The Digital Commerce Daily

TikTok pushes its own attribution model, Amazon claims ads outperform standard windows, and UK wellness marketplace Healf ranks #1 among 250 European startups.

Show Notes

TikTok and Amazon are both rewriting how they count ad results — and brands are caught in the middle. Plus, a UK wellness marketplace just outgrew every AI and fintech startup in Europe.

In this episode:

  • TikTok is rolling out its own attribution framework to challenge last-click measurement, entering a space already destabilised by Apple's iOS privacy changes and competing platform-reported numbers from Meta and Google.
  • Amazon is claiming its ads generate sales beyond standard attribution windows, but agencies are demanding independent proof, arguing the company has an obvious financial interest in inflating its own ROAS figures.
  • Healf, a curated UK health and wellness marketplace, ranked number one out of 250 of Europe's fastest-growing startups in the 2026 Sifted ranking, beating AI and fintech companies across the continent.

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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Also from Marco & Klara: The FMCG Marketing Daily · The Health Marketing Daily

What is The Digital Commerce Daily?

Your 8-minute briefing on the platforms, players, and profits driving digital commerce today. Hosted by Marco and Klara.

Marco: Three stories making us think differently about measurement today — and one surprise from the world of wellness.

Klara: TikTok is rewriting the rules on how app advertisers track results. Amazon is claiming its ads work better than anyone realises. And a UK health marketplace just outgrew every tech startup in Europe.

Marco: Big claims, real stakes. Let's dig in.

Marco: TikTok is making a move on how advertisers measure whether their ads actually work — and it's worth paying attention to.

Klara: To understand why, you need to know a bit about attribution. Attribution is basically the answer to the question: which ad deserves the credit when someone makes a purchase? For years, the default answer has been "the last ad they clicked." Simple, but probably wrong.

Marco: The problem is that last-click attribution — giving all the credit to the final touchpoint before a sale — has always been a rough approximation. A shopper might see a TikTok video on Monday, a Google ad on Wednesday, and click a Meta ad on Friday. Under last-click, Meta gets all the credit. The other two get nothing.

Klara: And this was already getting messy. When Apple changed its privacy rules a few years ago, it cut off a lot of the data that platforms use to track users across apps. So the numbers brands were seeing inside Meta or Google became even less reliable than before.

Marco: Now TikTok is stepping into that gap with its own measurement framework — its own way of telling brands which sales it drove and how to count them.

Klara: Which sounds helpful. But I'd slow down before celebrating. Every platform has a financial interest in telling you it drove more sales than it actually did. TikTok's numbers will be TikTok's numbers.

Marco: Completely. The broader pattern here is that Meta does it, Google does it, now TikTok is doing it. Every major platform is building its own version of the truth. For European brands spending across all three, that means three competing scoreboards — none of which fully agrees with the others.

Klara: So the smart move is to keep your own independent measurement running alongside whatever any platform tells you.

Marco: Now, our next story.

Marco: Amazon is now claiming its ads drive far more sales than the standard measurement tools can actually capture — and agencies are not taking that claim at face value.

Klara: A bit of context. When brands advertise on Amazon, they want to know if those ads are actually producing sales. The standard way to measure this is to look at a fixed window of time — say, a week or two after someone sees an ad — and count the purchases that happened in that period. Amazon is now saying that window is too short. That its ads keep driving sales long after the window closes.

Marco: And agencies are pushing back hard. Their argument is straightforward: if Amazon is making that claim, it needs to prove it with independent data — not just numbers Amazon itself has produced. Because Amazon has an obvious reason to show its ads performing well. The more credit it claims, the more budget brands shift its way.

Klara: This is the same dynamic we just talked about with TikTok — every major platform has a financial interest in writing its own measurement story. But Amazon's version of this is particularly sharp, because Amazon isn't just an ad platform. It controls the product listings, the search results, the warehouse, the delivery. It sees the full purchase journey from first click to doorstep.

Marco: Which makes it incredibly powerful — and also means brands have almost no independent way to check whether Amazon's version of events is true.

Klara: I'd slightly push back on treating agencies as neutral here. They have their own interest in controlling where budgets go. But on the core point — independent verification matters — they're right.

Marco: For European brands selling on Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.co.uk — this is a live budget question, not a theoretical one.

Klara: Trust the receipts, not the pitch.

Marco: Our next story, after this.

Marco: A UK wellness marketplace just beat every AI and fintech startup in Europe to the top of a major growth ranking — and it's worth asking why.

Klara: The context is important here. Since the pandemic, spending on health and wellness products has stayed elevated across Europe. Consumers are still actively looking for new brands in this category — supplements, fitness, sleep, nutrition. That sustained interest has created real commercial opportunity for anyone building in this space.

Marco: Healf — a curated online marketplace for health and wellness brands — ranked number one out of 250 of Europe's fastest-growing startups in the 2026 Sifted ranking. Sifted covers European tech and startup news, and this list is pan-European, so Healf beat AI companies, fintech businesses, the lot.

Klara: The word "curated" matters here. Healf isn't just a place where any wellness product can show up. It selects which brands appear on the platform. That creates a sense of trust for the shopper — they're not sifting through thousands of unknown products. Someone has already done a basic quality filter for them. That's a real competitive advantage when consumers are making decisions about what they put in their bodies.

Marco: And for brands selling through Healf, there's a different calculation. You get access to an audience that is already in the mindset to buy wellness products. That's much warmer traffic than trying to acquire customers cold through paid ads.

Klara: My slight hesitation — rapid growth rankings measure speed, not sustainability. Healf is growing fast. Whether the underlying unit economics — meaning whether they're actually making money on each sale — hold up at scale is a different question.

Marco: True. But the category signal is hard to ignore. In a funding world obsessed with AI, a wellness marketplace quietly outgrew everything else on the continent. That tells you something real about where European consumer demand actually lives right now.

Marco: The single biggest thread today — the brands winning right now are the ones who stopped trusting the numbers they were handed and started demanding better ones.

Klara: So pick one metric you report on every week and ask honestly: is it telling you what actually happened, or just what was easiest to count?