Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 92
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! Edition 92 of my newsletter! So much news this week!
First I want to thank Dawn Gribble for recommending this newsletter! Thank you😊! I can also recommend Dawn’s newsletter the hospitality hub it’s full of things readers from this newsletter might also like. Thanks also to all readers for following me!
🇺🇸 The history of Walmart’s innovator’s dilemma
As a large traditional organisation it’s not always easy to innovate, and everyone in the e-commerce industry knows WalMart was not always the frontrunner, it is now. Fortune has an article on this topic, in which I think are some valuable lessons for other organisations that want to excel at omnichannel and e-commerce.
In his telling, then-CEO Glass, who died in 2020 at the age of 84, denied his request and predicted that Walmart’s online store would never register more annual sales than the largest location of Sam’s Club, a Walmart subsidiary. It was a lack of faith in the future of e-commerce that haunted Davis for years.
Davis’ failed attempt to convince Glass of the power of online retail instantly popped into my head on Thursday when Walmart announced that its e-commerce division had turned a quarterly profit for the first time, more than 30 years after he and a small team of Walmart colleagues began tinkering with a new sales channel for hawking merchandise to customers.
🇺🇸 WalMart is preparing for the AI shopping agent
Let’s continue a bit with WalMart, because I think they do this right. They are really preparing for an agentic world. To often, I speak people who do not know where to start with this topic, and even digital marketers are not always actively busy with it. It’s encouraging reading that WalMart is preparing.
Walmart is preparing for sweeping changes in the way consumers shop, investigating how to make products appealing not just to human consumers, but also to the AI agents that will one day shop on their behalf.
Details:
🥷How to prepare for an LLM /agentic world?
There are many things you can do to prepare for a LLM/Agentic world, and unlike WalMart where the brand is really known, this article might help smaller organisations or less e-commerce focused organisations, to prepare.
Checkout the link below for details and use it to your benefit.
Strategy 1: Competing for AI Mode visibility
Strategy 2: Owning the relationship (omnichannel ecosystem)
These strategies are mutually reinforcing. They work best when developed concurrently, not consecutively: One introduces. The other retains.One helps you exist where the user begins. The other ensures you’re remembered after they’ve left the AI interface behind.
Details:
🇹🇭 Meanwhile in Thailand: new e-commerce guidelines
I wrote earlier on it, Thailand is really active and doing good things in the e-commerce and tech industry, I visited their innovation hub in Bangkok a while ago and noticed that myself.
Now I read Thailand is preparing new e-commerce guidelines. I think it’s interesting to see what they plan.
I do not favor all ideas, especially not the VAT difference between on and offline purchases.
Mr Eakachai said variable value-added tax rates should be issued, such as 7% for products sold offline and 15% on online channels.
I am almost always against price increases for end consumers, this will also impact small and medium stores who happen to also sell a lot online in the country. Besides that, it might reduce investments in the online sector, a sector that is very important for Thailand.
It seems a better idea in my opinion, to start with educating store owners in how to sell and optimize online -and even internationally- and reduce red tapes for Thai e-startups.
But this other idea seems highly interesting if setup right and not run by bureaucrats:
He proposed Thailand set up a national e-marketplace as digital infrastructure open to all parties.
Very curious to more details of it. I will keep an eye at it. A littlebit more details via the link below:
As a sidenote, regarding the e-marketplace proposal, I think the best way to see it, is also through a non European lens, like Arnoud Bertrand says here on tech ecosystems in China. Probably that mindset is needed (and available) to make the Thai national e-marketplace a success.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1925029185052917791
👨💻Google I/O: wow!
Now a lot has happened at Google IO this week. There is by far not enough space in this newsletter to go into detail or to mention every interesting innovation or change that is coming, but from what I read it was one of the best I/O’s of the last few years.
I would encourage everyone to read about this conference, because exciting things come or are already available. First lets start with the cool opening video:
I also found this video that summarizes some important highlights:
A few other take aways:
Gemini AI is coming to chrome browser. Imagine how this will change e-commerce behavior! It can and will be massive!
What if you have very limited and non convincing product pages? It’s will be so easy to let gemini help you get details on a product and let you (or itself) browse elsewhere and purchase there.
Google Announced and demo-ed virtual try on technology! Wow, that will really boost conversions and reduce returns I think.
If I had an online clothes shop I would immediatly investigate how to prepare to be ready to use this feature when available in my region.
This will also be a massive game changer —> Use AI to buy when the price is right. This feature is directly integrated in the google ecosystem, making it so easy to use.
I think for many companies who sell online, this is very important. Not everyone can compete on price, so you have to create a strategy to counter this. Like spreading your incoming traffic from more sources, increase (local) loyalty and WOM, invest in CRM and CDP tools, collaborate with other complementary stores, invest in unique products or combine products to make them unique. Lot’s of possibilities but one need to prepare.
Very important take in my opinion, things will come rapidly fast! And all will be integrated! When things are so well integrated as they demo-ed, you get Chinese We-Chat or Alipay style integrations making buying or doing things very very easy. If you used the Chinese online ecosystem you know what I mean. If Google can bring that convenience to the West, the impact will be extra huge!
Couple of links on Google I/O if you want more details:
https://www.theverge.com/news/670201/google-gemini-chrome-ai-io-2025
https://www.theverge.com/google/671200/google-googling-ai-mode-project-mariner-i-o-2025
https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-io-2025-all-our-announcements/
And remember what was said on Google I/O:
Reid said that Google believes AI will be “the most powerful engine for discovery that the web has ever seen.” But if Google’s AI tools turn out to be as powerful in practice as they appear in the demos, all of that discovery might just be Google doing the work for you.
📱🇦🇪 Feature watch: Telegram’s staying ahead with innovations
Telegram messenger has a real small development team that works in a highly supermodern and agile way (pretty cool I think). That results in maybe the best messenger interface and feature usage/releases.
As Eric Ries said in his book “The lean Startup”
Businesses must continuously innovate to stay ahead of competitors who replicate their products.
Telegram is doing exactly that job, keep on innovating. It’s worth learning from their features regularly.
That’s it for this edition, thank you for reading, liking and subscribing
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My pleasure Alex, I look forward to your insights every week.
Interesting and a post with a lot of info. I will revisit to digest. Enjoy the weekend!