Retail Media Hits $130B – the Winning Niche Is the Product Itself

01 /The Concept

Retail has a practice called sampling – giving consumers free units of new or underperforming products to spark interest in them. The logic is simple: someone might not buy an unfamiliar product, but if they get to try it for free, they might like it enough to add it to their regular cart.

Swish built a platform that streamlines and improves the effectiveness of sampling inside online grocery stores – a capability both retailers and consumer brands can activate.

The platform's approach is built on three integrated mechanics. The targeting is AI-driven: the system selects which products to send to which shoppers based on each customer's demographic profile and purchase history, then automatically adds sample items to qualifying orders as they arrive – no manual work required from the retailer's team. The product source is the store's own full-size inventory, not dedicated trial packs, which eliminates the logistics headache of separate packaging, supply chains, and SKU tracking. And the loop closes with attribution: the platform tracks which sampled customers go on to purchase regularly, giving retailers and brands a clear ROI picture while continuously sharpening the AI's targeting.

Swish's target customers are online grocery retailers and the consumer packaged goods brands whose products they carry. Category doesn't matter. Retailers can configure sampling for any segment: new launches, slow movers, overstock about to age out, and so on.

When retailers run sampling programs, the benefits include larger basket sizes, exposure of shoppers to new categories, and stronger loyalty. Retailers can even configure the AI to prioritize high-margin products, improving profitability in the process.

For brands, sampling through Swish means faster market introduction and demand generation for underperforming SKUs – all without the logistics burden of creating, shipping, and managing dedicated trial packaging.

Swish was founded in 2022. It raised $400K in 2023 to bring the platform to market, and has now closed a second, larger round – though the amount hasn't been disclosed.

02 /Why It Matters

Swish's signature move is embedding sampling inside retailers' existing operational workflows:

- The samples come from the same inventory that already sits in the store's warehouse.

- No additional work is assigned to any employee. The right samples are added to the right orders automatically, fulfillment continues as normal, and marketing teams simply receive finished effectiveness reports.

This kind of seamless integration into existing business processes is essential for selling any B2B product – because organizations strongly resist changing workflows that are already working. Many will decline even a beneficial proposal if it requires process changes, because any change brings indirect costs: staff time, retraining, and at least temporary efficiency losses.

Swish went even further: it's embedding its platform not at the retailer level, but at the level of the commerce software providers retailers already run on.

Recent integration partners include Mercatus, whose platform powers 420 grocery stores, 180 liquor stores, and 230 in-store pharmacies. And Upshop, whose platform is used by 450 retail grocery stores. Those two deals alone opened access to 1,200 potential customers – who now only need to flip a switch to start using the feature.

This approach sets Swish apart from other sampling platforms previously covered here.

Samplico ([related review](/review/chtoby-kupit-nuzhno-poprobovat)) built a marketplace where consumers can order free samples of new products. The challenge: it requires independently driving traffic to the marketplace. Despite that friction, the model works – Samplico is the global rollout of Turkish service Denebunu, which has been popular domestically since 2016.

British startup Triyit ([related review](/review/hochesh-prodat-daj-poprobovat)) launched a similar free-sample marketplace and has also been growing, having raised a round last fall.

Because Swish delivers samples to shoppers through their regular grocery orders, it sits squarely in the retail media category – a classification confirmed by the "best retail media execution" award the startup received in 2024.

Retail media is a distinct and expanding category that's attracting startups and capital across multiple formats. A couple of examples:

Looma ([related review](/review/novaja-tema-na-130-milliardov-dollarov)) has raised $21.5M – $10M in September last year – for a network of in-store screens that show creator-made videos promoting the products sold in each store.

The Desire Company ([related review](/review/tri-sposoba-dlja-masshtabirovanija-na-jetom-novom-rynke)) focuses entirely on creating conversion-oriented content usable anywhere – including in physical and online stores. It has raised $22.7M, $3.3M of which came in this May.

03 /Opportunities

Retail media is one of the fastest-growing advertising categories right now.

Search advertising took 14 years to grow from $1B to $30B. Social media advertising took 11 years to cover the same distance. Retail advertising took 5 years.

Analysts project the retail advertising market to reach $130B. Amazon holds an early lead – the company earns enormous sums from the advertising that brands and sellers place on its marketplace – but there's a large enough pie for every other player to capture a meaningful slice.

Swish made a strategically sharp move by repositioning an age-old practice – product sampling – as a retail media channel, allowing it to capture a share of the capital flowing into this space.

The broad opportunity: build your own retail media platforms. As we've seen, the category spans a wide range – from content production to product sampling, where the product itself is the ad medium.

What could you build in this space?