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Shein, Temu and AliExpress shed 35.5% of German sales in Q3; Ikea launches second-hand marketplace in UK and Germany; PureOne Golf fixes attribution.
Shein, Temu and AliExpress just had their worst quarter in Germany — and Ikea is making a serious move into recommerce. Here's what both mean for European ecommerce strategy.
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 — we've got a sharp set of stories for you today.
Klara: Asian marketplaces are losing ground fast in Germany. Shein, Temu, and AliExpress all shed sales in Q3 — and it's a bigger shift than it might first appear.
Marco: Then Ikea brings its second-hand marketplace to the UK and Germany.
Klara: And a small golf brand shows us how to fix broken ad measurement.
Marco: Let's go.
Marco: Shein, Temu, and AliExpress just had a brutal quarter in Germany — and it's reshaping the competitive picture across European ecommerce.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you have to remember how fast these platforms grew. Over the past few years, they captured enormous chunks of European shopping by offering ultra-low prices on clothing, homeware, and electronics. Germany was one of their biggest markets.
Marco: But the EU has been turning up the heat. New rules on low-value imports, tighter parcel taxation, and growing regulatory pressure on these platforms have made it significantly harder to compete on pure price alone. The model that made them so powerful is getting squeezed from all sides.
Klara: And now the numbers show it. German sales for Shein, Temu, and AliExpress fell 35.5% in Q3 2026 compared to the same period last year. That is a dramatic drop for any platform — let alone three at the same time.
Marco: So the obvious question is where does that volume go? And this is where it gets complicated. Amazon already controls 63% of German online retail. So if shoppers are drifting away from the Asian platforms, they're most likely landing on Amazon — not on European alternatives like Zalando or Otto.
Klara: Though I'd add a different lens here. Some of that lost volume might not be going anywhere. If people were buying cheap impulse products they didn't really need, they may simply be buying less. Not every lost sale transfers to a competitor.
Marco: That's a fair challenge. But for European brands, the opportunity is still real. If even a portion of those shoppers are looking for alternatives, there's a window to capture them — especially on quality and trust grounds.
Klara: European retailers should be looking at this data very carefully right now.
Marco: Next up — our second story of the day.
Marco: Ikea is launching a second-hand marketplace across the UK, Ireland, and Germany — all at the same time.
Klara: To put that in context, recommerce — that's the buying and selling of used goods — has mostly been a side project for big retailers. A sustainability checkbox. Something brands mentioned in their annual reports but didn't really build into their core business. Ikea is changing that.
Marco: The move puts Ikea into direct competition with platforms like Vinted and eBay, specifically in the home furnishings category. Three of Europe's largest ecommerce markets, launching simultaneously. That's not a pilot — that's a commitment.
Klara: And I think the interesting angle here isn't the sustainability story. It's the business logic underneath it. When someone sells a second-hand Ikea sofa on Vinted today, that transaction happens completely outside of Ikea's world. Ikea gets nothing from it — no data, no relationship, no chance of a follow-up purchase. This marketplace changes that.
Marco: Exactly what I'd focus on. Keeping that customer inside your own channel — that's the real prize. If someone comes to sell a Billy bookcase and walks away browsing new shelving, Ikea has just turned a completed sale into a new sales opportunity. That's a smart loop.
Klara: Though I'd push back slightly on how quickly this can scale. Second-hand marketplaces are hard to run well. Quality control, logistics, trust — it takes time to build. Vinted spent years getting there. Ikea is a furniture giant, but running a peer-to-peer resale platform is a genuinely different operation.
Marco: True. But Ikea has one thing most recommerce startups don't — an existing base of millions of loyal customers already walking through its doors. The audience is already there.
Klara: And for European brands watching this, the lesson is clear — recommerce is becoming a real ecommerce channel, not just a PR story.
Marco: Our third story is coming right up.
Marco: A small golf training brand just gave us one of the most useful measurement case studies we've seen from the DTC world this year.
Klara: A bit of background. Most small online brands still rely on something called last-click attribution. That means if a customer clicks a Facebook ad and then buys, Facebook gets 100% of the credit for that sale — even if the customer first discovered the brand through a YouTube video or a Google search weeks earlier. It's a simple system, but it tells a very incomplete story.
Marco: PureOne Golf found out exactly how incomplete. When they audited their data, they discovered that last-click was systematically misattributing revenue. Channels that were actually pulling their weight in the purchase journey were getting zero credit. So the brand was cutting spend on those channels — which was actively damaging their growth without them realising it.
Klara: The fix was moving to what's called a multi-touch model — that's where you distribute credit across all the different touchpoints a customer interacted with before buying, not just the final click. Once they did that, the picture looked completely different.
Marco: And this story is about far more than golf. Thousands of DTC brands across Europe are still running on last-click measurement right now. And the problem has got worse since Apple introduced its privacy changes a few years back — those changes reduced the amount of data that ad platforms like Meta can see, which means the signals coming back to brands are already noisier and less reliable. Running a broken attribution model on top of that is a double problem.
Klara: I'd add one note of caution though. Multi-touch attribution isn't perfect either. It still requires assumptions about how much credit each channel deserves — and those assumptions vary depending on which model you use. The upgrade from last-click is real, but it's not the final answer.
Marco: True. But perfect measurement isn't the goal — better decisions are. And if you're still on last-click, there's a real chance you're cutting budgets that are actually working.
Marco: The single biggest takeaway from today — the rules of European ecommerce are being rewritten in real time, and the brands built on trust, transparency, and smart measurement are the ones pulling ahead.
Klara: Pick one thing you're measuring badly right now. Just one. Fix that first.