giant. For marketplaces operating under GDPR, that control matters enormously.
Marco: And for performance marketers in Scandinavia, this is a genuinely new option entering the media plan. Nordic marketplaces attract buyers with serious commercial intent — people looking for cars, property, second-hand goods. That's a high-value audience that until now had no proper ad product sitting on top of it.
Klara: Though I'd temper expectations a little. Building the technology is step one. Proving the results — the conversion rates, the measurement — takes time. Brands will want evidence before shifting budget.
Marco: Reasonable. But the infrastructure is now there. That's how every serious ad channel starts.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — AI is no longer waiting at the door of ecommerce, it's already inside taking orders.
Klara: So pull up your product listings this week and ask one honest question: would an AI assistant actually recommend you, or would it walk straight past?