’s discount pharmacy giant is rethinking tech architecture, retail media and customer experience with precision and purpose. Composable commerce with a franchise twist Chemist Warehouse’s scale is substantial, comprising nearly 600 stores, tens of thousands of SKUs and a growing presence in online retail. But what makes its digital shift more complex is its unique franchising model that requires e-commerce solutions to work with and not around local fulfilment systems. “We currently drive 85 per cent of all online sales revenue into our retail franchise,” said Serzycki. “Being a franchising model, that’s always top priority for the business… and we’re hoping to have that number up to 90 to 95 per cent by the end of the year.” This achievement is powered by features like click-and-collect, store-based fulfilment and fast delivery due to the platform’s ability to scale locally while centralising control. Serzycki emphasised that the move away from Chemist Warehouse’s legacy infrastructure, built in-house over a decade, was driven by urgency, not vanity.  “The importance of the online channel… has significantly increased over the last three or four years,” she explained. “That’s predominantly due to three key reasons,” Serzycki said in the fireside discussion. The three pillars of digital importance: Customer shopping behaviour: “We know from looking at the data that 60 to 70 per cent of our customers will research online before they go into the store,” Serzycki said. With more than 38,000 SKUs on-site, the platform is far more than just a transactional engine. Revenue integration: Chemist Warehouse’s digital sales are tightly integrated with its physical store network, delivering value directly into franchises. The on-the-ground fulfilment strategy not only supports stores but accelerates last-mile convenience for customers. Retail media: Perhaps the biggest commercial lever, and one echoed across the conference floor at Online Retailer 2025, is retail media. As third-party data dries up and customer acquisition costs climb, retailers are waking up to the power of their own digital real estate.  This layered monetisation strategy is transforming the pharmacy giant into a digital media business in its own right, offering suppliers prime visibility while funding continued platform investment. Let the customer (not the tech) lead Despite the repetition around platforming, AI and predictive engines, Serzycki grounded the conversation in customer empathy, and a willingness to evolve alongside them. “Rather than letting technology take us into the future, we want to let the customers take us there,” she said. “Our real goal is to make sure that we don’t just have an online platform, but are creating the best retailing experience for our shoppers and that might be very different next week to what it will be in the next two years to what it will be in 10 years.” That perspective, future commerce built not around flash, but flexibility, resonated with the panel. Commercetools’ Mosenzon Erez agreed, adding, “We’re at an interesting time… there’s been an inflection point from a technology perspective with what LLMs [large language models] can do.” She painted a vision of an online shopping world where experiences are not only personalised but adaptive and constantly learning. “We can imagine a future where the entire commerce journey… everything you see on the screen, is extremely personalised into where you are in the moment,” Mosenzon Erez explained. “To be ready for it, retailers need to be able to try and test and learn with their teams.” Agentic AI and assistive commerce Google Cloud’s MacKay expanded on how retailers like Chemist Warehouse can prepare for a generative AI future by investing in three key areas: Assistive search and discovery: “That comes from a wealth of knowledge we bring from our consumer-facing research,” she said, pointing to Google’s strength in query prediction and product matching. Hyperpersonalisation: “The promised land of hyperpersonalisation – I actually think that’s really happening now… with multimodal AI in a way that kind of has never been able to be achieved before.” Agentic experiences: MacKay was clear: “I think it wouldn’t be a panel without me mentioning agentic.” She described this as the next frontier of retail, where generative becomes assistive, helping users navigate, decide and transact in real time. The takeaway Chemist Warehouse’s e-commerce excellence story is not one of overnight innovation but the result of years of iterative learning, strategic tech partnerships and a fierce dedication to the customer.  From retail media to agentic AI, it’s embracing the complexity of modern retail, not resisting it. As Serzycki put it, “We don’t want to just keep up. We want to create the best experience for our shoppers, whatever that means in the future.”