The FMCG Guys
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Sep 16, 2026 · 59 min

#349. Simon Swan, Director of E-commerce Development at Karo Healthcare: eCommerce, Breaking Silos, Retail Media, Agentic, Digital Shelf

Simon Swan is Director of E-commerce Development at Karo Healthcare, where he is helping reshape how digital commerce is understood and executed across markets and functions. In this episode, Simon joins Daniel and Christina to discuss why e-commerce cannot succeed in isolation, why digital shelf excellence should be treated as a business basic rather than a standalone initiative, and why retail media investment only works when the fundamentals are already in place. They also explore how AI and LLMs are expanding the digital shelf beyond the PDP, raising the bar for discoverability, consistency and collaboration across the entire organization.

In this episode, we talk about:

  • Why e-commerce must break out of the silo and become a truly cross-functional capability.
  • Why digital shelf excellence is a hygiene factor, not a one-off project.
  • The case for getting the basics right before investing heavily in retail media.
  • How digital leaders can translate e-commerce into the language of the C-suite and wider business.
  • How AI and LLMs are redefining discoverability beyond retailer product pages.
  • Why collaboration, trust and emotional intelligence are becoming critical capabilities in digital commerce.