The Digital Commerce Daily — May 19, 2026

The Digital Commerce Daily — May 19, 2026 Your 8-minute briefing on ecommerce, social commerce, and digital marketing. In today's episode: • Amazon has quietly slashed affiliate commissions by up to 50% while gutting reporting tools, forcing publishers to urgently rethink their commerce revenue models. • German marketplace giant Otto is piloting access for Polish sellers next month, signalling a deliberate cross-border expansion strategy inside the EU single market. • New benchmark data shows Google Ads CPCs continued climbing in 2025 but conversion rates also rose, forcing ecommerce advertisers to rethink whether rising costs are actually eroding returns. Fun fact: Shopify merchants collectively sold more on Black Friday 2023 than the entire GDP of Iceland — hitting $9.3 billion in a single day. At its peak, that was $4.2 million in sales processed every minute across the platform. Hosted by Marco and Klara.