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Walmart adds spending limits for AI shopping agents, IKEA invests £31.5M in UK online fulfilment, and indie agencies challenge The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP on fees.
Walmart is building the trust infrastructure that could make AI shopping agents mainstream. Plus, IKEA's £31.5M UK fulfilment bet and a programmatic fee fight that hits DTC media budgets directly.
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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 — we've got a packed one for you today.
Klara: Walmart is giving shoppers actual controls over what AI can spend on their behalf. IKEA is dropping thirty-one and a half million pounds into UK online fulfilment. And independent agencies are pushing back hard on The Trade Desk and Amazon over how they buy digital advertising.
Marco: All three are worth your attention — let's go.
Marco: Walmart has just given shoppers the ability to set spending limits for AI shopping agents — and that's a much bigger deal than it sounds.
Klara: Let's set the scene. AI shopping agents are software that can browse, choose, and buy things on your behalf — no clicking required. Until now, the big question hanging over this idea has been: will people actually trust a machine to spend their money? That trust gap has been the main thing holding this technology back.
Marco: Walmart is trying to solve that directly. They're rolling out controls that let you put a hard cap on what an AI agent can spend. So instead of just saying "go buy me some groceries," you can say "go buy me some groceries, but don't spend more than fifty euros." The agent can't go rogue. You stay in charge.
Klara: And this matters because Walmart has already been positioning itself as the platform that welcomes AI agents — while Amazon has been more cautious about letting them in. So this is the next step: it's not just "agents are allowed here," it's "here's how we make sure shoppers feel safe using them."
Marco: For me, this is the missing piece in the whole agentic commerce debate. Platforms have been focused on the merchant side — APIs, integrations, technical access. But the real bottleneck is the shopper. If your customer doesn't trust the agent, none of the technical stuff matters.
Klara: I'd slightly reframe that though. The guardrails matter, yes — but I think the bigger question is whether European shoppers are ready for this at all. We tend to be more cautious about data and automation. GDPR habits run deep. Walmart is a US story right now, but whoever builds this for European markets will need to do even more to earn that trust.
Marco: Fair challenge. Keep that in mind when you see these features arriving on European platforms. More to get through today — next story coming right up.
Marco: IKEA is spending £31.5 million on online fulfilment in the UK — and that number tells you something important about where retail is heading.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to remember what IKEA actually built its whole model on. The physical store was the product. You drive out to a big blue box on the edge of a retail park, you walk the whole showroom, you load flat packs into your car. That experience was the point. Online was almost an afterthought for a long time.
Marco: And now they're putting serious capital into making the online side work properly. The £31.5 million is going into UK fulfilment specifically — warehousing and last-mile delivery, which means getting orders from a warehouse to someone's front door. The investment is linked to actual growth in digital sales, so this isn't a speculative bet. It's them catching up with where their customers already are.
Klara: What I find interesting is that the UK is where they're doing this first. The UK tends to move faster on ecommerce adoption than most of continental Europe. So IKEA is essentially using it as a testing ground. Whatever they learn here will likely shape how they roll this out in Germany, France, the Nordics.
Marco: For me, the headline is this: if IKEA — a brand whose entire identity is built around getting people through the door — is now treating online fulfilment as a capital priority, then no physical retailer can really argue they're too store-focused to invest in logistics. The category doesn't matter anymore. The expectation is the same everywhere.
Klara: I'd add one nuance though. Spending on fulfilment doesn't automatically mean the experience gets better. The investment still has to land well operationally. We've seen plenty of retailers pour money into logistics and still disappoint customers at the doorstep.
Marco: True. The money is the start, not the finish line. One more story to get through today — let's keep going.
Marco: Independent agencies are picking a fight with two of the biggest programmatic ad platforms in the world — and the brands they work with will feel the outcome either way.
Klara: A bit of background. When you want to run digital ads at scale, you typically do it through a DSP — a demand-side platform. Think of it as a control room where you buy ad space across thousands of websites and apps. The two dominant ones are The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP. For years, the best access and the lowest fees on these platforms have been reserved for the big agency holding groups — the WPPs and Publicis of the world — because they bring enormous guaranteed spend.
Marco: Independent agencies — the specialist shops that a lot of DTC brands now prefer to work with — have been locked out of those same commercial terms. They can access the platforms, but not at the same price, and not with the same direct negotiating rights. What's happening now is that indie agencies are pushing back collectively. They're saying: our combined spending power is significant. It warrants the same table-stakes access the holding groups get. The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP haven't moved yet.
Klara: For European DTC brands working with smaller specialist agencies, this matters in a very practical way. If your agency is paying higher platform fees than a rival brand's holding-group agency, those costs land on your media budget. You're getting less reach for the same spend.
Marco: And if the platforms don't budge, the likely response is indie agencies forming collective buying vehicles — pooling their spend formally to force the issue. Or they start routing more budget to alternative DSPs. Either route creates disruption before it creates savings.
Klara: The platforms built these tiers assuming big agencies would always control the big budgets. That's no longer true — and this standoff is the market catching up with that reality.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — the biggest players in retail and ad tech are all drawing lines around who gets access, on what terms, and at what cost.
Klara: So ask yourself: where in your business are you accepting someone else's terms by default — and is it actually time to renegotiate?