Digital grocery has evolved from a pandemic-era convenience to a core retail channel. More than 90% of US consumers now shop for groceries both online and in-store, according to FMI and NielsenIQ. As the channel matures, the competitive battleground shifts from basic fulfillment to AI-powered personalization, retail media monetization, and seamless omnichannel experiences. This FAQ addresses the trends, players, and strategies shaping digital grocery in 2026.

The growing role of AI in shopping is forcing retailers to rethink discovery and decision-making. Walmart, for example, is embedding its ecommerce capabilities into external AI assistants like Google’s Gemini. Meanwhile, Amazon is keeping AI-led discovery and decision-making inside its own ecosystem with tools like Rufus.

This FAQ discusses how the holiday marketing season is evolving into a longer, leaner, and more competitive period, driven by economic headwinds, earlier shopping behavior, and the growing importance of retail media. It outlines why marketers must plan earlier, prioritize measurable and omnichannel strategies, and avoid overconcentrating spend around the Cyber Five to capture demand across an extended season.

"Retailers are reinventing the ways that they connect with their customers in real life," said our analyst Blake Droesch during a recent “Behind the Numbers” episode. "The D2C revolution that we saw play out online has now really reached its limitations, giving way to a disconnection between brands and their customers."

CTV’s evolution will hit full stride in 2026 amid rising viewership, better measurement, and interactive ads.

Walmart’s low-risk online health hub could funnel customers to retail and pharmacy without the heavy overhead of primary care.

Walmart's latest genAI tools simplify campaign creation and optimization, helping advertisers prepare for a future shaped by AI-driven discovery.

Next year will bring shifts that redefine how networks operate, how brands show up, and how performance is measured. Here are three predictions for commerce media in 2026.

Visa and Mastercard reached a new settlement with merchants to lower fees in the US this November—another attempt to end a roughly 20-year fight in the courts, per SEC filings. The modest interchange reductions and new ability to steer customers away from higher-fee cards offer meaningful cost relief for small and midsize retailers that consumers may be more willing to support by using another card. However, those concessions are unlikely to move the needle for large national chains. They don’t materially change their economics, nor do they address the fundamental issue that networks and issuers still hold most of the pricing power.

It may be a new year, but we’re still catching up on what happened during the last week of 2025. Here’s everything you may have missed.

Walmart's leadership change is unlikely to change the retailer’s strategy in 2026 as it makes gains in technology, ecommerce, and advertising.

As 2025 closes, we’re assessing where our predictions for the payments industry went wrong, specifically for pay-by-bank solutions for major retailers.

While online pharmacy is booming, access to an in-person pharmacist remains important. Expect chains to focus on smaller, health-focused stores and expand their digital services in 2026.

Retailers faced a challenging year as economic factors, new technologies, and changing consumer behaviors reshaped the landscape. Here are our top five stories from this past year and what they meant to a tumultuous industry.

In 2025, retail media found itself at a turning point as networks, advertisers, and platforms pushed into new territory and redefined what the channel could be. Here are five of our top stories from the year, from the challenges of tracking CTV campaigns to the evolving competitive landscape shaped by Amazon, Walmart, and a wave of innovative smaller networks.

Retailers with a well-defined identity delivered strong growth in 2025.

Walmart’s OnePay adopted Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to drive agentic commerce as a credentialled provider, per a press release. With Chrome remaining consumer’s most popular browser, Gemini is narrowing the gap with ChatGPT as the most used chatbot: We forecast that by 2029, Gemini will hold 53% of genAI market share. That in turn could give Google’s AP2 a large share of agent-driven consumer spend in the long term, as consumers develop loyalty and use patterns around AI platforms.

Walmart wants discretion to refuse cards based on their issuer at the point-of-sale, per an objection filed in response to the proposed settlement to end the decadeslong interchange fee legal battle. While new types of fee agreements with banks remain entirely speculative at this point, it’s unclear whether a patchwork quilt of deals with issuers would benefit Walmart. Discontinuing acceptance of certain issuers at the POS will likely cause just as much friction for consumers as the purportedly “useless” changes to the honor all cards rule, especially if Walmart stands alone in its issuer blacklist.

The FDA sent warning letters to four major retailers that continued to sell baby formula linked to a botulism outbreak after the products were recalled in early November. As retailers move deeper into health and wellness, their daily operations need to support the image they’re trying to build.