A recent search for “cordless drill” on Walmart illustrated a quiet struggle playing out on many enterprise ecommerce sites.

A Greenworks-sponsored brand module occupied the top of Walmart’s search page with four products. The three products immediately below it were also sponsored. An organic result didn’t appear until the seventh product position.

Ads for Greenworks’ cordless drills held the top six listings in search results.

Every ad was relevant to the search. That is what made the page at least interesting rather than potentially annoying. The question was what decided which products should be first and why.

For retailers building retail media businesses, that question is becoming unavoidable . When advertising determines which products shoppers see first, where does merchandising end and media begin?

2 Objectives

Merchants have competing reasons to place a product prominently.

Merchandising.…