Two studies released at the Sydney summit show AI entering the shopping journey for six in 10 Australians while inconsistent network metrics keep advertiser confidence in check.

IAB Australia today published video of the research session that opened its Commerce & Retail Media Summit, putting the detail of two studies presented on 7 July 2026 into general circulation. Natalie Stanbury, Director of Research at IAB Australia, delivered both at the NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills: the Commerce Report, which tracks consumer behaviour, and the Commerce & Retail Media State of the Nation, which tracks how advertisers, agencies and networks are spending.

The pairing matters because the two datasets pull in opposite directions. Consumers are transacting online more often and researching harder before they commit. Advertisers are moving budget into the channel faster than they can prove what it returns. The gap between those two facts is where the Australian market now sits.

Six waves of consumer data, and a shift in how people research

The Commerce Report is in its sixth wave, produced with Pure Profile. Each year the study has surveyed more than a thousand Australian online shoppers aged 18 to 70, and for the last three years it has also covered New Zealand consumers. Fieldwork for this wave ran in May 2026, a detail Stanbury flagged directly, since petrol prices were dominating household conversation at the time and concern about global events affecting prices and product availability registered strongly in the results.

Frequency continues to climb. More than a third of online shoppers now buy online at least weekly, up six percentage points year on year. Grocery remains the sharpest structural change: 55% of online shoppers buy groceries online every month, a figure that has risen 15 percentage points across the five years the study has tracked it. Marketplaces carrying multiple sellers across categories, a group that includes Amazon and Temu, remain the most commonly purchased-from retailer type, followed by supermarkets.

Age splits the picture. Among 18 to 39 year olds, four in 10 shop weekly, and food delivery services now rank as the retailer type they purchase from most. That is a notable move from the fifth wave released in July 2025, when the same demographic was flagged mainly for over-indexing on supermarkets, fast food delivery and social platforms while Amazon led the overall retailer ranking.

Cost of living pressure has changed the decision process rather than the transaction volume. According to Stanbury, shoppers are spending less on non-essentials and diverting money into essentials and savings, while a rising share prefer Australian-owned brands. The research also recorded consumers spending more time researching products, comparing options and validating information before purchase.

Search fragments, and AI joins the stack

The study asked shoppers about 22 separate content sources, personal sources and tools used across discovery, research and comparison. Traditional search has not collapsed under that expansion. Over nine in 10 respondents reported that their use of traditional search results, and clicking through to websites, had either increased or remained stable over the last year. What has changed is everything sitting alongside it: shopping tabs, reviews and ratings, image search, and AI generated summaries.

Six in 10 online shoppers now use AI powered tools at least sometimes while shopping. Among younger shoppers that figure reaches three quarters. The primary uses are comparing products, answering questions and shortlisting options.

"AI is making shopping easier and it is surfacing products that shoppers may not have otherwise found," Stanbury said. The behaviour around it is more cautious than the adoption number suggests. Shoppers click through to websites for more detail, treat AI as one source among several, and place more trust in products they have already encountered elsewhere, including in advertising.

"While AI adoption is growing really rapidly, trust remains the biggest barrier," Stanbury said, citing consumer concern about inaccurate information, privacy and data security. The remedy she outlined for brands was structural rather than creative: consistent and transparent product information, quality images, richer content, credible reviews, and structured data so products can be found wherever consumers search.

That framing sits alongside the working group output PPC Land covered when IAB Australia mapped the agentic AI shift for search marketers on 18 June 2026, which argued that brands not structured in ways agents can parse are absent from the transaction rather than merely disadvantaged. Research from Retail Economics covered by PPC Land in March 2026 found AI bots crawling retail sites far more heavily than traditional search engines, with 73% of consumers across the UK, US and France having consciously used AI in shopping.

An audience poll opened the session. Asked what had changed most in their own shopping behaviour over the past year, roughly half the room selected using AI to research products.

Creators and loyalty programmes

Creators are now a fixed part of discovery. Six in 10 shoppers, and 85% of young shoppers, sometimes or often discover products through creators across social media, video and podcasts. Authenticity and trust in the creator rank highest in importance, along with the reputation of the brand being promoted. Stanbury noted a constraint that has been visible in disclosure research across markets: when it is known that a creator is paid, some shoppers become less likely to act.

Retailer-owned channels held their position. Retailer websites remain the most frequently used touch point, and loyalty programmes are close to universal in usage. They influence where consumers shop and make consumers more willing to share personal data when the benefits are worth it.

The complication is perceived balance. Almost half of online shoppers believe retailers extract more value from loyalty programmes than the members do. Consumers are pushing toward tangible everyday value: discounts, member pricing, free delivery and cashback rewards. They remain concerned about how retailers use their data and expect a clear exchange in return, a theme that runs through IAB Australia's data and privacy sessions earlier in 2026.

State of the Nation: money moves faster than measurement

The trade study surveyed advertising decision makers on both sides of the market, covering agencies and brands on the buy side and retail and commerce media networks on the sell side. IAB Australia's Retail Media Council contributed to the design.

The two sides do not agree on what the channel is for. Forced to name the top opportunity, buy side respondents chose reaching shoppers at the point of purchase. Retailers chose access to retailer data. Incremental sales and targeting efficiency featured for both.

Investment is climbing. Sixty per cent of buy side respondents increased investment in on-site and off-site retail media channels over the past year, with most ad formats recording year-on-year growth in usage. Stanbury put the consequence plainly: "retail media is now competing more directly for established ad budgets."

Nearly half of retail and commerce media investment is now fully reallocated from other channels, with retail trade budgets and traditional advertising the largest sources. That mirrors the reallocation pattern IAB Europe recorded in its 2025 survey, where display advertising supplied 55% of shifted funds into European retail media, overtaking linear television.

Stanbury placed Australian growth against two international reference points cited in the report: IAB in the United States recording commerce growth of 18% year on year last year, and the United Kingdom estimating its market growing around 17%. Longer-term forecasts assume networks expand into non-endemic categories such as travel and financial services to diversify revenue. For comparison, IAB's 2026 outlook study published on 28 January 2026 projected 12.1% commerce media growth for the year in the US market.

Silos, and a narrowing objective set

Two structural drags surfaced. Two thirds of active buyers use retail media only for products included in the retailer or marketplace offering, limiting the channel to endemic activity. And 56% keep trade and media budgets sitting separately. Stanbury described the siloed approach and the disconnect between teams as a barrier to investment, relaying one respondent's assessment that the disconnect "is costing everyone in the industry."

Campaign objectives have narrowed rather than broadened. Increasing sales and conversions remains the dominant objective and has intensified this year, while usage for brand building activities has pulled back. According to the report, future growth depends on moving beyond the current performance focus toward brand building, with advertisers looking to retailers and commerce networks to create consumer experiences across the full journey.

Measurement remains the constraint

Ad effectiveness, measurement and performance are the most important criteria brands use to evaluate partners, and incremental sales and return on investment are the metrics agencies and brands care about most. Those are also the hardest things to produce. Questions around incrementality rigour persist, and the relevant solutions are not universally offered across retailers.

The single biggest measurement challenge identified was inconsistent metrics across networks, with each operator applying its own definitions that cannot be compared. Confidence among buyers suffers as a result.

That problem is not confined to Australia, and it is not new. IAB Australia published its Retail Media Measurement Principles and Guidance on 28 August 2024, adopting IAB and Media Rating Council standards for viewability and setting out SKU and halo attribution, ROAS and incremental ROAS definitions. At the 2025 edition of the same summit, panellists identified omnichannel attribution complexity as the central unresolved issue. In April 2026, IAB and Instacart argued that marketing mix modelling systematically misattributes retail media sales. In June 2026, campaign data from Incremental showed how siloed attribution misses conversions occurring in physical stores.

Certification registered as a possible trust mechanism. Eighty per cent of surveyed brands and agencies said a retailer holding IAB certification would increase their willingness to work with that partner.

Networks rate themselves

Sell side respondents were candid. Only 22% describe their retail media offering as advanced, while nearly half say it is still developing. Planned investment centres on enhanced measurement, expanded formats, and additional data and segments.

Advertisers are working with more retail partners than before, and the quality of those relationships improved, with a lift recorded in reported good experiences. That reverses direction from the 2025 summit, where a panel discussion documented agency satisfaction with retail media networks falling from 66% to 44% even as budgets rose roughly 20%.

"The next stage of growth is about making it easier for advertisers to invest with confidence in an increasingly complex landscape," Stanbury said, listing more consistent measurement standards, comparable metrics and stronger data infrastructure as the requirements.

A second audience poll asked which capability delegates would prioritise over the next 12 months. The room's leading answer was AI search and discoverability.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For media buyers, the operative number is not the 60% raising investment. It is the near half of retail media budget that is now fully reallocated from elsewhere, combined with the 56% still running trade and media money on separate ledgers. Budget arriving from trade funds while measurement sits in media reporting produces exactly the accountability gap the report describes, and it explains why performance objectives keep crowding out brand ones.

For retail media networks, the 22% self-assessed maturity figure is the honest floor. It arrives while Criteo, Uber, Microsoft, Epsilon and Amazon representatives were on the same Sydney stage discussing innovation and brand measurement. Capability ambition is running ahead of self-reported delivery, and the certification finding indicates buyers would reward whoever closes that distance first.

For brands managing product data, the consumer findings and the trade findings converge on one operational task. Structured, consistent product information determines visibility in AI summaries and shopping surfaces at the same time as it determines whether a retail media campaign can be measured against anything comparable. The Australian video advertising survey published in May 2026 already found 54% of buyers using or testing retailer first-party shopper data to target video campaigns. Commerce data is spreading across formats faster than the metrics describing it are converging.

Both reports are available for download through the IAB Australia website, and the session recording is published on the organisation's YouTube channel.

Timeline

Summary

Who: IAB Australia, with Natalie Stanbury, Director of Research, presenting to advertisers, agencies and retail media networks at the organisation's Commerce & Retail Media Summit. Consumer fieldwork was conducted with Pure Profile. The wider programme featured speakers from TerryWhite Chemmart, MixIn, Metcash, News Australia, Medium Rare, Suddenly, Microsoft, Galderma, Arnotts, Amazon, Criteo, Vudoo, Uber and Epsilon.

What: Release of two studies. The sixth-wave Commerce Report found more than a third of online shoppers buying weekly, 55% buying groceries online monthly, six in 10 using AI tools while shopping, and almost half believing retailers gain more from loyalty programmes than members do. The Commerce & Retail Media State of the Nation found 60% of buy side respondents increased retail media investment, nearly half of that investment fully reallocated from other channels, 56% keeping trade and media budgets separate, 80% saying IAB certification would increase willingness to partner, and only 22% of networks describing their offering as advanced.

When: The reports were released at the summit on 7 July 2026, with consumer fieldwork conducted in May 2026. IAB Australia published the session recording today.

Where: The summit was held at the NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre, Surry Hills, Sydney, between 12.30pm and 5.00pm. The consumer research covers Australian online shoppers aged 18 to 70, with New Zealand consumers also included over the last three waves.

Why: Retail and commerce media is drawing budget away from established channels while buyers report that inconsistent metrics across networks remain the largest obstacle to confident investment. The consumer data shows AI tools and creator content entering the research phase without displacing traditional search, which places pressure on brands to maintain consistent, structured product information across every surface where discovery now happens.