Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 120
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
Goodmorning!! I had a busy, but very nice week, so a little delay in the newsletter publication. But I managed to write the newsletter also this week.
🇿🇦 Makro South Africa’s Ad Scan campaign! Very cleverly done!
Wow, that’s very very nice! This is a combination between a growth hack, creativity and innovation.
Makro South Africa invented “The Ad Scan” basically it takes advantage of the many ad’s we see in our daily life.
Scan any ad with the Makro Ad Scan and you get an offer at Makro for that product.
The extra good thing is that they convert media spend to actual savings for their customers!
Probably a big booster for their app downloads as well! Checkout the video!
🎨 Paul Boag: Building Internal UX Credibility Through External Validation
I follow Paul Boag already for years and I also have several of his books about UX.
I would like to share this post of him and also refer to an older post. Paul writes about something that I think happens in many organisations: not enough trust in internal experts for example on UX. Paul dives into that and gives tips, how to counter that.
External benchmarking gives you objective comparisons that stakeholders understand. This works the same way NPS scores do in marketing: they let you measure your performance against competitors in your sector and beyond.
Refering to the citation above, I can recommend Paul’s suggestion on the “system usability scale”, even in the age of AI.
This research method makes it also very easy to compare your app, or website, to a competitor in terms of usage.
I do think nowadays in, a more and more agentic world, it should be used as a starting point and combined with additional, AI specific UX research methods or metrics, such as (but not limited to) “context recall accuracy”.
Thanks Paul for this post!
Details: https://boagworld.com/emails/external-validation/
🕺DISCO: Vibe code “apps” for single use activities in a browser
I always read, and usually try tools, that show the direction of were we are heading with e-commerce and digital usage and customer experience.
Last week I wrote about Doubao assistant which I think is highly interesting to learn more about, so check out that video.
This week something different: “the DISCO browser🕺”, a new browser by Google that shows a direction things might be going.
Basically this browser vibe codes apps for you based on your search question.
Watch the example Google provided in the video above. I can immediatly think of many use cases.
It’s available in Google Labs, but you have to join a waitlist (with many questions) and MAC only for now. I subscribed to the wait list, if I get access I will make a demo for this newsletter.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/842000/google-disco-browser-ai-experiment
🧱Physical (and digital) retail block: inspiration & figures
Baoom. An omnichannel retail block in my newsletter, let’s dive in⬇️
Let’s start with the infographic below. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that Costco uses e-commerce mainly as a supporting channel, not as the center of its strategy. Walmart does the exact opposite.
Two contrasting approaches, both delivering results, but with very different bets on digital commerce.
While we’re at it, going in-store, Costco has a surprisingly elegant addition: a finger scanner for employees.
As one customer puts it:
I think it is genius - small finger scanner that helped the associate scan all the items in my cart and THEN magically it talked to the handheld device and the connected experience where it showed up at the Self checkout screen when I scanned my membership card. All I had to do was a quick review and pay with the tap of my card.
Source of the employee finger scanner image.
And finally, something I already saw in China two or three years ago, but that now seems to be making its way into Europe: small in store robots.
These robots move through the aisles, highlight promotions, strengthen brand presence, and can even act as a retail media channel. It’s a mix of in store activation, advertising, and experience, subtle, but hard to miss. I am sure we will see much more of this in Europe the next few years.
Details: https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/37537502/uk-supermarket-unleashes-robots-roam-aisles-speak-shoppers/
More details and sources via: https://www.icelandretailmedia.com/
🔍 Aleyda : Focus on Awesomeness
I often cite Aleya on SEO related topics, as I think she is really good. Recently she published this article with info from the Search Central Zurich 2025 conference and takeouts from conferences are often very interesting.
My takeouts of the blog post:
There’s no GEO without implementing SEO fundamental. Makes sense, right but a good citation to remember.
LLM.txt don’t matter. Then we also know that!
When asked about the metrics that we should look at for GEO, Google shared that not only for GEO but in general, we should look for the behavior and patterns in CTR and impressions; ideally exporting Search Console data via Big Query to avoid filtering, to establish patterns without limitations and using this data with Google Analytics data to better establish what’s having a real impact. Cool idea that I shoul try sometime with a BI collegue!
On Google Discover: That’s why the key recommendation is to continue optimizing for high quality interactions on Search to appear on Discover and avoid traffic volatility since users are Google’s #1 asset and utility on search is a hugely reliable signal for interest and intent. I love Google Discover it works really well. Just often the clicks to a paywalled article are annoying, but on the other hand they are often very relevant to my.
Google Shopping: Schema is key, use the new Merchant API & beware of CSR JS for Shopping Related Schema.
Google Product Studio: Generate product title and image optimizations at scale. This I didn’t know, its in Beta appearantly, but this can be very helpful for many organisations).
To avoid hyper fixating on things, and that done is better than perfect. Music to my ears!
We should focus on what matters more for the bigger picture, beyond those areas that are changing, and what actually drives impact for a great user experience.
Check out the details here: https://www.aleydasolis.com/en/search-engine-optimization/what-we-learned-google-search-central-zurich-2025/
🤩Meanwhile in Japan, look at this ice cream vending machine!
Japan is awesome, I’ve traveled there a lot and just love it! Vending machines are literally everywhere, with millions across the country (one for about every 25 people). You can buy drinks, snacks, umbrellas an many other things from a vening machine. It’s fun and easy, did so many times.
But check out this ice cream one: a robot arm makes a perfect ice cream, combines that with a fun holographic cartoons. It’s not just ice cream, it’s a little show! With so many machines around, they have to stand out, and this one does it perfectly. Kawaii!
🇺🇸 Instacart order groceries directly from ChatGPT, more then a single feature
Instacart and open OpenAI are integrating deeper, it seems to be the first app, to have a checkout directly integrated in the chat. Another example of a possible direction of commerce.
“With the Instacart app directly in ChatGPT, users can go from meal planning to checkout in a single, seamless conversation,” said Nick Turley, VP, Head of ChatGPT. “It’s another step toward bringing our vision to life—where AI delivers helpful suggestions and connects directly to real-world services, saving people time and effort in their everyday lives.”
Details: https://openai.com/index/instacart-partnership/
🦓Stripe introuces the Agentic Commerce Suite
Also important to know: on December 11, Stripe launched its Agentic Commerce Suite. With this release, Stripe merchants can easily make their products discoverable by AI agents, starting with ChatGPT. Beyond discovery, the suite enables a streamlined, agent-initiated checkout flow, allowing AI agents to complete purchases on behalf of users with minimal friction. Looks like things are speeding up. This integration from stripe makes it much easier for SME’s to be discovered by LLM’s.
To get started, you simply connect your product catalog to Stripe and then, in the Stripe Dashboard, select which AI agents you’d like to sell through. From there, Stripe helps with discovery, checkout, payments, and fraud detection, and will send you order events so you can continue using your existing commerce stack. All components of the Agentic Commerce Suite are modular by default, so you can pick and choose what best meets the needs of your business.
Details: https://stripe.com/blog/agentic-commerce-suite
And: https://www.connectingthedotsinfin.tech/
🤣 Ad Hook, never thought of this one 🤣
I like being creative, thinking about “Ad Hooks”, but I never, would have thought of this one🤣. But hey, maybe it works for certain types of audiences! Always try!
Thank you!!
Thank you so much for reading, liking and subscribing! I wish you all a great day and hope you liked this edition.
Alex
🫡Open to new opportunities
Thanks for reading, liking and subscribing, it means a lot to me! Hope you liked it. Slowly I am considering new opportunities (also international):
Contact me via LinkedIN → https://www.linkedin.com/m/in/alexbaar/
Checkout my archive of previous newsletters if you want to read more :