Why Customs and Returns Will Decide Growth

Cross-border e-commerce is becoming more complex in 2026 – and on multiple levels. From 1 July 2026, the de minimis rule which has allowed goods valued under €150 to enter the EU duty-free comes to an end. Going forward, a customs fee of €3 per item category will apply – more precisely, per tariff classification (HS code). A parcel containing products with different HS codes will incur the fee multiple times. From November 2026, an additional handling fee of €2 per consignment could apply.

The primary payment obligation lies with the seller, not the end customer, stresses our partner Spring Global Delivery Solutions, a specialist cross-border shipping provider. Under DDP (Delivered Duty Paid), the merchant covers the fee and delivers a fully costed final price. Under DAP (Delivered at Place), the buyer pays upon receipt – This can lead to refused deliveries and higher return rates. For merchants, DDP is the better choice – but it requires adapting pricing models and checkout systems.

“The new rule does not only hit the large Chinese marketplaces that have systematically benefited from the duty-free threshold”, says Stefan Böhler, Country Managing Director Spring GDS Germany: “It affects every merchant shipping from outside the EU into the EU – regardless of product category, country of origin, or order value.”

What merchants should address now:

●       Adapt checkout: customs fees must be shown as a separate line item – not buried in a generic “Taxes & Fees” field.
●       Rethink Incoterms: DDP protects the customer experience; DAP shifts the risk to the end customer – with consequences for conversion and return rates.
●       Review fulfilment location: a fulfilment hub within the EU is becoming an increasingly attractive option for merchants shipping regularly into the EU.
●       Standardise customs processes: paperless customs clearance and complete HS code datasets are an operational prerequisite, not an option.

Who is most affected

All merchants shipping from outside the EU into the EU are affected. The UK market is particularly relevant: since Brexit, shipments from Great Britain into the EU are treated as third-country imports. The new fee hits UK merchants directly and without exception, on top of the Brexit-related customs processes already in place. The same applies to merchants from Switzerland and Norway. The logical response for many: demand for fulfilment capacity within the EU is rising.

Cross-border scaling: where the real complexity lies

The customs rule is a symptom of a larger challenge. What is manageable when shipping to one or two markets quickly becomes an operational burden with serious internationalisation. Consider different carriers, different customs requirements, different consumer expectations.

Three operational prerequisites must be in place before cross-border growth becomes predictable:

●       Right carrier selection: access to a broad network with local last-mile carriers and out-of-home delivery options is essential.
●       Shop setup adapted: local specifics around checkout, payment methods, and customs communication must be clarified before go-live – not after.
●       Include local marketplaces: often the fastest route to becoming visible in a new market and building initial volume.

As Stefan Böhler from Spring GDS puts it: “As soon as brands internationalise, fulfilment complexity increases sharply. Only those who invest early in standardisation, integrated end-to-end processes and a flexible international warehousing strategy can scale successfully.”

Specialist providers like Spring GDS address this complexity with automated routing systems that select the right carrier for each parcel – based on format, weight, destination and service level.

International returns: cost factor or growth lever?

Many carriers treat returns as an optional add-on – more expensive than outbound shipping, negotiated separately, often handled by a different provider. For the end customer, this means uncertainty. And uncertainty costs conversion – frequently already at checkout, before the first parcel is even shipped.

What is structurally missing is a closed loop: outbound and return as an integrated, transparent unit – at the same price, through the same provider, without any break in the customer experience.

Stefan Böhler: “Customers only shop cross-border when they know that returns are easy, transparent and fast. Once this hurdle is removed, not only trust increases – so does the willingness to buy in new markets. For merchants, this means: fewer abandoned purchases and significantly faster scaling in cross-border business.”

What a closed-loop solution looks like in practice: label-in-the-box as standard, paperless return without customs forms for the end customer, transparent tracking on the return journey, and fast refunds as a prerequisite for repeat purchases.

The UK special case

For shipments to and from Great Britain, there is an additional requirement: returns are only seamless when the original outbound shipment was handled through a fully customs-compliant solution. Both directions require separate customs processes.

Many cross-border carriers offer outbound or return – rarely both as a closed, customs-compliant solution. Where this works, the process runs paperlessly on the basis of a single unified dataset. For merchants who regard the UK as a relevant market, this is the prerequisite for a returns-capable cross-border strategy.

Key Learnings

Cross-border e-commerce has not become easier in 2026. The real decisions are not made at the customs fee stage, but in fulfilment setup, carrier selection, and returns management. Those who think across all three dimensions before volume scales have a structural advantage.

●       From 1 July 2026: €3 customs fee per item category (HS code) on all e-commerce imports from third countries under €150. From November 2026, an additional €2 handling fee per consignment may apply.
●       The payment obligation lies with the seller. DDP protects the customer experience; DAP increases abandonment and returns risk.
●       UK, Switzerland and Norway are directly affected as non-EU countries – for UK merchants, the new rule layers on top of existing Brexit customs processes.
●       Cart abandonment frequently results from lack of transparency at checkout – customs fees must be shown as a separate line item.
●       Cross-border scaling requires a broad carrier network, locally adapted shop setup, and strategic use of local marketplaces.
●       Returns are a conversion factor: a closed loop – outbound and return from one provider at the same price – reduces abandonment and increases repeat purchase rates.
●       For UK: a fully customs-compliant outbound solution is a prerequisite for seamless returns – both directions must be covered from a customs perspective.

Der Beitrag Cross Border Logistics in 2026 erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

The optimization gap

Listings, ad spend, pricing, promotions — these are the areas most marketplace managers tune regularly. What tends to get far less attention is the inbox.

eDesk, a customer support platform built specifically for e-commerce sellers, handles more than 3 million customer conversations per month across thousands of seller accounts. One of the most consistent patterns they observe across that customer base is the gap between how much sellers invest in the commercial side of their operations and how little attention the support side receives — right until something breaks.

“Most marketplace sellers optimize for everything except inbox,” noted Gareth Cummings, CEO of eDesk, during the webinar How to Win More Sales on Marketplaces Without Losing Revenue in the Inbox, hosted by Marketplace Universe. “Ad spend, listings, pricing — these get tuned every week. Inbox operations? Often untouched.”

As a seller scales across more marketplaces and drives more traffic, inbox volume rises. Service level agreements (SLAs) start slipping. Message workflows that worked for three channels stop working for ten. Response consistency degrades. The compounding effect of those operational failures shows up directly in seller performance metrics — and that is where the revenue impact becomes hard to ignore.

Marketplace Universe Insight: The median eDesk seller operates across 17 channels (marketplace × country). 85% of sellers on the platform operate between 3 and 30 channels simultaneously. At that scale, inbox management is not a minor operational detail — it is a core business function.

Why seller performance is an operational question

Every major marketplace — Amazon, Zalando, bol, eBay, Kaufland and others — maintains a seller performance score. The exact methodology varies, but the inputs are remarkably consistent: response times, SLA compliance, review scores, claims and escalation rates.

These scores directly determine a seller’s visibility on the platform. Miss SLAs consistently and products rank lower. Miss them badly enough and a seller gets delisted entirely — with products sitting in fulfillment, no longer reachable by the customers they already paid to acquire.

Public holidays, weekends, and time zone differences can easily cause an SLA to be missed without a single agent making an error. Getting back on track requires actively demonstrating to the marketplace that the problem has been fixed. Meanwhile, the products are offline.

Pre-sales: the most underrated conversion driver

Much of the discussion around marketplace customer service focuses on post-purchase: returns, tracking queries, complaints. The pre-purchase window gets less attention — and according to eDesk’s platform data, this is where the biggest conversion opportunity sits.

Pre-sale questions look mundane: “Will this arrive before Friday?” “Is this compatible with X?” “Do you ship to Austria?” But buyers asking these questions are close to a purchasing decision. They are high-intent. They need an answer, not a follow-up.

eDesk’s data shows that sellers who respond to pre-sale questions within 15 minutes see a 40 to 50 percent conversion uplift compared to those who respond the same day or later.

“You’re in the mode to buy. It could be the evening or the weekend. If you can answer quickly, typically you’ll make that purchase. If it comes back the next day, you might have moved on. You’ve lost that sense of urgency.”
— Gareth Cummings, CEO, eDesk

Marketplace Universe Insight: 92% of webinar attendees said same-day response was their current standard for pre-sale questions. According to eDesk’s platform data, same-day is not fast enough to capture the conversion uplift — the threshold that makes a material difference is 15 minutes.

Hitting that window consistently across 10, 20, or 30 channels simultaneously is not straightforward. That is where prioritization logic and workflow structure become operationally critical.

The Pertemba case: what scaling to 160 marketplaces actually required

Pertemba is what Irene Epp, its Operations Support Manager, describes as “a bit of a unicorn.” The company does not sell its own branded products — it brings brands onto e-commerce marketplaces and manages the entire selling and service operation on their behalf, including all customer communications across all channels and languages.

The numbers alone tell a story:

• 160 active marketplace channels
• 1,000+ customer emails per day
• ~18 people in the entire customer service team

The operation started on Gmail, with messages processed sequentially and routing done by hand. Scaling to the current scope was not possible on that model.

“If you would need to log in and out of marketplaces — even if it takes only a minute — a minute times 130 is already a lot of time gone. Really not possible to do.” — Irene Epp, as pointed out on Marketplace Universe’s podcast Let’s Talk Marketplace, episode 145 (#LTM145)

Want to know more? Then check out episode 145 of our podcast “Let’s talk Marketplace”! In it, Irene Epp and Garth Cummings dive deeper into automation and how to handle channel expansion while keeping customers happy:

The shift to eDesk’s platform changed the structural logic entirely. SLA timers are set at the channel level, pre-sale tickets can be filtered into a dedicated queue, and AI-assisted translation handles incoming and outgoing messages across all languages — eliminating the need for language-specific hires at scale.

“We can prioritize our marketplaces on need. We can prioritize emails on need. For pre-sale questions, we set a filter and a standard SLA — I want it answered within an hour, that’s the maximum. With eDesk, changing the SLAs for specific tickets means they pop up on top for you,” Epp explained during the webinar.

What actually changed operationally:

Marketplace Universe Insight: Around 90% of all incoming queries fall into a handful of standard categories — where’s my order, I want to cancel, what’s my tracking number, how do I return this. Automation handles the volume. Human agents handle everything else.

Multi-lingual support is no longer optional

For European marketplace sellers, multi-lingual support is a structural requirement. Marketplaces in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and elsewhere expect — and in many cases require — responses in the local language. Getting the tone wrong carries real consequences — Pertemba once had a strongly negative customer reaction simply from an automated message using the informal “du” instead of the formal “Sie” in German.

The Japanese market adds another layer entirely. Epp described receiving what read in translation as a polite message — only for Japanese-speaking colleagues to point out the customer was actually furious. “What they put in writing is not always what they are saying to you. For a Japanese person, they are so polite when they are mad. As a European or English speaker, you wouldn’t pick up on that culture.”

The practical solution at Pertemba is to cross-train all agents across all marketplaces and let AI-assisted translation handle the language layer in both directions.

“Even if one agent is sick or on holiday, we don’t have that hole and the scramble to not hit the SLA because we don’t have that skill in our team. That’s why we could expand to 160 channels — because yes, we have some Spanish speakers, Japanese speakers, German and French. But that’s it. We don’t need to hire for every language.”
— Irene Epp, Let’s Talk Marketplace #LTM145

Customer support as a business intelligence function

Irene Epp describes the customer service team as “the watchdog of the company” — the part of the business where problems surface first. A SKU with unusually high return rates, a carrier struggling with deliveries in a specific region, customers in a given market suddenly asking the same question: all of it arrives in the inbox before it shows up anywhere else.

Cummings offered a concrete example from eDesk’s customer base. A seller had a top-performing SKU by sales volume — but when they surfaced the support data, the picture shifted: that product was generating high returns, negative reviews, and suppressed rankings. The seller had been driving sales for a product that was quietly undermining their ability to sell on the platform.

“If you went and spoke to your customer support team today and asked them what are the top three things that are happening, they will tell you straight away — they’re dealing with this every day. And you probably will be surprised in terms of what you would hear,” Cummings noted during the webinar.

Scaling support without breaking the team

The operational argument for scalable tooling is not just efficiency — it is retention. Every agent who leaves takes knowledge of workflows, marketplace rules, escalation paths, and communication patterns with them.

“You can set your limits as high as you want, but you will find you’re replacing one agent after another. Because at some point they either burn out or they’ve had enough. It’s a stressful job. You get abuse. It’s not even the best-paid one. Keeping your team happy is very important — because every team member that leaves is knowledge that leaves.”
— Irene Epp, Marketplace Universe webinar

Epp’s model is to keep the team at around 80–85% capacity for most of the year, preserving headroom to absorb peak periods. At Pertemba, the core team has remained stable for three years across continued channel growth — a result she attributes in part to tooling that removes a significant portion of the manual cognitive load from agents.

A structured internal knowledge base, integrated into eDesk and searchable by any agent covering an unfamiliar channel, sits at the center of that stability. The more comprehensive it is, the more effectively both the team and the platform’s AI automation can draw on it.

Where to start: the one metric that tells you everything

Both Cummings and Epp converge on a simple starting point in the Let’s Talk Marketplace podcast: measure your actual response times.

“You’d be surprised sometimes — if you’re not tracking it and then you discover it can be days or longer. So that’s the first metric you should look at: how quickly are we getting back to our customers. And that will tell you a lot,” Cummings said.

Response time is the metric that reveals whether the structure is working. Once that is visible, the path toward fixing it becomes clear.

Key Learnings

• SLA compliance is a revenue question. Response times, reviews, and escalation handling feed directly into marketplace visibility scores — and missing SLAs due to public holidays or weekends alone can take products offline. Leaving support operations unstructured while investing in listings and ads creates a compounding risk.
• Around 90% of marketplace support queries are standard and automatable — order status, cancellations, tracking, returns. Automation handles the volume; human agents handle everything else.
• Responding to pre-sale questions within 15 minutes can drive a 40–50% conversion uplift, according to eDesk’s platform data. Same-day response — the current standard for most sellers — is not fast enough.
• Multi-lingual support is a structural requirement in Europe. AI-assisted translation, properly configured, allows teams to cover far more markets than language-specific headcount would permit.
• Customer support is business intelligence. When the team has enough capacity to pay attention, the inbox surfaces product problems, carrier failures, and assortment issues before they show up anywhere else in the business.
• Start by measuring response time. If actual response times across channels are not being tracked today, that is the first metric to surface. It will tell you more than almost anything else about the state of the support operation.

Missed the live webinar? Watch the full recording here. For the full Pertemba story in their own words, listen to the Let’s Talk Marketplace podcast episode Automation at Scale: How to handle 1,000+ Daily Support Tickets #LTM145.

eDesk is a customer support platform built for e-commerce sellers, handling more than 3 million customer conversations monthly across thousands of seller accounts globally. Learn more or start a free two-week trial at edesk.com.

15.06.2026 – Written by Ricarda Eichler, Journalist and Author for OHN

Der Beitrag Why Your Marketplace Inbox Is Costing You More Than You Think erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Central European ecommerce to grow by 8% in 2026
Online spending in Central Europe is expected to grow by 8% this year, rising from €191.3 billion in 2025 to €206.6 billion in 2026. According to ECDB and Mastercard, the market is entering a more stable phase after the pandemic boom and several years of stagnation. Germany remains by far the largest ecommerce market in the region, while Poland is expected to grow by around 9% and Greece by around 11%. See more on Ecommercenews 

More News

Kaufland keeps expanding – but growth mainly comes from new markets
Kaufland will expand its marketplace to Spain and the Netherlands in late summer, bringing its marketplace network to nine countries. In 2025, GMV across Kaufland’s marketplaces grew by 11.9% across all countries. At the same time, the group figures paint a more sober picture. Lidl and Kaufland generated €1.7 billion in combined European ecommerce revenue – Schwarz Group only reports the figures jointly – which was flat year on year. The growth therefore appears to be driven mainly by expansion. In Germany, Kaufland’s GMV grew by 4%. See the full story on Ecommercenews (expansion), Wortfilter (online GMV) and Rundschau Online (group figures) 

easyGoup launches fulfillment platform in Europe
easyDelivery has launched a delivery and fulfilment platform for consumers and merchants. From day one, the service provides access to more than 350,000 parcel shops, lockers and other pickup and drop-off locations across the UK and Europe. This includes Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, among others. The launch fits into easyGroup’s broader commerce strategy, which also includes plans to build the new Easyshop marketplace together with OnBuy. Read more on ChannelX  

Joybuy opens up to European and Chinese sellers
Joybuy, JD.com’s online department store, is evolving into a marketplace. In the second half of 2026, the platform plans to allow selected third-party sellers from Europe and China, initially through a curated model with trusted brands. Sellers will be able to either store their products in Joybuy warehouses or ship directly to customers themselves. Find out more on Ecommerce News 

B&Q Marketplace grows faster than its ecommerce sales
B&Q continues to expand its marketplace and has now launched the Cameras and Wearable Tech category. B&Q Marketplace GMV recently grew by 29%, while ecommerce sales increased by 16%. Online penetration also rose from 16% to 19%. This means the marketplace is growing significantly faster than the British DIY retailer’s ecommerce business. See more on ChannelX

Amazon adjusts checkout and product titles
Amazon is changing two parts of the customer journey. With the new “Add to Delivery” feature, Prime customers in Europe will be able to add items to existing orders without going through checkout again or paying additional shipping costs. At the same time, Amazon is reducing product titles to a maximum of 75 characters. Additional information can be moved into “Item Highlights” with up to 125 characters. From July 27, titles that are still too long will gradually be replaced by AI-generated recommendations. Read more on Onlinehändler-News (checkout) and ChannelX (product titles)   

Allegro tests cross-border trade with Ukraine
Allegro is working on solutions for cross-border trade with Ukraine and is already testing them with partners. This suggests that the Polish marketplace is preparing a possible entry into the Ukrainian market. After Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, Ukraine would be Allegro’s next expansion market – and its first move outside the EU. See more on Liga.net 

compliance News

Shein launches compliance training for marketplace sellers
Shein is launching a new training series for its marketplace sellers, focusing on product safety, quality and compliance. The courses are being developed with partners including Bureau Veritas, Intertek, SGS and TÜV SÜD. However, Shein does not say whether participation is mandatory or how many sellers will take part. For a platform increasingly under pressure over product safety and seller control, this is exactly where more transparency would be needed. See the full story on Ecotextile 

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Der Beitrag Marketplace Universe News 15.06.2026 – Kaufland expands again, and Amazon adjusts checkout erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

France 2026: Europe’s Loudest Marketplace Battleground

Last year, France showed the rest of Europe what happens when a country has had enough of ultra-fast fashion. In November 2025, riot police guarded the doors as Shein opened its first-ever permanent store inside the BHV department store in Paris. On the same day, the government moved to suspend Shein’s online marketplace after authorities found childlike sex dolls and illegal weapons listed by third-party sellers. More than 120,000 people signed a petition against the opening; a dozen brands pulled their products from BHV in protest.

That spectacle sits on top of the Loi Violland, France’s anti-fast-fashion law passed by the Senate in June 2025. It threatens per-item eco-taxes, advertising bans and influencer sanctions aimed squarely at Shein and Temu. Brussels has since objected that the law breaches EU single-market rules — leaving France in the unusual position of being too aggressive against the Chinese platforms for the European Commission’s liking. No other European e-commerce market is this loud, this political, or this far ahead in the fight.

Through all of it, the numbers keep climbing. Revenue grew 5.9% to €70.3 billion in 2025, with ECDB forecasting another 6% to €74.4 billion in 2026. Online now accounts for 18.3% of French retail, up from 16.8% a year earlier.

Cross-border buying makes up 18.4% of revenue — and it is overwhelmingly Chinese. A striking 92.2% of French cross-border volume go to Chinese stores, which is why AliExpress, Temu and Shein loom so large in this quadrant. Everyone else — the US, the UK, Germany — barely registers.

What moved since 2025: a reshuffle at the top

The biggest change in this year’s Marketplace Country Quadrant France is at the generalist level. Carrefour and Veepee move up into the generalist tier; eBay and Auchan drop out of it. eBay’s exit comes with an asterisk — it lost the spot to Carrefour by a hair and still pulls volume across nearly every category. Auchan slides to position seven, right behind it, and reappears lower down as a care specialist where its supermarket strength counts most.

Down in the specialist grid, the moves are sharper than usual. Vinted finally enters — a deliberate break from our usual C2C exclusion, because pretending France’s biggest fashion destination doesn’t exist would be absurd. E.Leclerc muscles into electronics, Leroy Merlin claims a home & living slot, and cycling specialist Alltricks earns a place in sports. Shein, meanwhile, spreads into three categories at once — scandal and all.

The generalists in the Marketplace Country Quadrant France: Amazon leads, France argues about second place

Amazon sits on top, as it does everywhere. What’s interesting is the very French cast assembled behind it — and how much of it is built on grocery and legacy retail rather than pure-play e-commerce.

•  Amazon: the unavoidable anchor: reach, Prime, logistics, sellers.

•  Temu: still climbing fast, still pushing prices down across the board, regulators notwithstanding.

•  AliExpress: the established gateway for France’s heavily Chinese cross-border flow.

•  Cdiscount: the home-grown challenger to Amazon, under fire from the internationals but doubling down on a marketplace-first strategy.

•  Carrefour: the supermarket that became a genuine multi-category marketplace, and one of France’s most distinctive platform stories.

•  Veepee: the flash-sale model is under pressure globally, but French shoppers still love a curated deal.

Just outside: eBay at the door, Auchan right behind, and Showroomprive worth a nod as a smaller fashion-leaning generalist.

The specialists in the 6 categories

Fashion

• Vinted — France’s single largest fashion destination by volume; too big to leave off, C2C or not.
• Shein — growing fast despite being constantly under fire from the French state, industry and public (more below).
• Zalando — still the brand-driven cross-border counterweight to the fast-fashion crowd.

Electronics

• Boulanger — the service-led French specialist with a fast-growing marketplace.
• Back Market — refurbished tech is now a default, not a niche, and France is its home turf.
• E.Leclerc — another grocery giant turning marketplace muscle into a specialist slot.

Honourable mentions: Fnac still matters here, and Darty owns white goods in France.

Home & Living

• Leroy Merlin — the DIY leader stretching comfortably into home and furnishings.
• Shein — its home decor push is now big enough to register.
• La Redoute — the catalogue veteran reborn as a curated home marketplace.

Still circling: BUT and Conforama remain solid second-tier options.

DIY & Garden

• Leroy Merlin — the undisputed leader of French DIY online.
• Autodoc — the auto-parts platform that launched its B2C marketplace in France first, before rolling it out to Germany and Austria; still growing fast here.
• ManoMano — French-born and France remains its strongest market, yet even here it’s losing ground.

Sports

• Decathlon — the untouchable benchmark, now a real platform and not just a retailer.
• Zalando — holds the branded activewear corner.
• Alltricks — the cycling and outdoor specialist; owned by Decathlon since 2019 but run as a standalone brand, riding France’s deep bike culture.

Beauty & Care

• Shein — its beauty range is booming with younger shoppers.
• Auchan — supermarket strength translating most directly into everyday care and personal-care products rather than premium beauty.
• Nocibé — the French premium beauty specialist (Douglas’ sister brand).

One to watch: Yves Rocher opened its own marketplace in late 2024 and is developing nicely — one slot short for now.

The Shein paradox: under siege, and still winning

Shein has become the lightning rod for France’s entire anti-fast-fashion movement. The 2025 Paris store opening turned into a national flashpoint — protests, riot police, a petition with six-figure signatures, brands walking out of BHV. The marketplace suspension over illegal third-party listings was a genuine shock, and the Loi Violland is built largely with Shein in mind. Yet the marketplace reopened, the commercial trajectory never bent, and Brussels has now stepped in to slow France’s own law. The regulatory risk here is real and worth pricing into any partnership — but writing Shein off in France would be a serious misread.

What’s next: a social-commerce wildcard

TikTok Shop isn’t in the quadrant yet, but it had a strong 2025 in France and is moving quickly — a 2027 entry looks likely, especially given how well social commerce maps onto French beauty and fashion buying. Watch the legacy retailers too: Carrefour, Auchan, Leclerc, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon are proof that in France it’s the established store brands, not the pure players, driving the most structurally important marketplaces — and they’re still expanding. And keep an eye on the second tier generally, because in France that’s where the volume nobody else is fighting over actually lives.

Key Learnings

• France grows reliably at around 6% a year — €70.3 billion in 2025, €74.4 billion expected in 2026 — even amid the fiercest anti-Chinese-platform pushback in Europe.
• The Shein clash — store protests, marketplace suspension, the Loi Violland, and Brussels’ pushback against it — makes France the continent’s most politically charged marketplace market.
• French legacy retailers, not pure players, run the country’s most structurally important marketplaces: Carrefour, Auchan, Leclerc, Leroy Merlin, Decathlon.
• Volume is spread more evenly than almost anywhere in Europe; the ranking below position three is where French opportunity hides.
• Vinted’s inclusion breaks our C2C rule on purpose: it’s simply France’s biggest fashion platform.
• TikTok Shop is the wildcard for 2027.

Did we miss a platform? Let us know! Interested in other country markets or certain categories? Check out our full collection of country and category quadrants here.

Der Beitrag Marketplace Country Quadrant France erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Amazon moves Prime Day 2026 to June and stretches it to four days
Amazon Prime Day 2026 will run from 23 to 26 June across 26 countries, including most major European markets. The earlier timing and longer event window make this a clear operational heads-up for sellers. Inventory, advertising budgets, pricing and fulfilment planning need to be aligned now, not in July. See more on ChannelX 

More News

Belgian ecommerce grows – but much of the money leaves the country
Belgian consumers spent €18.3 billion online in 2025, up 5.4% year on year, with more than nine in ten Belgians shopping online. The catch: much of that spending went to foreign platforms. This is making Belgium another strong example of how cross-border marketplaces are capturing local ecommerce growth. Read more on Ecommercenews 

eBay tests Managed Shipping in the US
eBay has updated its US User Agreement with new sections covering eBay Live, Managed Shipping and arbitration rules. For now, the Managed Shipping test is limited to selected US sellers and categories, but strategically it points to a broader platform trend. Marketplaces are moving deeper into infrastructure, logistics and seller control. Find out more on ValueAddedResource 

France hits Shein with another €22.4 million in fines
French authorities have imposed two new fines on Shein, totalling €22.4 million, over consumer information, withdrawal rights and environmental information obligations. Shein says the sanctions are disproportionate and plans to appeal. But the case adds to a broader regulatory pressure pattern: French penalties against Shein now reportedly exceed €210 million. See more on Ecommercenews

eBay Germany raises fees for new goods sellers
From 1 July 2026, eBay Germany will remove tiered sales commissions in many categories and introduce fixed, often higher fees for new goods. In IT, for example, the new commission for new goods will be 7%, while used, refurbished and B-stock items will move to 5%. It’s a clear sign that eBay is shifting incentives towards recommerce, live shopping and selected focus categories. Read more on Channelpartner 

Launch News

easyGroup and OnBuy plan new European marketplace
easyGroup is entering ecommerce with easyShop.com, a new marketplace built together with OnBuy and planned for rollout in 21 European countries from late 2026. Seller recruitment has already started, but the market is crowded: brand awareness may help, yet easyShop will still need a clear proposition for merchants and consumers to stand out against Amazon, eBay, Zalando, Temu, Shein and others. See the full story on Retail News 

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Der Beitrag Marketplace Universe News 08.062026 – Prime Day gets longer and earlier, and France fines Shein again erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

German e-commerce is back on the (cautious) growth track 

After the difficult post-pandemic years, German e-commerce has found its rhythm again. According to the new HDE Online Monitor 2026, online retail sales in Germany grew by 3.9% in 2025, reaching €92.3 billion net. That follows growth of 3.8% in 2024 and marks a further step away from the correction phase of 2022 and 2023.

For 2026, the HDE expects the market to grow by another 4.3%, reaching €96.3 billion. That is not a return to pandemic-style acceleration. But it is a steady recovery – and probably the healthier kind. Since 2020, German online sales have increased by €19.3 billion.

The more interesting question is where this growth comes from. Last year, the headline was simple: marketplaces drove the entire growth. This year, the story is more nuanced. Marketplaces are still ahead, but the gap to other online formats has narrowed.

All categories are growing again

For the second year in a row, all major online retail categories recorded growth. The striking part: growth rates have moved closer together. The weak patches of previous years, especially in categories like fashion, seem to be largely over.

The clear exception is FMCG. Online sales of fast-moving consumer goods grew by 10.4% in 2025 – more than 2.5 times the market average. In 2024, FMCG was already the fastest-growing category with 7.3%. This year, the category pulled even further ahead.

Other categories grew at a much more moderate pace: Health & Wellness by 4.9%, Jewelry & Watches by 3.1%, Consumer Electronics and Leisure & Hobby by 2.9% each, Fashion & Accessories by 2.8%, Office Supplies by 2.4%, DIY & Garden by 2.1%, and Home & Living by 1.8%.

Fashion and Electronics remain Germany’s two largest online categories. Fashion & Accessories reached €21.2 billion, accounting for 22.9% of total online sales. Consumer Electronics followed with €19.7 billion, or 21.3% of the market. Together, the two categories still make up 44.2% of German online retail – but their combined share is slowly declining. In 2024, it stood at 44.7%.

FMCG is the category to watch. Its share of total online sales rose from 13.7% to 14.5%, reaching €13.4 billion. The online penetration is still low, but the direction is clear: groceries, drugstore products and everyday consumer goods are becoming a much more important part of German e-commerce.

Marketplaces still lead – but they no longer own the whole growth story

In 2024, the message was brutal for many retailers: all online growth came from marketplaces, while other online channels declined. In 2025, the picture looks less one-sided.

Sales via marketplaces and platforms grew by 5.4%. That is still above the total online market growth of 3.9%. But other formats also grew: providers with online DNA by 3.9%, stationary retailers by 4.0%, and manufacturers by 3.8%.

So yes, marketplaces remain the strongest growth format. But the simplistic “marketplaces win, everyone else loses” narrative no longer works. Own shops, retailer shops and manufacturer-led models are not dead. They just need a much clearer role: brand experience, customer relationship, loyalty, better margins, exclusive assortments – something beyond simply listing products online.

Amazon gains share again

Germany remains an Amazon market.

According to the HDE Online Monitor 2026, Amazon.de accounted for 63.3% of German online sales in 2025, up from 62.7% in 2024. Amazon’s own retail business remained stable at 17.2%, while the Amazon marketplace grew from 45.5% to 46.1%.

That may sound like a small increase. It is not. When a player already controls more than 60% of the market, even half a percentage point matters.

Other marketplaces also gained slightly. The combined share of marketplaces outside Amazon – including eBay, Zalando/About You, Otto, TikTok Shop and specialist platforms such as ManoMano, Moebel.de or Chrono24- rose from 10.6% to 10.8%. Overall, marketplaces accounted for 56.7% of German online sales in 2025.

The uncomfortable truth remains: Germany is not a highly fragmented marketplace market. It is an Amazon-dominated market with a relevant, but much smaller, platform landscape around it.

Temu and Shein are big – but not as big as you think

Temu and Shein are now structurally relevant in Germany. The HDE estimates their combined German sales at around €4.7 billion in 2025, up from roughly €3.0 billion in 2024. That equals about 5% of total German online retail.

That is impressive. But it is not market takeover.

The two platforms are large enough to put pressure on pricing, assortment expectations and customer acquisition. But they are still far from Amazon’s scale. The industry sometimes talks about Temu and Shein as if they had already rewritten the entire German market. The numbers are more sober: they are a serious force, not the whole market.

Their user base is growing, though. The HDE estimates that 16.0 million people in Germany bought from Temu and/or Shein in 2025, up from 14.4 million in 2024. Average order value rose sharply from €24.95 to €34.15, while order frequency increased slightly to 8.51 orders per year.

The reputation problem remains. Many non-buyers still associate Temu with poor product quality. But among actual buyers, the picture is more positive. That is the real risk for established players: Temu does not need to convince everyone. It only needs a large enough group to keep buying frequently.

TikTok Shop starts small – but not quietly

TikTok Shop is still tiny compared with Amazon, Zalando or even Temu and Shein. But the early numbers are worth watching.

Half a year after launch, 52% of German internet users already knew TikTok Shop, and 9% had already bought there. The top categories were Clothing & Accessories, Cosmetics & Care, Sports & Leisure, Consumer Electronics, and Drinks & Snacks. Average spending per purchase was €59, and PwC data cited by the HDE estimates TikTok Shop’s German 2025 sales at around €220 million.

That does not make TikTok Shop a must-have channel for every brand yet. But ignoring it would be lazy. Especially in categories where impulse, creators, entertainment and low-friction buying meet, TikTok Shop is becoming part of the platform conversation faster than many expected.

Amazon Haul brings the low-price fight into Amazon’s own ecosystem

The low-price battle is no longer just happening on Temu, Shein or AliExpress. Amazon is moving too.

Amazon Haul launched in Germany in June 2025. Four months later, it already had 47% awareness, 13% of respondents had purchased via the concept, and 59% of buyers ordered at least once a month.

This matters because Amazon Haul brings ultra-low-price mechanics into the most powerful commerce ecosystem in Germany. For brands and sellers, that means the pressure from low-price models is no longer somewhere else. It is moving closer to the mainstream.

Cross-border shopping keeps rising

German consumers are also becoming more comfortable buying from abroad. The share of online shoppers who say they consciously order from foreign providers increased from 24% to 26%. China remains by far the most important source country: 49% of those who bought abroad ordered from China.

This is one of the reasons why national market logic is becoming weaker. German brands and retailers are not only competing with German retailers anymore. They are competing with global supply chains, platform-funded reach, aggressive pricing and increasingly frictionless cross-border delivery.

Social media and AI are moving into the shopping journey

The customer journey is becoming less predictable. Social media is not just a place for inspiration anymore. It triggers purchases. On average, 13% of German internet users have bought a product after seeing it in a person’s social media post. Among 30- to 39-year-olds, the share reaches 23%.

AI is moving even faster into product research. 35% of consumers already use AI chatbots when researching products, mainly to compare product features, quality and prices.

For brands, this is more than a marketing side note. Product data, reviews, trust signals, price logic and content quality are becoming machine-readable sales assets. If shoppers start asking AI tools what to buy, where to buy it and which shop to trust, visibility will no longer depend only on Amazon search, Google rankings or marketplace filters.

Second-hand is now a €10.5 billion online market

Second-hand is still excluded from the HDE’s main online sales figure because the report focuses on new goods. But as a market, it has become too large to treat as a niche.

Online second-hand sales reached €10.5 billion in 2025, up 5.3% from the previous year. Since 2019, the market has grown from €5.7 billion, with a CAGR of 10.6%.

The strongest segments are Books, Fashion & Accessories and Consumer Electronics. What started as a sustainability story is increasingly also a price story. Consumers buy second-hand not only because it feels responsible, but because it helps reduce spending. That makes the market relevant far beyond vintage fashion or refurbished electronics.

Conclusion: Germany’s online market is stable – but the rules are shifting

The German online market is growing again. Not spectacularly, but steadily. That alone is good news.

But the real story is not the growth rate. It is the changing structure underneath.

Marketplaces remain the backbone of German e-commerce, and Amazon has strengthened its already dominant position. But the market is no longer as one-sided as last year’s figures suggested. Other formats are growing again, FMCG is becoming a stronger online category, second-hand is reaching serious scale, and low-price platforms are forcing everyone to rethink price perception and customer expectations.

At the same time, TikTok Shop, social commerce and AI-driven product research are changing how products are discovered and evaluated. The next phase of German e-commerce will not be won only through more listings, more ad spend or more marketplace presence. It will be won through better execution: sharper channel roles, cleaner data, stronger pricing discipline, operational excellence and a realistic understanding of where customers actually make decisions.

Germany is not in an e-commerce boom. But it is entering a more complex, more platform-driven and more competitive phase of online retail.

Key Learnings

• German e-commerce is growing steadily again: Online sales increased by 3.9% to €92.3 billion in 2025, with 4.3% growth forecast for 2026.
• FMCG is the strongest growth category: With 10.4% growth, FMCG is pulling far ahead of the market average, even though online penetration remains low.
• Marketplaces remain dominant, but the gap is narrowing: Marketplace sales grew by 5.4%, still above market average, but other online formats are growing again too.
• Amazon is still the central force in Germany: Amazon.de increased its share to 63.3% of German online sales, driven mainly by its marketplace business.
• Temu and Shein are serious, not all-powerful: Their estimated combined market share reached around 5%, making them releva- but not dominant.
• TikTok Shop and Amazon Haul show where the pressure is moving: Social commerce and ultra-low-price mechanics are entering the mainstream faster than many brands expected.
• Second-hand has become a structural market: At €10.5 billion, online second-hand is no longer a side topic.
• AI will reshape product discovery: If consumers use AI tools for product research, brands need better data, clearer trust signals and more machine-readable product content.

If you’d like to learn more about TikTok Shop, check out our in-depth guide How to Succeed on TikTok Shop or our podcast Just Being on TikTok Shop Is Not Enough: Philips’ 2-Year Playbook for Europe #LTM153

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Der Beitrag The German Online Market 2026 erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Who is where now? The personnel carousel of the Marketplace Universe has been moving merrily along in May. We help you keep up with the Movers & Shakers of our dynamic industry.

Our Movers & Shakers Top picks in may

Laura Cialdella has left Hunkemöller to join Under Armour as Senior Manager, Digital Marketplaces, bringing her marketplace expertise into the global sportswear business.

Ray Cao now leads Zalando Partner Marketing Services (ZMS), following senior roles at TikTok, Google Shopping and Intuit.

Patricia Lay has been promoted to Lead International Partnership Growth at bol, continuing to drive the marketplace’s international ecosystem.

Jocelyn Nagy has moved from Tommy Hilfiger into a global role at PVH Corp., now serving as Director, Global Digital & Ecommerce.

Philipp Lüders has been promoted to Leader Channels & Sales Activation GROHE / LIXIL Europe at LIXIL.

More Movers & Shakers in may

Federica Alessio has been promoted to Marketplace Specialist at ALOHAS, strengthening the brand’s marketplace presence.

Christina Antypa has left Skroutz to join Moving Doors as Group Sales Director.

Lionel Boukobza has left Stradivarius to become Vice President Ecommerce at Gloria Jeans, taking on a senior digital commerce role.

Ole Brossmann has left L&T to join RUF Lebensmittelwerk as Sales Manager E-Commerce, bringing his digital commerce experience into the FMCG space.

George Chang has left SHEIN to become President | North America at ONERWAY.

Mark Cowdery has moved on from Moss to join LINLEY as Director of Partnerships.

Caterina Maria Fera has moved from Veepee to Veepee|ad, where she now works as Key Account Manager Media.

Robin George has moved on from Engelhard and joined WD-40 Company as Marketing Manager | Teamlead Channel Marketing.

Urs Heger has taken on a new leadership role at PUMA Group as Teamhead Running/Training Cluster Central.

Katie Holmes has advanced to Senior National Account Manager – Spar at Nestlé Purina PetCare Europe.

Kristina Kolle has stepped up at bonprix Handelsgesellschaft, now leading as Head of Partner Commerce.

Leon Kreukniet has stepped up at ChannelEngine, now working as Senior Integration Coordinator.

Florian Kriegel has been promoted to Team Lead Brand Communications at idealo internet.

Wael Mahainy has started a new role as Digital Marketplace Manager at alinma.

Susan Nichols (Caracciolo) has left Temu to join The Dufresne Group in Business Development, Marketplace.

Raúl Río Fernández has stepped up at BERSHKA, now leading as Head of Online Markets, with responsibility for the brand’s digital market operations.

Thomas Röttenbacher has moved on from BIG Spielwarenfabrik to join Toys & More in Project Management / Consulting.

Alexandre Santamaria has been promoted to Business Development Manager Europe at Asendia Germany.

Benedikt Sauter has been promoted to Senior Business Development Manager – E-Commerce at Andreas Schmid Group, taking on a broader commercial role.

Torsten Schäfer has left Recom to co-found Flow Ecommerce, where he now serves as Co-Founder & COO.

Katayoun Aslani Tafreshi has taken on a new role at bonprix as Key Account Manager – Marketplace.

Luiz Paulo Vervloet Sollero has moved from Amazon to Mercado Libre, where he now serves as Director, Brazil Fashion.

Claudia Vivas has left Aarke to take on the role of Marketplace Manager at IDEAL OF SWEDEN.

Did we miss something? Let us know!

Der Beitrag Marketplace Movers & Shakers in may 2026 erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

EU imposes €200 million fine on Temu
The EU has imposed its first major fine on Temu under the Digital Services Act. The platform is expected to pay €200 million because it allegedly failed to sufficiently control illegal products on its marketplace. For the industry, the case shows that the DSA is becoming a real platform risk. Read more on DW

More News

TikTok Shop continues its European expansion
TikTok Shop is further expanding its presence in Europe: on 15 June, the shopping feature is expected to launch in Poland, the Netherlands and Austria. For sellers, the announced “Sell Across Europe” feature is particularly relevant, as it is designed to allow merchants to reach multiple EU markets through a single registration. In Spain, where TikTok Shop has been active since late 2024, one in five online sellers is already represented on the platform. See more on LinkedIn (Poland), LinkedIn (Netherlands), Die Presse (Austria) and Ecommercenews (Spain)

Otto.de grows significantly
Otto Group significantly increased its profit in the past financial year: EBIT rose from €276 million to €641 million, while revenue declined by 7.4% to €13.8 billion. The main reason for the revenue decline was the sale of About You to Zalando. Otto.de grew by 8% to €4.8 billion and accounts for around one third of the group’s total revenue. At the same time, Otto points to cost savings – including job cuts – as another driver of higher profitability. Find out more on Süddeutsche Zeitung

JD.com eyes the Very Group
JD.com is apparently pushing ahead with its European ambitions. The Chinese group is reportedly looking to acquire the UK’s Very Group for £2 billion. At the same time, the EU is now also reviewing JD.com’s planned investment in Ceconomy. This is no longer just about individual acquisitions, but about how strongly Chinese retail groups will shape European retail in the future. Read more on Retail Gazette (Very) and Yahoo Finance (EU)

Amazon invests $20 billion in the UK
Amazon invested more than £15 billion in the UK in 2025. By the end of 2027, the total investment is expected to reach £40 billion. The money went into new logistics sites, studio and office space, and a drone delivery trial. Amazon also reported more than £30 billion in revenue from its UK activities in 2025. See more on FashionNetwork

Farfetch launches livestream shopping for Private Clients
Farfetch is launching “Farfetch Live”, a new livestream format for selected Private Clients. The focus is on fine watches, fine jewellery and rare accessories, presented in curated digital sessions. Instead of classic live shopping, Farfetch is focusing on advice, expertise and luxury storytelling. Read more on FashionUnited

Zalando partners with Vestiaire Collective
Zalando is opening its platform to Vestiaire Collective and expanding its pre-owned offering in the luxury segment. The partnership shows that luxury resale is moving further into the mainstream.Find out more on FashionNetwork

Nostalgia News

eBay brings back “3, 2, 1 …!”
eBay Germany is launching a new brand campaign around its well-known claim “3, 2, 1 …!”, putting eBay Live at the centre. The live commerce format is now active in seven markets; in Germany, eBay says it has developed into a scalable channel since its launch in November 2025. eBay is combining nostalgia, community and live shopping – bringing the direct exchange between buyers and sellers back into focus. See the full story on eBay

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Der Beitrag Marktplace Universe News 01.06.2026 – EU fines Temu €200m, and TikTok Shop expands in Europe erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

What Agentic Commerce Actually Is (and Isn’t)

Agentic commerce describes a model in which AI agents act autonomously, or semi-autonomously, on behalf of consumers across the full commerce journey: product discovery, comparison, negotiation, checkout, and post-purchase management. The user sets a goal. The agent executes.

Imagine a shopper who needs new running shoes. They tell their AI assistant: best options under €150, next-day delivery to Germany, size 43. By the time they finish their coffee, the agent has compared inventory across platforms, verified stock and pricing, applied any loyalty discounts, and placed the order — without the shopper ever visiting a brand’s website or marketplace listing.

That scenario is no longer hypothetical. The question now is whether your brand is ready to be found by AI agents when it happens.

The Numbers: How Fast This Is Moving

The commercetools Agentic Commerce Radar, published in May 2026, and supporting data from multiple analyst sources tell a consistent story. Consumer adoption at the discovery layer is already mainstream. The transaction layer is beginning to follow.

Consumer adoption — where we are today:

According to Riskified consumer research, compiled in the commercetools radar:

• 73% of consumers are already using AI in their shopping journey — for product ideas (45%), review summaries (37%), and price comparison (32%)
• 60% of shoppers expect to use AI agents for purchases within the next 12 months (Martech)
• 44% of users who have tried AI-powered search say it has become their primary and preferred source for internet searching (McKinsey)
• But only 13% have actually completed a purchase after being referred by an AI assistant — with 70% saying they are at least somewhat comfortable with an agent making purchases on their behalf (Riskified)

That last gap — between comfort and actual completion — is the defining dynamic of agentic commerce right now. The majority of consumers are using AI for research and discovery. Very few are completing purchases through agents yet. The infrastructure and habits needed for full transaction delegation are forming, but they are not there.

The downstream traffic and conversion impact:

According to Adobe Analytics data reported by Digital Commerce 360, AI-driven traffic to US retail sites surged 805% year-over-year on Black Friday 2025. More recent Adobe data from Q1 2026 shows that AI-referred shoppers now convert 42% better than non-AI traffic — a complete reversal from a year prior, when they converted 38% worse. Traditional search engine volume, meanwhile, is projected to decline 25% by 2026 as consumers shift to GenAI channels, according to Gartner.

Where the market is heading:

A Morgan Stanley forecast estimates that nearly 50% of online shoppers will use AI agents by 2030, accounting for approximately 25% of their spending and adding around $115 billion to the US e-commerce sector alone. For B2B, the trajectory is steeper still — Gartner projects that 90% of B2B buying will be AI agent-intermediated by 2028.

Why Consumers Are Adopting It — and What That Means for Brands

The adoption driver is not technology enthusiasm. It is genuine frustration with the existing shopping experience.

Comparison shopping across multiple platforms is tedious. Review synthesis is time-consuming. Inventory availability changes by the hour. Return policies differ by retailer. For high-frequency or research-heavy purchases, AI agents remove real friction — and consumers know it.

This matters for brands because it means the adoption curve will not reverse. The question is not whether agents will mediate more purchases, but how quickly.

Marketplace Universe Insight: When a consumer delegates their purchase decision to an AI agent, brand marketing — the campaign, the imagery, the emotional narrative — has no surface to land on. The agent does not read copy. It reads data: price, availability, delivery time, return policy, product attributes, ratings. If that data is incomplete, inconsistent, or missing from the sources agents query, the brand simply does not exist in that transaction.

The shift from the traditional sales funnel to an agent-mediated purchase does not eliminate brand relevance entirely — but it relocates where that relevance is built. It moves earlier, to the data layer, and later, to the post-purchase experience. The moment of selection increasingly belongs to the algorithm.

The Hard Limits: What’s Not Working Yet

The numbers above are real. So is the hype around them. And the hype tends to obscure the genuine structural limits that still apply in mid-2026.

Full transaction delegation remains thin. According to Riskified consumer research, 70% of consumers say they are comfortable with an AI agent making purchases on their behalf — but only 13% have actually done it. OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature, launched in September 2025, quietly ran into this wall: users were asking plenty of shopping questions inside ChatGPT but not completing purchases. By early 2026, OpenAI had walked back the native checkout model and pivoted to a discovery-first approach, routing transactions to merchant-controlled checkout environments instead. The lesson: even where the infrastructure exists, habits and trust take time to follow.

Data fragmentation undermines agent reliability. AI agents can only act on information they trust. Inconsistent product data — different titles, attributes, and pricing across channels — creates uncertainty. Research from Rithum, referenced in commercetools’ white paper “Navigating the Agentic Commerce Era On Your Terms,” found that 75% of retail leaders say AI is advancing faster than their organizations can adopt it, and 49% of brand workflows still rely heavily on manual processes. Agents built on fragmented data produce fragmented recommendations.

The post-purchase experience is fully brand-owned — and fully exposed. An agent can surface and order a product. It cannot process a return. That interaction remains owned by the brand or retailer. Brands investing in agentic entry points while neglecting post-purchase experience are building on unstable ground.

Regulatory clarity is still forming. The EU AI Act and related consumer protection frameworks are still being interpreted in their application to autonomous commercial transactions. Consent frameworks for agent-mediated purchases are not yet standardized. European brands need to monitor this actively.

Three Protocol Standards Brands Need to Know

Protocols are the infrastructure that determines whether AI agents can find, evaluate, and transact with your products. Three distinct standards are currently live or emerging — and they are not yet converging.

These three are complementary, not competing. MCP provides the data access layer. ACP routes OpenAI/ChatGPT-adjacent transactions. UCP routes Google-adjacent transactions. In April 2026, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe all joined the UCP Tech Council — signaling that UCP is emerging as the open governance standard that major players are coalescing around.

Marketplace Universe Insight: Brands that want to be present across the full agentic landscape need to be thinking about all three. The good news: the foundation is the same for all of them — clean, structured, real-time product data. A brand that solves its data infrastructure problem is not solving it three times over. It is solving it once and becoming protocol-ready by default.

The Amazon Angle: Control, Then Integrate

Amazon’s relationship to agentic commerce is its own story — and a revealing one.

Amazon’s first move was defensive. The company blocked ChatGPT and other AI crawlers in its robots.txt file, preventing OpenAI’s agents from surfacing Amazon product listings in real time. The stated rationale: protecting against misrepresentation of automated traffic as human. The commercial logic: Amazon’s $4 billion advertising business depends on controlling who can access its product data and on what terms.

What followed suggests a strategic recalibration rather than a clean reversal. In May 2026, a job listing for a Principal Technical Program Manager to lead a dedicated 40-person agentic commerce team surfaced publicly — specifically tasked with building controlled integrations between Amazon’s marketplace and third-party AI platforms including ChatGPT. Reported by PPC.land and TechBriefly, the listing signals that Amazon is now building its own integration layer — on its own timeline, under its own commercial conditions. In April 2026, Amazon also joined the UCP Tech Council alongside Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe, bringing itself inside the governance structure of the open standard it had initially stood apart from.

Amazon’s “Buy for Me” feature — announced in early 2026 — takes this further: it allows Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, to complete purchases from other brands’ websites when Amazon does not carry the product itself. Amazon is positioning itself not just as a marketplace, but as a shopping agent layer that captures purchase intent regardless of where the transaction ultimately happens.

For European brands, the implication is direct: Amazon is not absent from the agentic future. It is engineering the terms on which it participates. Brands with Amazon presence need to monitor this closely — because the data and integration requirements for Rufus-visibility may differ substantially from those for ACP or UCP.

Answer Engine Optimization: The Concrete Action Available Today

The question practitioners eventually arrive at: what can we actually do right now?

The answer may lie in Answer Engine Optimization — AEO. Because AI agents function as search engines that synthesize and act rather than list and rank, content and product data need to be structured in a way that makes them directly accessible to those systems.

As Aditya Sinha from Sanbi AI puts it: “This is the defining challenge for brands in 2026: if your data isn’t machine-readable, you don’t exist in the agentic shopping funnel.”

AEO is distinct from traditional SEO in one critical way: SEO optimizes for human click-through from a ranked list. AEO optimizes for agent comprehension and direct action. An agent does not present options for selection — it synthesizes available information and either recommends or executes. A brand not represented in the structured data sources an agent queries is simply not included.

Marketplace Universe Insight: The brands best positioned for agentic commerce are often not the largest brands, but the most data-disciplined ones. A mid-sized European outdoor brand with complete, structured, intent-rich product data will outperform a global conglomerate with a fragmented catalog in agent-mediated recommendations. That is a genuine competitive opportunity — available right now.

Key Learnings

• The consumer shift is already happening at the discovery layer. 73% of consumers use AI in their shopping journey. Traffic from AI sources to retail sites grew 805% year-over-year. The infrastructure is being built in real time.
• The agent doesn’t read your campaign. It reads your data. When an AI agent is the buyer, brand relevance is determined by the completeness and accuracy of structured product data — not by creative or messaging.
• Three protocols are emerging simultaneously: MCP, ACP, and UCP. They are complementary. A solid data foundation makes a brand protocol-ready across all three without solving the problem three times over.
• OpenAI’s Instant Checkout struggled — and the pivot is instructive. Native AI checkout didn’t convert at scale. The current model routes to merchant-controlled checkout. Post-purchase experience remains fully brand-owned, and it matters more than ever.
• Amazon’s strategy is: control first, integrate on your own terms. It blocked AI crawlers, established its own agent rules, then joined the UCP council and started building integrations. Its “Buy for Me” feature positions Amazon as a shopping agent layer across the entire web — not just its own marketplace.
• AEO is the concrete action available today. Structured, complete, machine-readable, intent-rich product data is what makes a brand reachable by AI agents. This is an ongoing data discipline, not a one-time implementation.
• Data discipline, not brand size, determines agentic visibility. The brands that will capture disproportionate share in agent-mediated commerce are the most data-disciplined ones — regardless of marketing budget.

Enjoyed this article? The Marketplace Universe Weekly is our free newsletter — every Monday, the latest marketplace news, platform updates, our newest posts, and the insights that matter, delivered straight to your inbox. So you never miss a thing. Subscribe here: https://marketplace-universe.com/newsletter/

29.05.2026 – Written by Ricarda Eichler, Journalist and Author for OHN

Der Beitrag When the Buyer Is an Algorithm: What Brands Need to Know About Agentic Commerce Right Now erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Otto opens marketplace to Polish sellers
After opening up to Dutch sellers, Otto is now preparing the next step in its European seller expansion. Selected sales partners from Poland are set to join the marketplace as part of a pilot programme starting in June. This makes Poland the second European market from which Otto is actively onboarding sellers outside Germany. In parallel, Otto is also expanding its assortment in Germany. Through a new partnership with Thalia, around 100,000 books are now available. Find out more on Ecommercenews and Otto 

More News

Breuninger expands to Denmark, Sweden and Romania
Breuninger is further expanding its international online presence with localised shops in Denmark, Sweden and Romania. This brings the fashion retailer to 13 European markets, with deliveries handled by PostNord and DHL. Whether and to what extent the marketplace business will also be rolled out in the new markets remains unclear. See more on Ecommercenews  

Fashion industry calls for relief for resale
Primark, H&M, Vinted, Zalando, Etsy and 63 other organisations are calling on governments in the EU, the US and Canada to create better economic conditions for resale and repair. The call follows a new study suggesting that circular business models are currently disadvantaged by taxes and labour costs. Read more on Retailgazette

Debenhams Group tests AI checkout on Meta
Debenhams Group is the first UK retailer to enable AI-driven in-app checkout on Meta. US customers of Karen Millen, boohoo, boohooMAN and PrettyLittleThing can now shop directly within Facebook and Instagram via PayPal’s Agentic Commerce Services. See more on ChannelX

Zalando partners with the Belgian Football Association
Zalando and the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) have agreed a five-year partnership. The focus is not classic perimeter advertising, but rather the “Arrival Moment” at the RBFA training centre in Tubize. The players’ arrival looks are to be staged as a shoppable fashion format on Zalando.Read more on Retaildetail 

DHL introduces new variable shipping surcharge
From June 1, DHL will introduce a new short-term energy surcharge for business customer shipments. The surcharge will be based on the 10-day average of the Brent oil price and can rise to up to 3%, depending on market developments.
For this reason, merchants will face another pricing lever whose calculation, adjustment and future impact will be difficult to fully track. DHL is thus following the lead of its competitors DPD and GLS, which also charge an energy surcharge. Find out more on LinkedIn and DHL

AI-Race News

Google builds shopping into AI infrastructure
Google is stepping up in the race for the next generation of online shopping. Its Universal Cart is becoming an AI-powered shopping hub across Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail. Products from different merchants can be collected centrally. The AI is designed to monitor prices, check availability, apply discounts and support checkout. For merchants, visibility, brand presence and margin control are shifting further into Google’s infrastructure. See more on Forbes

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Der Beitrag Marketplace Universe News 26.05.2026 – Otto opens to Polish sellers, DHL adds new shipping surcharge erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.