Two sunny spring days in Gothenburg. Thousands of people from across the Nordic commerce ecosystem. Packed stages, spontaneous booth visits, long coffee lines, and the familiar feeling that everyone somehow knows everyone. And of course, plenty of insights worth bringing back to the office. That’s exactly what D-Congress is.
It’s one of those rare events that feels both big and surprisingly intimate at the same time. A place where founders, retailers, tech partners, and policymakers meet under the same roof to exchange ideas, catch up with old colleagues, and debate what the future of commerce will look like. This year’s theme, Shaping Culture – Transforming Commerce, captured this perfectly. Because if one thing became clear over the two days. Commerce is no longer just evolving technologically. It’s evolving culturally.
Let’s dive into 3 takeaways that we think stood out:
One of the most striking aspects of D-Congress is that it’s not just a conference. It’s about community in a totally different way. Yes, the stages are packed, and the agenda is ambitious. But much of the real exchange happens in between – in booth conversations, spontaneous coffee meetings, and reunions with partners and colleagues across the Nordic ecosystem. Something we value deeply at Qliro throughout the year as well.
In many ways, that atmosphere reflects the broader shift happening in commerce. Culture today is no longer something brands add on top of their business. It’s something they build together with their communities. When conversations span from fashion editors and cultural strategists to founders like Rickard Lyko and global brand builders, you start to see the shift.
Culture isn’t marketing anymore. It’s positioning, relevance, and growth. And ultimately, it’s trust. Especially in a landscape where AI increasingly dominates the conversation.
This year’s D-Award for E-commerce of the Year went to ESSNCE (proud, and not surprised!), recognized for an impressive growth journey and strong brand positioning in a highly competitive market. Their journey reflects exactly the shift discussed throughout the event, that is to say combining creative brand building with strong commercial execution.
The question is no longer “How do we sell more?”, it’s “How do we matter?”. And that’s a cultural question.
If culture defined the emotional side of the conversation, AI clearly dominated the technological one. Across sessions, speakers described how we are entering one of the largest technology investment cycles in decades. But real transformation doesn’t happen when technology appears. It happens when organizations redesign their processes around them.
Retailers already hold vast datasets across transactions, customer behavior, and product information. The opportunity now lies in turning that data into operational intelligence, as AI moves from productivity tool to core infrastructure.
It’s fascinating to hear how companies are approaching the transition in different ways. New, digitally native brands are building their businesses around data and AI from the start, while more established players are integrating the technology step by step through platforms and partners, gradually strengthening their capabilities over time.
The important thing is not to copy one approach, but to implement AI in a way that fits your organization, your technology stack, and your brand.
One of the most talked-about topics during the event was Agentic Commerce, something that was hard to miss if you spent any time around D-Congress. Based on insights from the event and how we work with these developments at Qliro, agentic commerce is evolving in three stages:
The third stage is where payments become critical infrastructure. However, Europe still faces regulatory limitations, particularly around Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), which currently makes fully autonomous AI-driven purchases difficult. Even so, the shift in product discovery and decision-making is already underway.
And just like in the discussions around culture and community at D-Congress, the human layer remains essential, especially as AI becomes more deeply embedded across the entire commerce journey.
Something that came up across several sessions was that commerce today functions as an interconnected system. AI. Logistics. Sustainability. Retail media. Payments. Policy. Data. Success doesn’t come from optimizing a single channel. It comes from orchestrating the ecosystem.
That was also the focus of our own session at D-Congress, Scaling Modern Commerce: Payments as the Financial Revenue Engine, where our CEO Christoffer Rutgersson joined Laila Högfeldt from Lenoites, and Fredrik Norberg from Fyndiq/CDON to discuss how modern commerce is increasingly built through interconnected systems instead of separate solutions.
We might be slightly biased, but payments are a good example of what ties the ecosystem together. They influence conversion, shape the customer experience, and increasingly drive loyalty and long-term growth. Combined with composable partners and integrations across the commerce stack, payments become much more than just a transaction.
And when commerce becomes an ecosystem, performance can no longer be isolated. For years, e-commerce growth has been visualized as in a funnel. Traffic enters at the top, conversion happens somewhere in the middle, and the journey ends at checkout. Performance today behaves more like a loop. At Qliro, we often describe this as a flywheel, where we maximize every sales opportunity and interaction in the customer journey to reinforce the next. Again, and again.
If there was one thing D-Congress made clear, it’s that the companies that succeed are the ones that build together across partnerships, platforms, and ecosystems, with culture and relevance at the core.
Stepping back, the bigger picture emerges. Modern commerce lives at the intersection of culture, technology, and ecosystems. Shaping culture means building relevance. Transforming commerce means operationalizing it.
At Qliro, we believe performance comes from strengthening the entire journey, and not just optimizing one step. Because in a connected ecosystem, payments are no longer a back-end function. They are part of the growth architecture. And that’s the future we’re proud to help build.
Now that we’ve landed back at the office and returned to drinking a more reasonable amount of coffee, we’re already looking forward to next year’s D-Congress and to the many great events still ahead this spring.
Book a demo with our team or learn more about how Qliro helps merchants turn payments into performance.