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FTC alleges Amazon secretly inflated ad auction prices 250% on Prime Day; Shein invests €500M in Poland to dodge EU duties; Criteo brings retail media CTV to Europe.
Amazon is accused of secretly overcharging sellers by up to 250% during peak events. Shein just made European fashion brands' worst nightmare permanent. And Criteo is bringing measurable TV advertising to European ecommerce for the first time.
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: Morning — we've packed three stories into today's show and all of them have teeth.
Klara: Amazon secretly inflating ad prices during Prime Day, Shein dropping half a billion euros into Poland to dodge EU duties, and Criteo bringing retail media measurement to your living room TV screen.
Marco: Big implications for sellers, fashion brands, and advertisers alike.
Klara: Let's get into it.
Marco: The FTC — that's the US consumer protection regulator — has just unsealed court documents alleging that Amazon secretly inflated its ad auction prices by up to 250% during peak shopping events.
Klara: Let's rewind for a second. When brands advertise on Amazon, they compete in auctions to have their products shown to shoppers. The idea is that the auction sets a fair price based on competition. Sellers have always trusted that Amazon was running those auctions honestly.
Marco: According to the newly unredacted FTC filings, that trust may have been badly misplaced. The complaint alleges Amazon artificially pushed up auction prices by as much as 250% — specifically during Prime Day and Black Friday, the two moments when sellers are spending the most on ads and when every euro counts most.
Klara: So the allegation is that Amazon was essentially overcharging sellers at the exact moments when their budgets were stretched the highest. That's not a small technical quibble — if true, that's brands systematically paying far more than they should have, season after season.
Marco: And the legal weight here is significant. This involves both the federal FTC and state-level complaints, which means multiple regulators are pushing at this simultaneously. It's harder to make something like that go away quietly.
Klara: I'd note these are still allegations — nothing has been proven in court. Brands shouldn't panic and pull their Amazon budgets tomorrow.
Marco: Agreed on that. But even as an unproven allegation, this should prompt every brand advertising on Amazon to go back and scrutinise their peak-season ad spend. What were your costs per click during last Prime Day? Were your returns what you'd expect? Those questions are now worth asking seriously.
Klara: And it raises a broader point — auction transparency across all retail media networks deserves much more scrutiny than it currently gets.
Marco: Next story is coming right up.
Marco: Shein has just committed another €500 million to its logistics hub in Poland — and for European fashion brands, this is a serious problem.
Klara: To understand why, you need to know how Shein built its advantage. Until now, it shipped most orders directly from China. That meant shoppers waited longer for delivery, and the goods were subject to EU import duties — taxes charged when products cross into Europe from outside. Regulators were counting on both of those friction points to slow Shein down.
Marco: Both of those friction points are now being removed. By fulfilling orders from inside Poland — inside the EU — Shein avoids those import duties entirely. And because the warehouse is in Europe, delivery times drop dramatically. This isn't a workaround. It's a permanent structural change.
Klara: So the two policy levers that were supposed to level the playing field — tariffs and slower cross-border shipping — have essentially been neutralised. Shein now competes with European brands on price and on speed simultaneously.
Marco: Heading into peak season, that is a genuinely uncomfortable position for DTC fashion brands in Germany, France, and the UK. You're no longer just competing with someone who undercuts you on price. You're competing with someone who can now deliver as fast as you can.
Klara: I'd push back slightly on the doom framing, though. Shein's model still has real weaknesses — sustainability concerns, sizing inconsistency, and a growing number of European shoppers who actively choose not to buy from them on principle. That's not nothing.
Marco: That's worth holding onto. But brand values only protect you if shoppers already know and trust your brand. For smaller DTC players without that recognition, the competitive pressure from Shein's Polish infrastructure is very real, very immediate, and not going away.
Klara: Our third story is up next.
Klara: Criteo — the ad tech company best known for retargeting, which is showing you ads for products you've already looked at — has just announced it's bringing its connected TV advertising product to Europe.
Marco: To understand why that matters, you need to know the problem it's solving. Retail media — brands paying to advertise within shopping platforms — has always been strongest at the bottom of the funnel. That means reaching people who are already close to buying. TV advertising, meanwhile, is where you build awareness at the top of the funnel, with people who aren't actively shopping yet. The problem has always been that nobody could cleanly connect a TV ad to an actual purchase. You'd spend the money and hope it worked.
Klara: What Criteo is doing is taking the rich shopper data it holds from retail partners — who bought what, when, how often — and linking that directly to ads running on connected TV. Connected TV means streaming services watched through smart TVs or devices like a Firestick. And crucially, they're bringing closed-loop attribution to European advertisers for the first time. Closed-loop means you can actually see whether someone who watched your ad on TV went on to buy your product. That's something traditional broadcasters have never been able to offer.
Marco: The timing is deliberate. Launching this in Europe right before peak season means performance marketers can test it on real Q4 budgets. That's a smart move by Criteo — brands are already loosening their purse strings, and this gives them a new place to put money they can actually measure.
Klara: I'd temper expectations slightly. Connecting data across retail and TV sounds clean in theory, but in practice, matching that data accurately across different platforms is genuinely difficult — and European privacy rules add another layer of complexity.
Marco: Fair — but the brands that figure it out first will have a real edge. TV budgets are large, and right now most of that spend is essentially unaccountable. If Criteo can change that, even partially, that's a compelling offer to put in front of a European media buyer.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — the platforms and partners you depend on are all making moves in their own interest, and your margins are the ones caught in the middle.
Klara: So take a hard look at where your costs are quietly being decided for you — and ask whether you actually know.