Unpacking Commerce | May 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.
👉 In this edition: why Amazon's Q1 settles the quick commerce debate Europe spent five years and €5 billion losing, what separates a €8B Vinted from a $1.2B Depop, and how Decathlon and IKEA quietly redefined what an integrated retailer looks like in 2026. Let’s go!
🛒 Quick commerce was always a feature - Amazon just proved it
Quick commerce only works as a feature layered on a paid subscription base. Amazon's Q1 results prove the model; Europe burned roughly €5B and a decade discovering the standalone version was structurally impossible. What survives in Europe now trades at grocery multiples, not tech ones.
Amazon’s Q1 2026 results contain a small revolution that European commentary has barely registered. North American retail unit growth hit 15% year-over-year, the strongest reading since the tail end of pandemic lockdowns. Average prices on Amazon.com declined year-on-year. Amazon Now, the company’s 30-minute delivery service, is now scaling across thousands of items, and one- and three-hour delivery windows are live in hundreds and 2,000+ US cities. Perishables, the hardest unit economics problem in grocery, grew 40x year-on-year and now account for nine of the ten most-ordered same-day items. Amazon’s grocery business closed 2025 with more than $150 billion in gross sales, making it the second-largest grocer in the United States behind Walmart.
⚡ The relevant comparison is what European venture capital spent the better part of five years and roughly €5 billion trying to build. Getir was sold to Uber in February 2026 for $335 million in cash plus a $100 million stake in the residual grocery business, valuing what was once a $12 billion company at roughly $435 million, a 96% drawdown. Gorillas had been absorbed earlier into Getir before the implosion. Gopuff in the US has burned through more than $5.1 billion of capital and remains private at a dramatically reset valuation. The last serious European independent, Flink, raised $100 million in March at a $900 million post-money, with EBITDA profitability achieved by tightening to 160 hubs in two countries, an average basket of €45, and the discipline born of a near-death experience.
🪙 The two trajectories tell the same story from opposite ends. Quick commerce as a standalone business model required customer acquisition costs that the unit economics could never absorb. Quick commerce as a feature embedded in a subscription product (Prime) requires no acquisition spend at all, because the customer is already paying for the right to use it. The marginal cost of layering 30-minute delivery on top of a fulfillment network handling billions of annual orders is small. The marginal cost of building that network from scratch, with no captive demand, is precisely what bankrupted Getir, Gorillas, and most of the European cohort. The mechanism is what Ben Thompson has been describing for a decade as aggregation: when an incumbent’s marginal cost of serving you is near zero, no challenger working off a positive marginal cost can win on the same dimension.
🏗️ What this leaves for European operators is not entirely defensive. Flink’s path - dense local hubs, REWE supply partnership, no gig labor, ruthless cost discipline - looks more like a small-format grocery business that happens to deliver, less like a tech company that happens to sell groceries. The framing matters because the multiple has collapsed. Flink's $900M post-money on roughly $700M of gross revenue prices the company at around 1.3x sales - discount-grocer territory. DoorDash trades at roughly 5.5x revenue today, and Getir at its $12 billion peak in 2022 was valued at closer to 10x. Capital is no longer underwriting quick commerce as a tech business; it's underwriting it as a thin-margin retail business that happens to deliver. The category leader in European online grocery is more likely to emerge from a marriage between a physical grocer’s logistics network and a quick-commerce operator’s last-mile capability than from either side independently. Carrefour’s stake in Flink, taken in 2022 when Flink acquired French rival Cajoo, is a small-scale early version of that template. The Amazon datapoint to revisit when thinking about this is not the 30-minute delivery itself. It is that Amazon’s North American retail margin reached 9.0% this quarter, up from 8.0% a year earlier, while average prices declined. Whether any European operator can replicate that integrated-operator math without a Prime-equivalent subscription base is the open question.
👜 Vinted at €8B and Depop at $1.2B, in the same quarter
Vinted's €8B and Depop's $1.2B are two rational bets on different slices of the same resale TAM, both correct on their own terms. Vinted owned horizontal mass-market through zero seller fees from day one; Depop owned curated Gen Z fashion. eBay just paid to lock in the one segment Vinted's playbook can't easily take in the US.
The C2C resale story split in two this quarter. On April 27th, Vinted closed an €880 million secondary share transaction at an €8 billion equity valuation, oversubscribed, on the back of 2025 GMV of €10.8 billion (+47%) and €62 million in net profit. Two months earlier, eBay had acquired Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion - a 25% nominal loss on the $1.625 billion Etsy paid in 2021.
🧵 Vinted’s 2025 GMV was roughly ten times Depop’s $1 billion, and the temptation is to read that gap as execution. The driver is less flattering to either narrative. Vinted made zero seller fees foundational from 2008 and built a horizontal mass-market platform around the casual seller clearing a closet. Depop kept a 10% seller commission until July 2024 and built a vertical curated marketplace around Gen Z fashion sellers running shops as a side business. Two different bets on which slice of resale TAM matters. Vinted’s bet was bigger, the network effects compounded for the better part of two decades, and Vinted now holds roughly 90% market share in Europe.
🚚 Vinted Go and Vinted Pay - the proprietary shipping label network and embedded payments stack CEO Thomas Plantenga foregrounded in the secondary’s positioning - matter, but probably less than the framing suggests. Both were built between 2022 and 2024, layered on top of an existing network effect rather than as its cause. They compound the moat into margin and lock-in: Vinted captures payment processing, optimizes shipping costs at scale, and reduces fraud with first-party data. But the moat itself - the network effect strong enough to make Vinted France’s number one clothing seller by volume, ahead of Amazon and Shein - was already in place before any of it was built. What €8 billion is buying is the Vinted network - the millions of European buyers and sellers who keep finding each other there. The infrastructure is what turns that network into earnings.
The eBay-Depop logic sharpens through this lens. Vinted hard-launched in the US on November 13, 2025 with a New York pilot - the first material commitment after twelve years of dormant US presence. Its pricing edge has been preemptively neutralized: Mercari removed US seller fees in March 2024, Depop followed in July. Poshmark already has 150M users and over $10B in lifetime GMV under Naver. Vinted’s mass-market playbook is running into a US market where its core differentiation no longer differentiates. eBay’s $1.2B investment in Depop is a bet that Gen Z-curated fashion is the most defensible slice of US resale, regardless of who wins the broader war. If Vinted’s European model travels, eBay overpaid. If it doesn’t, eBay just locked in the most resilient niche before anyone else realized it was ’s the only one worth owning.
🏃 Decathlon’s quiet decade
Decathlon's 2025 results - profit up 21% on 7% GMV growth - vindicate a model European retail commentary spent a decade overlooking. 80% own-brand manufacturing, minimal influencer spend, and patient compounding produced what venture-backed DTC competitors couldn't.
Decathlon’s 2025 annual results landed on April 2nd with the kind of numbers retail commentary has spent a decade pretending the European market couldn’t produce: GMV €20.7 billion (+7.1%), net sales €16.8 billion (+4%), EBITDA €1.8 billion (+21%), net profit €910 million (+16%), 1,902 stores in 82 countries. Profit growing four times faster than revenue is the signature of an integrated operator who controls both brand and distribution. CEO Javier López is now targeting Decathlon’s positive impact to reach one billion people by 2030.
🏗️ For most of the last ten years, retail commentary in Europe has focused on DTC, marketplace verticalization, and the eventual death of the big-box format. Decathlon contradicts almost every premise of that conversation. The group manufactures roughly 80% of its assortment under its own brands. It does minimal influencer marketing. Digital represents 20.2% of sales, a healthy share but nowhere near the pure-play threshold that defined the 2018-2022 venture thesis. On April 24th, Decathlon opened its first store inside an IKEA in Croydon, 1,188 square metres carved out of a 25,000-square-metre IKEA, with its own dedicated entrance, 5,000+ products and a Buyback circular service. It is the first time IKEA has hosted another global brand in any of its UK stores, and part of a broader Ingka pilot including Kjell & Company in Sweden and Thomas Philipps in Austria.
The IKEA partnership is interesting precisely because both businesses run the same operating model. Both manufacture or design the bulk of their assortment. Both compete on price-for-quality, not assortment breadth. Both treat affordability as the central value proposition rather than as a means to volume. Both have built physical retail experiences that work as destinations rather than convenience stops. Two integrated operators recognizing each other, in the lineage Web Smith has documented for years on Costco, Aldi and Trader Joe’s, transposed to specialty European retail.
The harder question is what stops this model from being replicated. Capital can buy stores, supply chains, and even own-brand manufacturing. It cannot buy what OC&C has measured for years: Decathlon led France’s Retail Proposition Index five times in seven through 2024, dethroned only this March by Picard - another vertically integrated French specialist. Brand love at that scale compounds slowly: a family willing to trade gross margin for inventory turnover, fifty years of operational consistency, and the patience to compound quietly while a generation of DTC competitors raised hot rounds, dominated press cycles, and ended up as distressed assets.
📚 Reading list
Andrew Lipsman, “Agentic Commerce Is (Still) a Collective Hallucination” (Marketecture). Eight reasons agentic commerce stays a hallucination. The keeper: the only purchases worth automating are the ones consumers don’t trust agents to make.
BCG, “Consumers Trust AI to Buy Better. Brands Must Adapt”. Empirical counter to Lipsman (link above). Shopping-related GenAI use grew 35% from Feb to Nov 2025; among daily AI users, GenAI is now the single most influential touchpoint in the purchase journey, ahead of search and social.
Adobe Digital Insights, “AI traffic surge: retail sites not machine-readable”. AI traffic to US retail sites grew 393% YoY in Q1 2026 and now converts 42% better than non-AI - reversed from 38% worse a year earlier. Twelve-month flip.
Adobe, 2026 AI and Digital Trends Consumer Report. 25% of consumers cite AI platforms as their top research tool. Only 19% want AI agents as their primary brand interface. Adoption is real; full delegation is not.
Modern Retail, “Customer reviews become a key battleground as AI revolutionizes product discovery”. 84 million weekly shopping queries on ChatGPT in the US (Stackline). Amazon blocks OpenAI crawlers; Reddit licensed to it. Moat construction in real time.
McKinsey & EuroCommerce, State of Grocery Retail 2026: Europe. 47% of European grocery CEOs rank AI/automation top priority. 3% report >5% EBIT impact. Hype vs realized value, quantified.
Cross-Border Commerce Europe, TOP 500 B2C Cross-Border Retail Europe 2026. European cross-border e-commerce plateaued at €108B in 2025; top 10 take 20% of the TOP 500. Multichannel Nordics lead (Ikea, Jysk, H&M); Zalando is the top pure-player.
NRF & Kantar, Top 50 Global Retailers 2026. The global top tier - Walmart, Amazon, Schwarz, Aldi, Costco, Ikea - is value retail and integrated ops. Decathlon and JD Sports make the cut because the model travels.
FashionNetwork on the IFM 2025 fashion barometer. Second-hand at 19% of French clothing by volume, ultra-low-cost imports at 6%, average purchase price down to €22. Both ends pulling against the middle.
👍 If you like Unpacking Commerce and want to help it grow, please share this newsletter with your colleagues, followers, and friends. Have a great day!
About us
Spring Invest is a European investment fund dedicated to companies that are shaping the future of commerce. We champion doers who build innovative companies making commerce better, from enabling technologies to new commerce models and everything in between. More info about our investment thesis 👉 here.
