Unpacking Commerce | July 2026
Emerging trends, analysis, and more.
Welcome to the latest edition of Unpacking Commerce, our newsletter about emerging trends in retail, brands, and new commerce.
š TL;DR - three takeaways from this edition:
Agentic commerce: the in-chat checkout everyone predicted for 2026 has already stalled - Walmart measured conversion three times worse inside ChatGPT than on its own site, and OpenAI retreated. The model that works splits the job: the agent finds the product, and the merchantās site closes the sale.
Social commerce: TikTok Shop reached 10 European markets in June and shipped a tool that lets one seller registration cover all of them. The first genuinely pan-European marketplace is being built by an entertainment app, just as the generalist catalogues it replaces are shutting down.
Payments: Klarnaās Q1 numbers describe a payment network in construction, not just a BNPL provider - 5 million cards, 119 million consumers, deposits funding 91% of the balance sheet, and a queue of distribution deals (Worldline, Google Pay, a stablecoin) signed since November.
š¤ Agentic commerce: the checkout stays home
Six months of hard data have inverted the agentic commerce story. In-chat checkout stalled - roughly 30 Shopify merchants went live against the million promised, and Walmart measured conversion three times worse inside ChatGPT than on walmart.com - while AI-referred traffic to retail sites now converts better than any other channel. The scarce asset turns out to be selectability: being the answer an agent gives at the moment it answers - and most retail catalogues remain illegible to the machines doing the answering.
š June made the reversal official: OpenAI, which spent 2025 telling retailers that agents would do the buying, started selling them product feed ads inside ChatGPT instead - an admission that the economics of an assistant are advertising economics, not transaction economics. The story behind that pivot took nine months. In September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout with Etsy live and āover a millionā Shopify merchants announced as imminent. By February 2026, Shopify confirmed to Forrester that roughly 30 had actually gone live. In March, OpenAI scaled the feature back in favour of ChatGPT apps and product discovery.
š§® Walmart supplied the decisive numbers. It put part of its catalogue on Instant Checkout and measured completion inside ChatGPT at roughly one-third the rate of shoppers who clicked through to walmart.com - even as the same traffic delivered about twice the new-customer rate of search. Taken together, those two numbers settle the strategic question: the assistant is a discovery channel with real acquisition value, and a terrible cash register. Walmartās answer is to embed Sparky, its own agent, inside ChatGPT: the assistant brings the audience, the merchant keeps the checkout. Gapās CTO made the same calculation in choosing Googleās UCP over OpenAIās ACP: more merchant control over the experience.
š Meanwhile, the referral model keeps getting stronger. Adobe tracked AI-sourced traffic to US retail sites up 693% year over year during the 2025 holiday season and up 393% in Q1 2026. The quality signal matters more than volume: in March 2026, AI-referred visits converted 42% better than non-AI traffic, a record, compared with 38% worse one year earlier. Shoppers arrive pre-researched, stay 48% longer, and bounce less. The agent now performs better at the top of the funnel than any other channel, then hands the merchant a customer who is already half-convinced.
š§ So the real bottleneck is no longer the checkout: it is whether the agent can find you at all. Adobeās AI visibility benchmark scored US retail homepages at 75% machine-readable and product pages at 66% - a third of the catalogue, on average, invisible to the systems now directing high-intent demand. Googleās answer is protocol plumbing: UCP, launched at NRF in January with Shopify, Etsy, Target, Walmart and Zalando among backers, added real-time catalogue access in March and a cross-retailer Universal Cart, BNPL inside Google Pay and YouTube shopping ads in May. Retailers remain the seller of record throughout. Google never needed to own the checkout: it was already monetising discovery through ads - the model OpenAI has just pivoted to.
š Europe is watching this from the stands. UCP checkout is rolling out US-first, then Canada, Australia and the UK - the EU is not on the published map - and the continentās first live agent-executed payment, by Santander and Mastercard in March, was a controlled test, explicitly not a commercial rollout. At Shoptalk Europe in June, the mood was adoption without delegation: retailers move fast - Zalandoās assistant grew from 6 to 10 million users in Q1 alone - while consumer trust lags, at 35% in Europe against 48% globally. For once, arriving late is a grace period: in-assistant buying remains a bet no Western platform has won so far, and a machine-readable catalogue pays off either way - it gets a product recommended today, and plugs into the transaction rails if they ever reach the EU.
Amazon, predictably, is the exception that confirms the rule: it renamed Rufus āAlexa for Shoppingā, shipped Auto-Buy and Buy for Me, and keeps rival agents locked out of amazon.com - because the transaction stays with whoever owns the customer relationship. The open question for everyone else: is discover-in-AI, buy-on-site a durable equilibrium, or just a temporary truce, funded by the platforms while they capture demand?
šļø TikTok builds the pan-European marketplace nobody else did
Twenty-five years of European e-commerce produced no true pan-European marketplace - Amazon runs separate national sites, and the local generalists are dying one by one. The first real attempt is now coming from an entertainment app: TikTok Shop reached 10 EU markets in June, with a tool that lets one seller registration cover all of them.
š From 15 June, TikTok Shop is live in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland, joining France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK. The base it builds on: 200 million monthly European users, over 100,000 European businesses selling since the late-2024 EU launch, and daily GMV growing triple-digit between August 2025 and February 2026. One caution: TikTok publishes the growth rate but not the GMV itself - a percentage without a base is exactly the kind of number to treat carefully.
š Third-party numbers fill that gap. Momentum Works estimates TikTok Shop's 2025 global GMV at $64.3bn, up 94% - but $45.6bn of it in Southeast Asia and $15.1bn in the US. Everything else, Europe included, shared less than $4bn. TikTok is not consolidating a strong European position - it barely has one. It is betting that Europe will follow the US, another Western market written off as resistant to video shopping, which still grew 68% in its second full year.
š§µ The piece that matters is āSell Across Europeā: register once, sell in every TikTok Shop market, with listings localised per country, partner carriers handling cross-border delivery, and creators across the EU promoting the products on commission. Selling across Europe has always meant dealing with languages, carriers and VAT country by country - a cost that kept most sellers at home and protected local players. No European marketplace ever removed that complexity at scale, and TikTok is not alone in trying now: at Shoptalk Europe, Kaufland announced its own nine-country marketplace under one registration, launching in Spain and the Netherlands this summer.
šŖ Put this next to the marketplace shutdowns we covered in Juneās edition and the pattern is clear. Rakuten France is closing: a generalist catalogue in Amazonās path, with nothing else to defend it. Skroutz sold for ā¬635m because it owned payments, logistics and ads on top of the catalogue. TikTok Shop starts from the opposite end: it already owns what the dying generalists never had - entertainment that creates demand instead of waiting for a search query - and is now building the unglamorous layer underneath: seller tools, logistics partners, checkout. Live shopping, long dismissed as a Chinese habit that would never travel, is the engine behind that growth curve - while the industry debates agents.
Two questions remain open. Does buying from videos work as well in Warsaw and Vienna as it does in the UK, TikTok Shopās most mature European market? And will Brussels let a ByteDance property become part of Europeās commerce infrastructure without a fight?
š³ Klarnaās network turn
The market still sees Klarna as a BNPL provider. Yet within a few May weeks, Klarna published Q1 results showing 91% of its lending is funded by customer deposits, signed Europeās largest payment processor to bring Klarna to physical store checkouts, and secured a default slot inside Google Pay. A card in consumersā hands, acceptance in merchantsā stores, deposits to fund the credit, and its own payment rails: the four building blocks of a payment network, assembled piece by piece while everyone still debates instalments.
š° Start with the Q1 2026 results: GMV of $33.7bn, up 33% year over year, revenue of $1bn, up 44%, and adjusted operating profit of $68m against $3m a year earlier. Underneath: 119 million active consumers, over one million merchants, the Klarna Card at 5 million users across 16 countries, and 91% of funding now coming from customer deposits. The banking features arrived fast: when Klarna launched peer-to-peer transfers across 13 European countries in January, card payments already made up 15% of its total volume. Deposits fund the lending, the card brings daily usage, and a million merchants already accept it. That describes a bank with its own payment network, not a BNPL provider.
š¤ The recent deals all push in the same direction. In May, Worldline - Europeās largest payment processor for merchants - signed an agreement to build Klarna into its online platforms and, in a later phase, its in-store card terminals. Klarna reaches physical shops across Europe without installing a single terminal itself. The same month, Google put Klarna directly inside Google Pay as a payment option in its new checkout - a default position in whatever AI-driven shopping becomes. And with KlarnaUSD, its stablecoin built on Stripeās Tempo blockchain, Klarna can eventually move money without touching Visaās or Mastercardās infrastructure at all.
āļø The counterargument: a payment network is worth what its coverage is worth, and Visa and Mastercard are not standing still - both released protocols to authenticate AI agents, and Mastercard executed Europeās first live payment initiated by an AI agent with Santander in March. Klarnaās advantage is narrower but real: it holds the customer relationship, the credit decision, and the merchant contract at the same time. Visa and Mastercard hold none of the three.
A decade ago, the question was whether BNPL was a feature or a company. Klarna's numbers suggest a third answer: pay-later was a recruitment tool. It brought in 119 million shoppers and a million merchants; the card, the deposits and the Worldline deal now turn that base into a network. Klarna earns a fee when the card is used, a fee when the merchant gets paid, and interest on the deposits in between - whether or not anyone still pays in instalments.
š¤ Mediarithmics signed a partnership with Unlimitail, the retail media company created by Carrefour and Publicis. Its āZero-Copyā technology lets Unlimitail work on retailersā data - loyalty programmes, checkout data - without copying it out of its cloud: the data stays where it is, and campaign targeting and sales measurement run on top. For mediarithmics, the deal is also a shortcut to international growth: Unlimitail works with some twenty retail partners across several markets, each one a potential client.
šļø Xpln.ai unveiled Ideal Attention Time at Cannes Lions. The tool measures how many seconds of attention a video ad needs to do its job - brand recognised, message understood - then tells advertisers which channels can actually deliver that attention, from connected TV and streaming platforms to YouTube and the open web. The number behind the launch: 75% of ad impressions never get the attention their ad would need to work. A self-service version arrives in September.
š Weeks after the ā¬7m round we covered in June, Ouidrop opened its first robotised grocery pickup point for IntermarchĆ© in the centre of Saint-Jean-de-Luz: 250 lockers covering ambient, fresh and frozen, 20,000 products available, and a target of 120 orders a day. IntermarchĆ© is the third national grocery chain to run the system, after E.Leclerc and U.
Forrester (Lily Varon), Agentic Payments In B2C Commerce: Where We Are Now. The most complete timeline of the battle between payment protocols (ACP, UCP, AP2, and the rest), with one number that puts it all in perspective: Alipay processed 120 million AI-initiated transactions in a single week in China. The West is debating standards; China is already processing the payments.
Stripe, 2025 Annual Letter. The company that co-built ACP admits agentic commerce āsuffers from having been overhyped too earlyā, then describes its evolution in five stages and places us at stage one or two. When the player with the most to gain from the hype says the hype went too far, it is worth reading twice.
Euronews, EU ends tax loophole exploited by Shein, Temu and AliExpress. The de minimis exemption died on 1 July, and the details are harsher than the headline: the ā¬3 duty applies per product category in each sub-ā¬150 parcel, so a dress, sunglasses and a gadget pay ā¬9. A separate ā¬2 handling fee is still being negotiated, and from 2028 a new customs system will tax every item from the first cent. The number that justifies it all: the EU receives over two billion low-value parcels a year, and customs physically checks an estimated 0.006% of them.
Hyve, Shoptalk Europe 2026 recap. Useful for anyone who skipped Barcelona, and for one number: Merkle surveyed 100 companies worth over a billion dollars - 88% have deployed AI, only 6% can link it to actual profit. That gap, not agent adoption, is the real European AI story.
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