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easyShop.com goes live in 21 countries as an Amazon rival; Obsero raises €1M to fix AI search visibility; retail media's true cost questioned.
Stelios Haji-Ioannou just launched easyShop.com across 21 European markets to take on Amazon — and a London startup called Obsero raised €1M to solve the AI search problem brands don't know they have yet.
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: Good morning — today's show has some weight to it.
Klara: A brand new pan-European marketplace launching right now, explicitly built to take on Amazon. Then a London startup trying to solve one of the trickiest new problems in ecommerce — how do you get found when AI is doing the searching?
Marco: And we're finishing with a question every brand should be asking about retail media budgets.
Klara: Let's get into it.
Marco: A new pan-European marketplace just went live today — and it's coming for Amazon.
Klara: To understand why this is interesting, you need to know who's behind it. Stelios Haji-Ioannou is the founder of easyJet — the budget airline that made the "easy" brand a household name across Europe. He's a serial entrepreneur, meaning he's built and launched multiple businesses. And now he's turned his attention to online retail.
Marco: The launch is called easyShop.com. It went live today across 21 European countries simultaneously. The positioning is blunt — this is an Amazon challenger. Stelios isn't tiptoeing around it.
Klara: And look, the brand recognition is real. "Easy" is trusted across Europe. Millions of people have booked an easyJet flight. That kind of familiarity is worth something when you're trying to get shoppers to take a chance on a new platform.
Marco: But brand recognition and marketplace success are two completely different things. Amazon holds 63% of online retail in Germany alone. Zalando owns fashion. To compete, you don't just need shoppers — you need sellers. Thousands of them. And sellers go where the buyers already are.
Klara: That's the real challenge here. It's the classic chicken-and-egg problem — shoppers won't come without good products, and sellers won't come without shoppers. easyJet solved a relatively simple problem: cheap seats, clear prices. A marketplace is a whole different beast.
Marco: My honest read? This could go either way. The easy brand buys attention. But attention doesn't build a seller network.
Klara: I'm slightly more open to it. If Stelios prices seller fees aggressively — which is very on-brand for him — he might attract smaller European merchants who feel squeezed by Amazon's cut.
Marco: Worth watching closely. Our next story is up — let's get into it.
Marco: A London startup just raised a million euros to solve a problem most brands haven't fully woken up to yet.
Klara: So here's the shift that's happening. For years, when someone wanted to find a product, they Googled it. Brands invested heavily in making sure they showed up in those Google results. But increasingly, shoppers are skipping Google entirely and just asking ChatGPT or other AI assistants for recommendations instead.
Marco: And the problem is — most brands have no idea whether they're showing up in those AI answers or not. There's no equivalent of Google rankings to check. It's basically a black box.
Klara: The startup is called Obsero. They're based in London, and they've just closed a seed round — that's early-stage funding — of one million euros. They've built a specialist AI agent, essentially a tool that monitors and improves how brands appear inside AI-powered search results.
Marco: The timing makes sense. ChatGPT traffic to ecommerce sites is growing fast, and early data suggests it converts well — meaning people who arrive via an AI recommendation are more likely to actually buy something. That makes this a channel worth fighting for.
Klara: My instinct is that this is going to matter a lot sooner than most brands expect. DTC brands — those selling directly to consumers online — are already struggling to track where their customers come from since Apple tightened privacy rules. Now there's another channel they're largely blind to.
Marco: I'd put a small caveat on that. One million euros is a very early bet. The category is real, but how you actually influence AI recommendations at scale — that's still an open question. Obsero will need to prove the product works before brands start shifting serious budget towards this.
Klara: Fair enough. But the brands that figure it out first will have a real edge.
Marco: Our third story is next.
Marco: A sharp new analysis is asking the question most brands are quietly avoiding — is retail media actually worth what you're paying for it?
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know what retail media actually is. When you search for something on Amazon or Tesco's website and the first results are marked "sponsored" — that's retail media. Brands pay for those top spots. It's become enormous, very fast. In the UK alone it's now a £2 billion market, growing 32% year on year.
Marco: And the piece — from Practical Ecommerce — raises a genuinely uncomfortable structural question. When you pay to appear at the top of search results on a retailer's platform, what happens to your organic ranking? That's your natural, unpaid position. The argument is that sponsored listings can actually suppress it. You end up paying for visibility that should, arguably, already be yours.
Klara: And there's a broader cost too. Every pound going into sponsored listings is a pound not going into brand building — the kind of advertising that builds recognition, loyalty, and the ability to charge a decent price long term. CFOs are starting to notice this, and they're asking brands to justify the spend properly.
Marco: My take is pretty blunt. A lot of retail media spend right now is defensive. Brands aren't buying growth — they're buying protection from competitors who've already bought the top slot. That's a pay-to-play trap, not a growth strategy.
Klara: I'd nuance that slightly. Retail media does work well for certain objectives — launching a new product, running a promotion, clearing stock. The problem is when it becomes the default channel without anyone properly questioning whether it's driving new sales or just protecting existing ones.
Marco: The framework this piece offers is simple and worth stealing: before you sign off another retail media budget, ask whether the money is genuinely bringing in new customers — or just renting space you used to own for free.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — European ecommerce is being contested on every front, from who owns discovery to who owns the marketplace itself.
Klara: So pick one channel you actually control — your email list, your site, your content — and ask yourself honestly whether you're investing in it enough.