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Walmart and Amazon split on AI shopping agents, Kevel raises $52M for retail media M&A, and Temu and Shein lose a third of German sales after EU duty change.
Walmart is building infrastructure for AI agents to shop autonomously while Amazon locks them out — a fork in the road that will reshape how brands sell in the US. Plus, Kevel's $52M raise signals retail media consolidation is accelerating fast.
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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: Morning — three stories on the slate today that all connect in interesting ways.
Klara: We've got Walmart and Amazon heading in completely opposite directions on AI shopping agents, which has big implications for European brands selling into the US.
Marco: Then retail media infrastructure — a fifty-two million euro fundraise that tells us a lot about where the ad market is heading.
Klara: And Temu and Shein losing serious ground in Germany. Let's dig in.
Marco: Walmart and Amazon are taking completely opposite positions on one of the biggest questions in retail right now — should AI agents be allowed to shop on your platform?
Klara: Before we get into it, let's explain what an AI agent actually is. It's software that acts on your behalf — you tell it what you want, set a budget, and it goes off and makes the purchase for you, without you clicking a single button.
Marco: Until now, most retailers hadn't taken a firm public stance on this. But that's changed. Walmart is actively building the infrastructure to welcome these AI agents in — letting them browse, choose, and buy on behalf of real customers. Amazon, on the other hand, is blocking them. Keeping the whole experience closed and controlled, the way they've always done things.
Klara: And these are the two largest retailers in the US. When they go in opposite directions this clearly, it's not a technical footnote — it's a signal about where the whole industry is heading.
Marco: The reason this matters for brands is blunt. If an AI agent is doing the buying, your product listing has to convince a machine, not a person. No emotional pull from a nice lifestyle photo. No brand loyalty. The agent is optimising for price, availability, fit — and it's moving fast.
Klara: Though I'd say we shouldn't overstate how quickly this scales. Most shoppers in the UK and across Europe aren't using AI agents to buy their groceries yet. This is still early.
Marco: Fair — but Walmart betting on it now means the infrastructure will be there when it does scale. And the brands already optimised for agent-friendly listings will have a real head start.
Klara: Which means the time to start thinking about this is before it becomes urgent — not after.
Marco: Now let's move to our next story.
Marco: A company that helps retailers build their own advertising networks just raised fifty-two million euros — and it's planning to go shopping.
Klara: Let's back up. Retail media — selling ad space on your own platform to brands who want to reach your shoppers — has become a serious revenue stream for big retailers. But most of the technology running those ad networks is owned by a handful of large players, like Amazon or Criteo. That means smaller retailers are often renting someone else's infrastructure instead of owning it themselves.
Marco: That's exactly the gap Kevel is trying to fill. They build the ad tech layer — the underlying software — that lets retailers run their own media networks without being dependent on one of the big platforms. They just closed a fifty-two million dollar Series D, which is a late-stage funding round, and they've been explicit that the money is earmarked for acquisitions. They want to buy other companies to expand what they offer.
Klara: What I find telling is the timing. Retail media has been talked up as a huge opportunity for a few years now — but a lot of mid-sized retailers haven't actually built the infrastructure to capture it properly. This raise suggests there's a real race on to get that sorted before the window narrows.
Marco: And when Kevel signals M&A, it usually means other challenger providers in this space are about to get acquired or roll up together. Expect consolidation among the smaller retail media tech vendors over the next twelve months.
Klara: My slight hesitation is whether mid-tier European retailers — your Zalandos, your regional grocery chains — are actually ready to act on this. Building an owned ad stack is a significant commitment, not a quick fix.
Marco: True. But the brands that delay tend to end up permanently renting someone else's audience instead of building their own.
Klara: Our next story is coming right up.
Marco: German shoppers haven't switched to European alternatives after Asian platforms got more expensive — they've just stopped buying.
Klara: To understand why that matters, you need to remember what happened earlier this year. The EU scrapped the duty-free threshold on low-value parcels — the rule that let cheap packages from Asia arrive without import taxes. The thinking was that this would level the playing field for European retailers who were already paying their full tax burden.
Marco: Temu and Shein were the platforms most exposed to that change. And the numbers show the impact has been severe — sales from Asian ecommerce platforms in Germany dropped by more than a third in Q3 2026. That's a dramatic fall.
Klara: But here's where it gets uncomfortable for European brands. German retailers didn't see a corresponding rise in their own sales. The spend didn't migrate across. It largely disappeared.
Marco: Which tells you something important about what that demand actually was. A lot of it was price-manufactured — people buying things they wouldn't have bought at a higher price point. When the discount evaporates, so does the purchase.
Klara: I'd add a slightly different read on this. Some of that missing spend will come back over time, as consumers adjust and find new reference points for what things should cost. The picture in Q3 might be bleaker than the longer-term trend.
Marco: Possibly. But for European DTC brands — brands selling directly to consumers online — that hoped the duty crackdown would send shoppers their way, this is a reality check. The competitive threat from Temu and Shein was real, but it didn't mean European retailers automatically inherit that audience once the threat shrinks.
Klara: Winning those shoppers still takes work. Price was always doing a lot of the heavy lifting — and you can't just assume lower competition means higher sales.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — control is becoming the defining advantage in commerce, whether that's controlling how AI agents shop for your customers, controlling your own ad infrastructure, or controlling shelf space that cheap imports just vacated.
Klara: So ask yourself: where in your business are you waiting for someone else to decide — and what would it take to own that decision yourself?