Joybuy is quietly winning Google Shopping auctions while European CPCs shift

Chinese retail group JD.com today finds its Joybuy platform at the centre of a new competitive pressure point for European ecommerce advertisers, as fresh data from Smarter Ecommerce (smec) reveals that Joybuy spent all of March 2026 buying Google Shopping ads across several EU markets - a full two weeks before news of its European launch broke publicly in mid-March.

The timing gap is significant. According to smec's Market Observer tool, which draws on more than 450 million euros in annual European retail ad spend across thousands of active Google Ads campaigns including more than 4,000 Performance Max campaigns, Joybuy was already a measurable presence in Shopping auctions well before most advertisers were aware it had entered the market.

Auction data: more than 10% of advertisers already competing

The smec analysis, published on April 9, 2026, and shared publicly via a LinkedIn post by Mike Ryan, Head of Ecommerce Insights at Smarter Ecommerce, quantifies the competitive footprint Joybuy established in its first month. According to the data, more than 10% of the 510 advertiser accounts monitored in the smec panel were already experiencing account-level competition from Joybuy in Google Shopping within the first 31 days of its European presence.

That figure is notable because it places Joybuy's early trajectory on a similar line to Temu when that platform launched in European markets. "This was an alarming start: Joybuy looked to be spending as aggressively - or even more so - than Temu did during their first month in Europe," Ryan wrote in the Smarter Ecommerce post.

The comparison to Temu, however, breaks down quickly on closer inspection. Where Temu accelerated its spend aggressively through weeks three and four of its European launch - the phase during which it began its most aggressive scaling - Joybuy showed no such progression. Spend flattened. On the surface, that might look like a retreat.

Outranking data tells a different story

The smec data introduces a more nuanced metric: outranking rate. At the start of March, Joybuy was being outranked a median 80% of the time. By the end of the month, that figure had dropped to below 50%. In other words, Joybuy shifted from losing most of its Shopping auction contests to winning more than half of them - without dramatically increasing its ad spend to do it.

According to Ryan, "they are consistently getting better at outranking other advertisers." The implication is that Joybuy is optimizing its campaigns rather than simply increasing budgets. A platform that improves its auction performance through structural optimisation - better product feeds, sharper bidding signals, refined audience targeting - is harder to defend against than one that simply outspends the competition.

This is not, Ryan argued, "the delirious money-at-the-wall Temu playbook." Temu's strategy in Europe was blunt: buy visibility at almost any cost. PPC Land has covered that dynamic extensively, including Temu's abrupt withdrawal from U.S. Google Shopping in April 2025, when Temu shut off all Google Shopping ads in the United States on April 9, 2025, and its App Store ranking fell from a typical third or fourth position to 58th place within three days.

Joybuy's approach appears more deliberate. Lower outranking rates achieved through campaign optimisation rather than spend escalation suggest a team actively working the auction mechanics. That makes the platform harder to predict and potentially harder to displace.

What Joybuy is selling

The product proposition matters here. Joybuy sells branded goods from recognisable manufacturers - electronics, appliances, household items, health and beauty products, and grocery imports including Asian food specialities. This is a materially different catalogue from the commodity, white-label goods that made up the bulk of Temu's inventory.

According to the smec analysis, Joybuy "sell real products from real brands, not just commodity warehouse junk." On pricing, the assessment is direct: "Their prices are rock-bottom." On logistics, Joybuy offers same-day and next-day delivery in the markets where it is currently active.

That combination - brand-name products, low prices, and fast delivery - positions Joybuy as a different type of competitor from Temu. Smarter Ecommerce characterised it as "something more akin to Amazon 2.0" rather than "Temu 2.0."

PPC Land reported in August 2025 that JD.com officially launched Joybuy in Germany on August 23, 2025, with same-day and next-day delivery options positioned as a central offering. That German launch followed Joybuy's broader EU rollout and came weeks after JD.com announced a voluntary takeover bid for CECONOMY AG - the parent company of MediaMarkt and Saturn - at 4.60 euros per share, valuing the business at 4.0 billion euros in enterprise value. The two moves together indicate a company making serious long-term commitments to European retail infrastructure, not testing the waters.

The markets where Joybuy is currently active include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. A notable gap in its European coverage - the platform is not available in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and a range of Central and Eastern European markets - limits its immediate impact in some of the continent's larger ecommerce territories, but the core Western European markets it does serve represent a substantial share of total EU online retail.

The broader Google Shopping environment in April 2026

The Joybuy data lands in an already complicated auction environment. Smec's Market Observer, last updated April 6, 2026, shows significant structural shifts in European Google Ads performance across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max channels.

On cost-per-click, Shopping CPC rose to 0.36 euros in April 2026. The year-over-year trend through the final quarter of Q2 2026 shows Shopping CPC up 10% year-over-year. Performance Max CPC decreased to 0.38 euros, down 3.5% year-over-year. Search CPC dropped to 0.40 euros, with a 2.5% year-over-year decline.

Those diverging trends are meaningful. Shopping inventory is getting more expensive - consistent with increased competition from players including Joybuy - while Search CPC is softening slightly and Performance Max is declining in cost-per-click terms.

On impressions, both clicks and impressions display a gradual downward trend leading into March 2026. The year-over-year impression figures for Q2 2026 are stark: Shopping impressions declined approximately 16.5%, Performance Max impressions dropped roughly 14%, and Search impressions saw a milder decline of around 4.5%.

On conversions, the deterioration is sharper still. During March 2026, conversions declined sharply while costs remained broadly stable. The Q2 2026 year-over-year conversion figures show Search plummeting roughly 55%, Shopping dropping approximately 45%, and Performance Max falling around 30%. Meanwhile, Q2 costs across all three channels saw minimal shifts, hovering nearly flat in a range between minus 1% and plus 1%.

The combination - flat costs, collapsing conversions - pushes conversion-based efficiency metrics downward across the board. That pressure creates a market environment where new entrants with strong organic traffic, direct consumer recognition, or deep-pocketed ad budgets have structural advantages over smaller incumbents competing for shrinking conversion pools.

CTR rising, conversion rate falling

The smec efficiency data adds texture to this picture. During the last measured month, Search CTR reached 15% - up from 11% the previous year. That is a substantial increase. But conversion rate for Search dropped from 6% to 4.5% over the same period.

Higher click-through rates paired with lower conversion rates suggest that ad creative and auction mechanics are generating more clicks, but those clicks are converting to purchases less reliably. This pattern could reflect changes in consumer behaviour, increased price sensitivity, or competition from platforms - including Joybuy - that may be capturing intent that previously converted through incumbent advertisers.

On ROAS and average order value, the picture is more positive. The current median ROAS reached approximately 6.7, up significantly from a previous year figure of 5.0. Average Order Value peaked at 100 euros before closing the period at roughly 95 euros, maintaining a positive gap over the prior year's closing value of 88 euros.

The ROAS improvement is genuine, but it exists alongside the conversion volume collapse. Advertisers achieving higher returns on spend are doing so on a smaller base of transactions. Whether that trade-off is sustainable depends heavily on individual business economics and margin structures.

Smec's Market Observer also tracks the impression share of major platforms in Google Shopping over time - Amazon, Temu, eBay, AliExpress, and now Joybuy. The visualisation covers a period running from late December 2024 through late March 2026.

This context matters because the competitive landscape of Google Shopping is not static. Amazon removed its entire Google Shopping advertising presence globally between July 21 and July 23, 2025, a move that temporarily redistributed impression share across the auction. Amazon subsequently resumed Shopping advertising on August 25, 2025, exactly one month after the withdrawal. The selective reactivation - all international domains but not the United States - remains a live variable in European Shopping dynamics.

Joybuy is now visible within that impression share tracking framework, which means its competitive presence is being measured against the same benchmarks applied to Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress. The fact that smec added Joybuy to this panel is itself a signal of how seriously the platform is being taken as an auction participant.

Why this matters for ecommerce advertisers

The smec data and the Joybuy analysis are published in a context of genuine uncertainty for European ecommerce advertisers managing Google Ads. Performance Max campaigns are facing structural criticism from practitioners who argue the campaign type becomes unreliable at scale - specifically that it over-indexes on remarketing audiences and shifts budget away from Shopping inventory at higher spend levels.

The smec Market Observer is built on data from 450 million euros in annual European retail ad spend. That sample includes more than 4,000 Performance Max campaigns. Its channel-level benchmarks - covering Search, Shopping, and Performance Max separately - are among the more granular publicly available datasets for European ecommerce advertisers trying to contextualise their own performance against market trends.

For context on how benchmark data functions in practice, Pixis released comprehensive Google advertising benchmarksacross 100 brands in September 2025, covering nearly 1 billion USD in spend. The Pixis data showed average Google CPC at 0.73 USD, with Search dominating spend allocation at 56.2% of total investment. The smec European data, focused specifically on ecommerce and retail, offers a parallel view calibrated to European cost structures and campaign type distributions.

Smec positions its Market Observer as a free baseline tool, with PRO access adding industry vertical filters across Fashion, Electronics, Home and Garden, Health and Beauty, Sporting Goods, and more. The tool was last updated April 6, 2026.

According to the smec FAQ documentation, the Market Observer is free at its core level. Registration unlocks additional chart access, full historical time ranges, industry filtering, and a monthly newsletter covering market trends.

Joybuy by year's end

The smec post closes with a direct forecast. Joybuy "will be a serious pain point in Europe by year's end." The phrase captures a specific concern: not that Joybuy is currently a dominant force across all Shopping auctions, but that its trajectory - improving outranking ratios, branded product catalogue, fast delivery infrastructure, and apparently disciplined campaign optimisation - makes it a credible long-term competitor in a way that Temu never quite was.

Temu's aggressive early spend in Europe generated visibility but also generated awareness of its model. Consumer trust remained a challenge throughout Temu's European expansion. Joybuy enters with JD.com's logistics infrastructure, established brand supplier relationships, and a platform model closer to the full-service marketplace than the discount clearinghouse.

The difference in competitive model has direct implications for Google Shopping dynamics. A platform competing on brand-name products and delivery speed is fighting for different search queries than a platform competing on the lowest possible price for unbranded goods. The product categories Joybuy targets - electronics, appliances, household goods - are high-intent, high-CPC categories where incumbent advertisers have historically been willing to pay premium CPCs. If Joybuy continues to improve its outranking rate while maintaining its current spend discipline, the cost environment in those categories will shift.

Timeline

2015: Joybuy originally launched by JD.com as a competitor to AliExpress in European markets
December 2021: Joybuy ceases B2C operations, transitions briefly to B2B under JD Global Trade designation
2022: JD.com relaunches European presence under the Ochama brand across 25 European countries
March 7, 2024: Wall Street Journal reports Temu's parent company spent approximately 2 billion USD on Meta advertising in 2023
April 9, 2025: Temu shuts off all Google Shopping ads in the United States
July 21-23, 2025: Amazon removes its entire Google Shopping advertising presence globally
July 31, 2025: JD.com announces voluntary takeover bid for CECONOMY AG at 4.60 euros per share
August 15, 2025: Ochama migration to Joybuy platform begins, with Ochama operations ceasing August 23, 2025
August 23, 2025: JD.com officially launches Joybuy in Germany, completing its European platform transition
August 25, 2025: Amazon resumes Google Shopping advertising on all international domains except the United States
March 2026: Joybuy begins buying Google Shopping ads across EU markets; more than 10% of monitored advertisers see account-level competition within 31 days; Joybuy's outranking rate improves from being outranked 80% of the time to below 50%
April 6, 2026: Smec Market Observer data last updated, showing Shopping CPC up 10% year-over-year, Q2 2026 conversion crashes across Search (-55%), Shopping (-45%), and Performance Max (-30%)
April 9, 2026: Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce publishes Joybuy analysis on LinkedIn

Summary

Who: Joybuy - the European ecommerce platform operated by Chinese retail group JD.com - is the subject of new competitive analysis published by Smarter Ecommerce (smec). Mike Ryan, Head of Ecommerce Insights at smec, documented the findings. The analysis affects European ecommerce advertisers running Google Shopping campaigns.

What: Smec's Market Observer data shows Joybuy purchased Google Shopping ads throughout March 2026, before its European launch was publicly reported. Within 31 days, more than 10% of 510 monitored advertiser accounts faced account-level competition from Joybuy. Joybuy's outranking rate improved from being beaten 80% of the time at the start of March to below 50% by the end - without a matching increase in spend. Separately, smec's April 2026 benchmark data shows Shopping CPC up 10% year-over-year, while Q2 2026 conversion rates have collapsed across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max.

When: Joybuy's Google Shopping activity began in March 2026. The smec analysis was published on April 9, 2026. The broader benchmark data covers Q2 2026 with a last update date of April 6, 2026.

Where: The competitive activity is occurring in EU Google Shopping auctions, in markets where Joybuy is active: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The smec Market Observer tracks European ecommerce campaigns.

Why: The data matters because Joybuy - backed by JD.com's logistics infrastructure, branded product catalogue, and fast delivery capabilities - represents a structurally different competitive threat from Temu. Unlike Temu's spend-heavy approach, Joybuy is improving auction performance through apparent campaign optimisation. Combined with a deteriorating conversion environment across European Google Shopping, the entry of a well-resourced player competing on branded goods and delivery speed creates new cost pressures for incumbent advertisers in high-intent, high-CPC categories.