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Amazon's ad business nears $20B as AI takes over buying; DoorDash acquires Instacart to challenge Uber; Breuninger enters 11 European markets.
Amazon is closing in on $20 billion in ad revenue — in a single quarter — and handing budget decisions to AI. Meanwhile, a DoorDash-Instacart deal could redraw the entire retail media map.
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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Also from Marco & Klara: The FMCG Marketing Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
Your 8-minute briefing on the platforms, players, and profits driving digital commerce today. Hosted by Marco and Klara.
Marco: Good morning — we've got a genuinely packed show for you today.
Klara: We do. Three stories worth your attention. A potential DoorDash-Instacart merger that could shake up where brands put their ad budgets. German luxury retailer Breuninger making a bold move into eleven new markets at once. And Amazon's ad business closing in on twenty billion dollars in a single quarter — with AI changing how those ads actually get bought.
Marco: Let's get into it.
Marco: DoorDash is in talks to buy Instacart — and this deal could redraw the map for digital advertising budgets across the entire grocery and delivery world.
Klara: To understand why that matters, you need to know what both companies actually sell beyond deliveries. Instacart has built a serious advertising business — brands pay to appear in search results and sponsored spots when you're shopping for groceries. DoorDash has done the same across restaurant and on-demand retail. These are what people call retail media networks — basically, ad platforms built on top of shopping behaviour.
Marco: And here's what makes a merger so significant. Put the two together and you get one enormous pool of purchase data — what real people are actually buying, how often, and in what combinations. That combined ad inventory would cover groceries, restaurants, and on-demand shopping in one place. Uber's advertising business pulls in around two billion dollars a year and competes for the exact same budgets — the money that consumer goods brands spend to reach shoppers at the moment they're deciding what to buy. A combined DoorDash-Instacart would make that fight a lot harder for Uber.
Klara: I think the Uber angle is real, but I'd actually focus on Amazon first. Amazon has been the dominant force in this kind of shopping-moment advertising for years. A merged entity with this kind of scale would be the first genuine challenger that isn't just nipping at the edges.
Marco: Fair — though for European brands, the immediate question is about budget allocation. If this deal closes, the platforms where you park your shopper marketing money in the US will look very different heading into 2026 and 2027. And those shifts in the US tend to set the template for what happens here.
Klara: One to keep a close eye on as the deal develops.
Marco: Our next story is coming up right after this.
Marco: Breuninger — a German luxury fashion retailer — has just launched into 11 new European markets in one single push.
Klara: If you're outside Germany, you've probably never heard of them. Breuninger has been around for over a century — a premium department store brand with a strong German following. They've been building an online presence for years, but until recently they stayed close to home. Earlier in 2026 they made some initial international moves, and now they've gone much further, much faster.
Marco: Eleven markets at once. That's an unusually bold step. Most retailers expand one or two countries at a time, test the waters, then decide whether to push further. Breuninger is essentially saying — we've done enough testing, let's go. They're now competing directly with Zalando, FARFETCH, and whatever strong local players exist in each of those markets.
Klara: What I find interesting is the timing. Temu and Shein are facing serious regulatory headwinds right now — the EU's customs reforms are making their low-price model harder to sustain. That's obviously a different part of the market to Breuninger, which sits at the premium end. But the broader signal is the same: there's a window open in European cross-border retail, and confident players are stepping through it.
Marco: And Zalando has been consolidating — focusing more on its platform model, pulling in brands rather than acting purely as a retailer. That does leave space for a brand with its own identity to come in and compete on curation and quality.
Klara: My hesitation would be execution. Eleven markets means eleven different customer expectations, logistics setups, and return policies. Ambition is one thing — actually delivering a consistent premium experience across all of them is genuinely hard.
Marco: Definitely one to watch. Our third story is up next.
Marco: Amazon's advertising business is closing in on twenty billion dollars in a single quarter — and it's now betting on AI to keep that number climbing.
Klara: To put that in context, Amazon is already the third-largest digital ad platform in the world, sitting behind only Google and Meta. Brands pay to appear in Amazon search results and across its wider ad network — it's become a core part of how consumer goods companies reach shoppers at the exact moment they're ready to buy. That's not a nice-to-have anymore. For many brands, it's non-negotiable.
Marco: So the number itself — nearly twenty billion in one quarter — confirms something most people in the industry already suspected. Amazon's ad business is now structurally embedded. Brands aren't spending there seasonally or experimentally. It's a permanent line in the budget. And even when Amazon shuffled its Prime Day timing this year and caused some slowdown, growth kept moving. The flywheel keeps turning.
Klara: But the bigger story is what comes next. Amazon is building what it calls an AI Ads Agent — an automated system that makes campaign buying decisions on your behalf. You set a goal, the AI decides how to spend your budget.
Marco: And for anyone running sponsored product campaigns or using Amazon's programmatic ad-buying tool — where ads are bought automatically across multiple sites — this raises a real question. If the AI is making the decisions and your return on ad spend drops, who do you hold accountable? How do you even audit what happened?
Klara: I think there are advertisers who will welcome this. Managing Amazon campaigns manually at scale is genuinely complex — the AI could save time and improve results for smaller teams.
Marco: Maybe. But handing a six-figure monthly budget to a system you can't fully see inside is a different kind of risk. Understanding what you're giving up in control is the thing brands need to work out before they opt in.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — power in digital commerce is concentrating fast, and the platforms controlling attention, delivery, and ad spend are getting fewer and larger.
Klara: So look at where your ad budget actually goes — and ask whether that's a conscious choice, or just where the current pulled you.