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Google expands lifecycle goals in Shopping and Search, Zooplus launches its marketplace in Spain, and Temu submits a compliance plan after a €200M EU DSA fine.
Google just gave ecommerce advertisers new levers to bid differently for high-value and lapsing customers. Meanwhile, Temu faces its biggest EU regulatory reckoning yet — and Zooplus is quietly taking on Amazon in Spain.
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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: Three stories lined up for you this morning — and they all touch something real.
Klara: Google is changing how advertisers chase their best customers. Zooplus is taking on Amazon in Spain. And Temu just got hit with a €200 million EU fine — and is now promising to behave.
Marco: Big moves across ad tech, marketplace strategy, and platform regulation.
Klara: Let's get into it.
Marco: Google just made a quiet but meaningful upgrade to how advertisers can target different types of customers inside its ad platform.
Klara: To understand why that matters, you need to know how this used to work. Until now, if you wanted to treat a loyal customer differently from a new one — or spend more to win back someone who hadn't bought in six months — you had to do all that work outside of Google. You'd build those audience lists in your CRM, your customer database, and then import them manually. It worked, but it was clunky and easy to get wrong.
Marco: What's changed is that Google is now baking that logic directly into the bidding system itself. There are two things happening. First, Google is bringing High Value customer acquisition goals into Shopping campaigns — so you can now tell Google to specifically go after customers who are likely to spend more over time, not just anyone who clicks and buys. Second, retention modes are rolling out across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max — that's Google's all-in-one automated campaign type. So if you have customers who've gone quiet, you can now bid specifically to win them back, all within the platform.
Klara: For a lot of ecommerce brands, this is genuinely useful. Knowing the difference between a customer who buys once and a customer who comes back five times — and being able to bid accordingly — that's the kind of thing big retailers have always had an advantage at. This could level the playing field a bit for smaller brands.
Marco: My hesitation is around Performance Max specifically. Every new signal you hand Google makes its auction smarter — but it also makes it harder to see what's actually happening. You're trusting the machine more, not less.
Klara: Fair worry. Transparency has always been the weak spot there.
Marco: Something to watch as these features roll out more widely. Now, let's move to our next story.
Marco: Zooplus — Europe's biggest online pet retailer — has just launched a third-party marketplace in Spain.
Klara: For context, Zooplus built its reputation by selling its own range of pet food and supplies directly to customers. It became the go-to destination for pet owners across Europe by doing that one thing really well. But a marketplace is a different model — instead of only selling what you stock yourself, you open the platform to other sellers and take a cut of their sales.
Marco: Spain is the third country where Zooplus has rolled this out. The launch adds ten thousand new products from third-party sellers to the platform — so pet owners in Spain are suddenly looking at a much wider range than before. The strategy is clear: turn a retailer into a platform, and make it harder for customers to bother going anywhere else.
Klara: What I find interesting is the choice of Spain specifically. Amazon is present there, but it hasn't locked things up the way it has in Germany or the UK. So Zooplus has a real window to establish itself as the default place for pet shopping before the big players fully consolidate their grip.
Marco: And pet owners are unusually loyal shoppers. If your dog needs a specific food or your cat has a sensitive stomach, you don't want to experiment. You go back to whoever got it right. Zooplus is betting that trust transfers — that people who trust them for their own products will also trust the marketplace sellers they've let in.
Klara: My question is whether ten thousand products is actually enough to feel like a destination rather than just a bigger catalogue. The bar Amazon sets is almost impossible to match on range alone. Zooplus has to win on relevance and expertise — not volume.
Marco: That's the real test. Alright — our third and final story is next.
Marco: Temu has been handed a €200 million fine by the European Commission — and has now responded with a formal promise to clean up its act.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know what the Digital Services Act actually is. It's the EU's rulebook for large online platforms — covering everything from how they moderate illegal products to how transparent they have to be about their algorithms, meaning the systems that decide what you see and when. Temu, the Chinese ultra-low-price marketplace that exploded across Europe over the last few years, was found to be falling short on several of those obligations.
Marco: The fine — €200 million, issued in May — is the largest DSA enforcement action against a Chinese platform in Europe so far this year. Temu has now submitted a formal compliance action plan to the European Commission. The plan is supposed to show how they'll fix the specific problems: better vetting of the sellers on their platform, stronger controls against counterfeit products, and more transparency about how their recommendation systems work.
Klara: What strikes me is that an action plan isn't the same as actual change. Regulators have accepted a document. What they haven't yet seen is different behaviour. And Temu has a strong financial incentive to look compliant while moving as slowly as possible.
Marco: I'd actually give the Commission slightly more credit here. The DSA has real enforcement teeth — they can restrict platform access entirely if commitments aren't met. Temu knows that. A €200 million fine you can absorb. Being locked out of Europe you cannot.
Klara: And for European brands and marketplaces that have spent years competing against Temu on price — often painfully — this is the moment regulators actually start levelling the conditions. The fine matters less than whether the compliance plan produces a Temu that plays by the same rules everyone else does.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — the rules around who gets to sell to Europeans, and on what terms, are getting tighter, whether you're Google, Zooplus, or Temu.
Klara: So ask yourself: are you building your customer strategy, your market presence, and your compliance posture like those rules actually matter — because they do.