Retail Media: Essential Growth Area for Webshops

Briefly, retail media is about a webshop using its own digital surfaces, customer data, and purchase-close touchpoints to create measurable visibility for suppliers and brands.

This can be through sponsored product placements, social media, display ads, campaign pages, digital catalogs, inspiration universes, newsletters, or other formats where suppliers can meet customers closer to the purchase decision.

Unfortunately, retail media is still considered by several webshops as just an opportunity to make a few posts on social media to extract marketing contributions from the supplier. It should be a strategic effort to create new revenue streams, strengthen competitiveness, and develop the relationship with the supplier.

Here are 3 reasons webshops must act now!

1. Retail media creates new revenue streams

Many webshops operate in a reality with increasing competition, higher marketing costs, pressure on margins, and customers who compare prices more than ever before. Therefore, it is interesting that retail media can create a new commercial revenue source on top of the existing business.

The webshop already has the channels. It already has the product views. It already has the customer journey. And it already has the relationship with suppliers. Retail media is about activating these assets more commercially. And many are already doing it, just without systematizing it with professional handling of reporting, use of data, and content in general.

Instead of solely making money by selling products, the webshop can also make money by offering measurable digital visibility to brands and suppliers, who in many cases are already eager to influence the customer's purchase decision. This makes retail media particularly attractive, because ad revenue typically can have a different margin profile than classic product sales. The media TechRadar describes retail media as an opportunity for retailers to create new and sustainable revenue streams, and simultaneously points out that global retail media spending is expected to land at 179.5 billion dollars in 2025.

For a webshop, this means that retail media is not just a marketing project. It can become a new business leg!

2. Retail media strengthens the webshop's competitiveness

Competitiveness in e-commerce is about price, assortment, and delivery. But it is also about data, customer insights, relevance, and the ability to create value for both customers and suppliers. Here you have a special advantage as a webshop.

Webshops sit on valuable first-party data: searches, clicks, categories, product interest, campaign behavior, and log-ins. This is data that brands and suppliers have a hard time accessing themselves in the same way. Deloitte describes retail media networks as a way where retailers can activate their first-party data to help brands reach customers across the customer journey - and simultaneously create more precise targeting and more measurable effect.

This is important because the market is moving away from generic advertising and towards more data-driven, relevant, and measurable campaigns. For webshops, this means that retail media can become a competitive advantage. Not only because the webshop can sell ad space, but because it can offer suppliers something that is hard to buy elsewhere: access to customers in a purchase-close context.

Retail media makes the webshop more than a sales channel. It also becomes a media channel. And as more suppliers move budgets closer to the sales channel, the webshops that establish a strong retail media setup early can stand stronger in the competition for both customers' attention and suppliers' marketing budgets. A revenue source that increases competitiveness beyond price and delivery.

3. Retail media strengthens the relationship between webshop and supplier

Traditionally, the collaboration between webshop and supplier has often been about purchase prices, campaign subsidies, discounts, assortment, and volume. That is still important. But retail media provides the opportunity to elevate the collaboration to a more strategic level.

When a webshop can offer suppliers measurable campaigns, digital placements, performance data, and insight into customer behavior, the dialogue changes. It's not just about what the supplier should give in discount. It's about how the webshop and supplier together can create more relevant visibility, better campaigns, and more measurable growth.

Deloitte precisely highlights that retail media can connect ad exposure closer to conversion, so brands can better track ROI and ROAS. This is a huge advantage in supplier collaboration.

For the supplier, it becomes easier to see the effect of their investments. For the webshop, it becomes easier to document the value of its digital surfaces. And for the customer, the result can be more relevant inspiration, better campaigns, and more targeted content. Retail media can therefore move collaboration (and budgets) from classic campaign negotiations to a more data-based partnership.