In partnership with
Happy Friday! AI agents can own discovery without giving retailers the customer. Adyen is joining payments, identity and loyalty to reconnect the relationship.
News
1️⃣ Adyen reconnects the AI shopper
2️⃣ Citi buys the commerce media loop
3️⃣ Kroger combines two recurring baskets
Insights
4️⃣ CMO roles absorb commercial accountability
5️⃣ AI search splits the generations
6️⃣ Ecommerce compounds another $2.25tn
LET’S ENTER THE MAZE!
1️⃣ News
The Maze: AI agents can own discovery without giving retailers the customer. Adyen is joining payments, identity and loyalty to reconnect the relationship.
Adyen's H1 net revenue rose 21% at constant currency on €803.8 billion of processed volume.
Agentic Feed, Cart and Payments let merchants connect once across AI protocols while reusing fraud and compliance rails.
The €750 million Talon.One deal adds real-time loyalty and promotions across online and store transactions.
Why it matters: Adyen can deepen merchant dependence while retailers keep more identity and repeat-purchase data. One integration replaces many, but not every gatekeeper.
2️⃣ News
The Maze: Citi agreed to buy Kard, adding a rewards engine that links merchant offers to card spending. The bank is building an ad network around the payment itself.
Citi plans to combine its 70 million primarily U.S. cardmembers with Kard's technology, staff and merchant relationships; the deal has not closed and terms are undisclosed.
Kard's application programming interface matches merchant-funded offers with purchase data and previously processed more than $10 billion in transactions each month across its existing network.
Citi Commerce is building audience targeting, ad inventory and attribution around real purchase behavior, turning rewards into measurable media.
Why it matters: The bank that sees the transaction can sell the influence and grade the result. Merchants gain proof, but rent another measurement system they do not control.
3️⃣ News
The Maze: Kroger now lets eligible U.S. customers add groceries to a ready prescription and receive both through one Instacart-powered delivery from its app or website.
The flow starts in My Prescriptions, then moves to grocery checkout after the medicine is ready.
Controlled and refrigerated drugs are excluded; consultation, insurance, ID and handoff rules still apply.
Instacart delivers, but Kroger’s licensed pharmacy keeps dispensing, payment, packaging and patient support.
Why it matters: One trip can lift convenience and route density. But the basket works only if pharmacy-grade controls survive grocery-speed fulfillment.
4️⃣ Insight
The Maze: The exact CMO title fell nineteen points across the Fortune 500 in two years. Marketing is not vanishing; its accountability is being rebundled.
Exact CMO-title use fell from 55% in 2024 to 36% in 2026, a 34.5% relative decline.
Executive-level marketing representation was higher at 52%, as growth, commercial, and customer titles absorbed wider mandates.
WHOOP's new CMO remit spans brand, international growth, partnerships, media, and product storytelling.
Why it matters: The durable marketing leader owns more than promotion—connecting customer evidence, product, demand, channels, and margin under one commercial system.
5️⃣ Insight
The Maze: AI is becoming a second discovery layer. Younger US shoppers use it about twice as often, letting software shape the shortlist before a brand earns a visit.
Gen Z and millennials each reach 58% AI-mediated search, versus 45% for Gen X, 25% for baby boomers, and 14% for the Silent Generation.
The younger 58% is still split: roughly one-quarter use AI always/mostly, while one-third combine AI with traditional search, so brands must serve both systems.
About 89% of unbranded prompts draw on third-party sources, while earlier zero-click research put the organic-traffic loss at 15% to 25%.
Why it matters: Product pages optimize after arrival. AI visibility decides whether a brand enters the shortlist, making reviews and accurate product data acquisition infrastructure.
6️⃣ Insight
The Maze: Global ecommerce is expected to grow from $4.89tn in 2025 to $7.14tn in 2030. That is $2.25tn of extra annual revenue—roughly the size of the whole market in 2018—without another pandemic-style jump.
Why it matters: A predictable 7%–9% category tailwind will make weak execution look acceptable for a while. The winners will separate market growth from share gain, then compete on buyer access, conversion, frequency, fulfilment and retained margin. The headline is scale. The job is capture.
🗞️ Quick hits
Everything else you should know
💳 Payment rails widen the checkout
Airwallex integrated Affirm so merchants in 35 countries can offer installments to eligible U.S. shoppers without a separate build, widening financing distribution through one checkout stack.
Google Play added ShopeePay in Singapore alongside cards, PayPal, GrabPay and carrier billing, giving a local wallet another global-platform checkout surface.
📈 Retail platforms reset the outlook
JD.com reported lower quarterly revenue but expects second-half electronics sales to improve as food-delivery losses narrow, testing whether subsidy-led local commerce can coexist with core retail growth.
Zalando maintained growth while narrowing its full-year outlook, giving brands and investors a tighter range for European fashion demand and execution.
📦 Commerce infrastructure gets more precise
Shopify made DHL Express available to merchants in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, embedding more cross-border carrier choice inside the platform workflow.
YouTube split affiliate traffic from organic reporting, giving creators and brands a cleaner basis for partner payouts and commerce-channel investment.
Google Merchant Center announced an August 24 reporting change that restates organic traffic back to July 1, forcing merchants to reset performance baselines before shifting budget.
THAT’S IT FOR TODAY!
You’re the reason our team spends hundreds of hours every week researching and writing this email.
What do you think of this issue?
See you next time in the maze!
MarketMaze team
