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Amazon DSP now lets advertisers target Walmart, Kroger and Sephora shoppers; agencies acquire TikTok Shop specialists; Chord buys Zenlytic to build an AI-native CDP.
Amazon just turned its logged-in audience into a cross-retailer targeting weapon — bad news for Walmart and Kroger's ad businesses. Plus, why agencies are buying TikTok Shop expertise before Q4 hits.
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: Three stories lined up today, and they all point in the same direction — the infrastructure of digital commerce is being rebuilt in real time.
Klara: Amazon's making a bold move with shopper data, there's a wave of agency acquisitions around TikTok Shop, and two data startups have just merged to rethink how customer data works in an AI world.
Marco: Let's get into it.
Marco: Amazon just gave advertisers something that retail media networks did not see coming.
Klara: So set the scene for us — what was the situation before?
Marco: Until now, Amazon's advertising tools were mostly useful for reaching shoppers on Amazon itself. If someone was browsing or buying on Amazon, you could target them. But if they were shopping at Walmart or Sephora, that was a blind spot. Each retailer basically sat on its own island of customer data.
Klara: And that data was valuable precisely because it was exclusive. Walmart knew its shoppers. Kroger knew its shoppers. That was the whole pitch.
Marco: Exactly — and Amazon has just punched a hole in that wall. Advertisers using Amazon's ad-buying platform can now target display and video ads at people who also shop at Walmart, Dollar General, Kroger, Walgreens, and Sephora. Amazon is using its own logged-in user base — which is enormous — to identify people who also purchase at those other retailers.
Klara: So Amazon is effectively saying: we know who shops at your competitors, and we'll sell you access to them.
Marco: That's the blunt version, yes. It turns Amazon's ad tools from an on-Amazon thing into a much broader targeting machine. For a brand advertising across several retail media networks, this is significant. It means Amazon can now do something those other networks cannot easily replicate.
Klara: Though I'd want to understand the data sourcing here. How does Amazon actually know someone shops at Sephora? Are consumers aware their purchase behaviour is being used this way? In Europe, that question immediately triggers GDPR considerations — and I'd expect regulators to look hard at this if it ever crosses the Atlantic.
Marco: That's a genuinely uncomfortable question, and it doesn't have a clean answer yet.
Klara: Worth watching closely.
Marco: Our next story is up after this.
Marco: There's a quiet acquisition wave hitting the agency world — and TikTok Shop is at the centre of it.
Klara: Back up a second. TikTok Shop is the part of TikTok where you can actually buy products without leaving the app. It's been growing fast, but most traditional marketing agencies haven't known what to do with it. The skills involved — working with creators, running live shopping events, managing the affiliate side of things — are quite different from running a standard ad campaign.
Marco: And that gap is now expensive. Ecommerce agencies and larger holding companies are buying up the smaller specialist shops that have already figured this out, rather than trying to train their existing teams. They don't have time to learn from scratch — Q4 is coming, and TikTok Shop is expected to be a real revenue channel this holiday season.
Klara: The speed of it tells you something. When agencies buy instead of build, it usually means the channel is moving faster than internal training programmes can keep up with.
Marco: The other thing that's being underestimated here is the Amazon connection. TikTok isn't just driving sales on TikTok Shop — it's driving product discovery that converts on Amazon. Someone watches a video, gets interested in a product, then searches for it on Amazon and buys it there. These agencies want to own that full journey.
Klara: Though I'd push back slightly on the European relevance. TikTok Shop in the UK is growing, but it hasn't hit the same scale in Germany or France yet. For most European brands, this is still something to watch rather than act on immediately.
Marco: Fair distinction. For UK brands though, particularly in beauty, fashion, and home — this is happening now, not later.
Klara: If your agency doesn't understand TikTok commerce yet, it might be worth asking why.
Marco: Our final story is coming up next.
Marco: Two commerce data startups have just merged — and the reason behind it says a lot about where ecommerce infrastructure is heading.
Klara: So what's a CDP, for anyone who hasn't come across the term? It stands for customer data platform. Think of it as the central brain that collects everything a retailer knows about its customers — purchase history, browsing behaviour, preferences — and makes that usable for marketing.
Marco: These platforms have been around for years. The idea was that if you had all your customer data in one place, you could personalise better and sell more. That worked well enough when humans were doing the browsing and the buying.
Klara: And the key word there is "humans."
Marco: Chord — a six-year-old commerce tech company — has acquired its rival Zenlytic. Both were working on similar problems around commerce intelligence, so there's a consolidation element here. But the more interesting part is why they're merging. The combined company wants to build what they're calling an agentic version of a CDP.
Klara: Agentic commerce is the idea that AI assistants — software agents — will increasingly handle shopping on behalf of people. Find the product, compare the options, complete the checkout. All without the shopper opening a browser themselves.
Marco: And the existing data infrastructure underneath most ecommerce brands was simply not built for that world. It was built to show dashboards to marketing teams, not to communicate with AI systems making decisions in real time.
Klara: I'd say for most European brands right now, this feels a step or two ahead of daily reality. The majority of shoppers are still very much clicking things themselves.
Marco: True — but the brands building their data foundations today are the ones who'll be ready when that shift actually lands. And 2027 is closer than it sounds.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — the infrastructure of commerce is being quietly rebuilt around data, AI, and platform consolidation, and most businesses haven't noticed yet.
Klara: So pick one part of your stack — your audiences, your agency relationships, your customer data — and ask whether it was built for the world we're actually in now.