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ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity never recommend 78% of ecommerce brands; Too Good To Go enters non-food surplus; sales data is reshaping merchant lending.
78% of ecommerce brands are invisible to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Plus Too Good To Go is opening a non-food surplus channel across Europe — and your Shopify sales data may now be your credit score.
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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: Three stories worth clearing your schedule for. AI platforms are quietly ignoring most brands — and that's a bigger problem than it sounds.
Marco: Then Too Good To Go is moving beyond food, which opens up something interesting for European sellers.
Klara: And your sales data might now be your credit score.
Marco: Let's go.
Marco: Here's a number that should stop a lot of brand managers in their tracks — nearly four out of five ecommerce brands are being completely ignored by AI shopping tools.
Klara: So let's back up for a second. When people say "AI shopping," they mean tools like ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or Perplexity — platforms where shoppers are increasingly typing things like "what's the best running shoe under a hundred euros?" and just buying whatever comes back. This is becoming a real discovery channel. And until now, most brands assumed it was still too early to worry about.
Marco: That assumption is wrong. A new report has looked at how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity respond to product category searches — and what it found is pretty stark. Seventy-eight percent of ecommerce brands were never recommended at all. Not once. The same small cluster of well-known names keeps coming up, across all three platforms, across all the categories tested.
Klara: And the brands that don't appear — they're not just getting less traffic. They're effectively invisible to anyone using AI as their starting point for shopping. That's a different kind of problem than a bad Google ranking. At least with search, you can work your way up. With AI recommendations, the gap between the brands that are in the set and the ones that aren't seems to be hardening fast.
Marco: My take — most DTC brands haven't even checked whether they show up in these results. That's the first thing to do today. Search for your category in ChatGPT and see if your brand appears. If it doesn't, you need to understand why.
Klara: I'd add a note of caution though. We don't fully know yet what makes a brand get picked up by these systems. It's not as simple as writing more content or getting more reviews. The signals are still murky.
Marco: Which makes it more urgent, not less. Next story is up.
Marco: Too Good To Go — the app that helps you buy leftover food from restaurants and supermarkets at a discount — is moving into non-food products for the first time.
Klara: For anyone who hasn't used it, Too Good To Go built its entire reputation on food waste. You open the app, find a nearby bakery or café with unsold stock at the end of the day, pay a few euros, and collect a surprise bag. It sounds simple, but they've spent ten years turning that into a genuine daily habit for millions of Europeans.
Marco: And that's exactly what makes this expansion interesting. After a decade focused purely on food, the platform is now opening its marketplace to non-food surplus — think overstock, returned goods, end-of-season products. The kind of stuff that brands normally struggle to move without destroying their pricing.
Klara: What strikes me is the distribution advantage they're starting with. Most new marketplaces spend years trying to build an audience. Too Good To Go already has massive consumer adoption across Europe. The trust is there, the app is already on people's phones, the habit is already formed. That's genuinely hard to replicate.
Marco: My take — for DTC brands and retailers sitting on surplus stock and feeling the pressure of EU circular economy rules, this is worth a serious look. Liquidating overstock through your own channels risks damaging your brand. Doing it through a platform built around sustainability actually frames it positively for the customer.
Klara: I'd want to see more detail before getting excited though. Food surplus is a very specific consumer behaviour — you're hunting for a deal, you don't know exactly what you'll get. Whether shoppers behave the same way with non-food products is a real open question. The model might need to adapt.
Marco: Something to track closely. Our last story is coming up next.
Marco: Our final story today is about something most business owners never think about — until they need a loan.
Klara: So here's the background. Traditionally, if you ran a small business and needed to borrow money, you went to a bank. The bank looked at your accounts, your credit history, maybe your assets. It was slow, often frustrating, and didn't really reflect how your business was actually performing day to day.
Marco: That model is changing. Platforms like Shopify Capital and Amazon Lending have started doing something different — they look at your live sales data, how reliably you fulfil orders, how your shipping performance holds up. And they use all of that to decide how much they'll lend you, and at what rate.
Klara: Which sounds straightforward. But the consequence is anything but. If your business lives primarily on one of those platforms, you build up a rich data trail. The platform can see everything — revenue, returns, delivery times, seasonal patterns. That makes you a known quantity, and known quantities get better loan terms, faster.
Marco: If you've deliberately spread your sales across your own website, marketplaces, and physical retail — which is smart diversification — you might actually have a thinner data profile on any single platform. And that can work against you when you're trying to access growth capital quickly.
Klara: I think this is worth taking seriously, but I'd push back slightly on the doom framing. Having a bank relationship and a diversified sales presence still has real value — especially when platforms change their terms, which they do. Relying entirely on one platform for both your revenue and your financing is its own kind of risk.
Marco: That's a fair tension to hold. But the compounding effect is real — faster loans mean faster inventory, faster inventory means faster growth. Over time, that gap between platform-native sellers and everyone else adds up. Worth knowing it exists, even if you choose a different path.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — the data you generate by selling online is quietly becoming more valuable than the sales themselves, whether that's your AI visibility, your surplus strategy, or your credit profile.
Klara: So ask yourself: who actually has access to your commerce data right now — and are you getting full value from it?