Costco Levels Up Its Retail Media Engine

Plus: Walmart Canada adds Klarna in-store to drive flexible checkout

Author

Avinash Duggempudi
August 28, 2025

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Retail Rev Up

Here's what's happening this week in the world of revenue tech:
- Costco centralizes audience activation for retail media.
- Walmart Canada brings BNPL to 400+ stores.
- Pecan debuts modular POS and kiosks for SMBs.
- NFC standards upgrade speeds tap-to-pay adoption.
- Criteo and Zepto push offsite retail media in India.

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📌WEEKLY MUST-KNOWS

Costco selected GrowthLoop to power audience creation and activation from its data cloud, giving its retail media team a centralized system to iterate campaigns faster with privacy controls. This signals retailers industrializing first‑party data to improve personalization and shorten campaign cycles from months to days. Advertisers and retail media buyers should expect better relevancy, measurement, and service levels across Costco’s footprint.

Walmart Canada rolled out Klarna’s QR-based checkout across 400+ locations, letting shoppers pay now or split purchases over four interest-free installments. BNPL’s move from online to physical lanes is a notable shift in tender mix that can lift conversion and average order value while reshaping returns risk and credit exposure. Payment leaders should anticipate shopper demand for flexible checkout across all channels.

Pecan is scaling a modular, dealer-friendly POS with flexible hardware, processing choice, dual pricing, and a new lightweight kiosk aimed at labor-constrained operators. The company grew from 5 to 54 dealers in a year, signaling demand for configurable, margin-friendly alternatives to locked ecosystems. For multi-unit F&B sales, this shifts buying criteria toward interoperability, channel support, and rapid deployment.

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⚡QUICK READS

NFC Mobile Payments Explained: A Small Business Guide To Tap To Pay: NFC Release 15 extends tap-to-pay range to 2 cm and, with iPhone-based acceptance, lowers hardware friction for contactless rollout across field and in-store teams.(More)

Capitalizing On AI-Driven Personalization In Tablet POS: Investor lens: AI-fueled personalization and cloud deployment in tablet POS is flagged as a high-growth theme, hinting at rising buyer expectations for smarter, lighter POS stacks.(More)

Walmart Canada Outlines C$6.5B Growth Plan: Beyond payments, Walmart Canada’s C$6.5B investment through 2029 signals aggressive omnichannel, supply chain, and store upgrades that could reset competitive baselines.(More)

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