Ecommerce looks to be facing something of a sea change going into 2026. Generative AI has upended discovery, possibly to the point of taking over the shopping journey entirely - depending on how bullish you are on agentic commerce - and is reshaping the customer experience.
Beyond this, brands and retailers are facing other concerns in the form of economic uncertainty and consumer spending cutbacks, which pile on the pressure to deliver amidst squeezed budgets. What skills will be vital for success? How are brands doing more with less? And what trends should they ignore - and prioritise?
Following on from our look at the influence of GenAI and agentic on the customer experience, we turned again to a roster of ecommerce and retail media experts to find out what they think.
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The consumer path to purchase is getting increasingly complex. Brands can no longer rely on old tactics if they want to appeal to their target audiences. Instead, they need to look to new technologies that help them utilise the data they have to ensure effective targeting.
The only tool that can process the vast amount of data needed to feed campaigns in this way is AI, but it's a black box, and requires marketers to let go of a bit of control. In traditional marketing, we have been able to define personas, but AI goes further, detecting insights on a much more granular, user-by-user basis.
If marketers are willing to use it, [AI] can clarify whether someone should be targeted by an ad and the likelihood of their conversion. Its ability to recognise hidden patterns and make precise decisions based on user intent, all in a millionth of a heartbeat, can ensure campaigns remain relevant while increasing ROAS.
…The hyper-personalised nature of AI, particularly deep learning, will come into its own in 2026, converting the large data pools brands have into structured insights that can be applied to individual users.
This can be layered on top of machine learning-based solutions to drive results from complex, multi-touch journeys. This ensures that brands reach non-obvious converters that others may miss.
There are two elephants in the room (a bit cramped!). One is AI, and the other is retail media. Will or won't AI change online shopping? Will or won't retail media integrate with organic relevance?
AI is a growing channel, but not necessarily an incremental one. Retailers need to invest in enabling this behaviour shift with technologies like retail Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agentic interoperability and Adaptive Transformer Search in order to meet customers where they are with the rise of conversational queries in traditional search bars.
Retail media is incremental, but it is currently siloed from the rest of the retail experience. Deeper, vertical integration with the same algorithms that power your experience across the retailing web is what is needed to grow retail media in a way that is accretive, not destructive, to the customer experience.
The elephant in the room at the moment is margins.
They are being squeezed and everyone knows the story and understands the solutions (discount less, don't focus on bottom-of-funnel only, invest in community and brand building) but the even bigger elephant is revenue - the pressure to deliver is fighting against the margins.
Consumer sentiment and fear of recession in the US. That is broader than just ecommerce but it is one of the primary drivers of the spending patterns we have seen across this year - and it will continue to play out in Christmas purchasing.
Most retailers have fallen behind the expectations of modern shoppers. AI isn't the real threat, the quality gap in onsite experience is.
Search is weak, navigation is clunky, personalisation is inconsistent, and product data is messy. Meanwhile, Google Shopping, TikTok and Amazon have raised the bar for what "good" looks like. AI is simply revealing these weaknesses faster and with less mercy.
It's a 'prove it or lose it' year. Despite WARC and the Advertising Association predicting a rise from £46bn to £49bn in spend, we will see CMOs funnelling spend into performance, automation, and first-party data anything that shrinks CAC or grows LTV. Everything else will be likely cut or consolidated.
Budgets are shifting toward performance, predictability and profitability. Retailers and brands are cutting anything that doesn't prove measurable value fast.
Spend is moving toward channels that can show incremental impact and toward technology that reduces cost to serve. The squeeze is real, but it's accelerating a healthier discipline across the industry.
Brands are investing more money into the channels they see delivering results. Two examples spring to mind.
The first is retail media. Brands like it because it's so close to the point of purchase, and they can use the consented transactional data [the networks] have on their customers to target them very precisely and effectively. It is suffering from some growing pains, most notably fragmentation, but these will be ironed out, and it will prove to be an important channel for many years to come.
The second is Connected TV (CTV). With fragmented audiences and fewer marquee programmes that can attract viewers in the huge numbers of 20 years ago, CTV is a place where advertisers can find hard-to-reach audiences with innovative, interactive ad formats that create real engagement with consumers.
Budgets have been in constant flux in 2025. As such, marketers have needed their investments to work harder. I'd expect we will see this continue as we enter 2026.
At the same time, consumers are being cautious with their spending, as seen by the decline in purchasing during the Black Friday sales. In addition, advertisers are telling us they, too, have pulled back from this promotional event this year and, more generally, from big-discount flash sales. While many will still participate, the structure, intensity and nature of promotions seem to be evolving.
Changes in how budgets are being used don't necessarily have to impact marketing effectiveness, though. Instead, marketers need to be more strategic. Harnessing AI-powered tools, for example, can drive efficiencies and maximise ROI. This is particularly important as users become increasingly difficult to reach.
But the answer really is less is more - use fewer, smarter tools in unison to ensure the right audiences are targeted at when they are in the right mindset.
Teams need structured problem-solving, data fluency and AI fluency more than ever. The missing skill is the ability to translate AI capabilities into workflow changes and business outcomes.
There's no shortage of people who know AI terminology. What's missing are operators and leaders who can redesign processes, decisions and metrics around an AI-driven future.
The skills that will be most in demand are those that can harness the power of AI and guide it intelligently to deliver the best outcomes for both the advertiser and the consumer.
AI is great at automating and making sense of vast amounts of data; less good when it comes to intuition, creativity and nuance. People with the skills to guide AI systems most effectively will be in great demand. Sadly, for the moment, I think they are also the ones most likely to be missing.
At Econsultancy we like to talk about evolving and evergreen skills. Evergreen skills are those that are foundational, like strategic thinking, creativity and customer understanding.
Evolving skills are the ones that change in line with the tech, media and customer landscape. We see gaps across both, but if I was to create a priority list it would be - critical thinking, AI understanding and data-driven decision making. All of which are requirements to be effective in ecommerce and to drive growth.
I think the skills most in demand will be around creative - whilst you could have loads of versions outputted, I think the skills in using these systems are still with the few, not the many.
The one trend I wish everyone would stop talking about is AI image creators. They are a key focus, but at the moment, they are not there yet for the masses. If you want evidence, look at all the AI-generated images of people with six fingers.
I wish everyone would stop talking about the reach and the dominance of the walled gardens. Their power is evaporating as customer acquisition costs rise and signal strength diminishes.
While few people would advocate abandoning the walled gardens completely, I would like to see organisations really focus on and commit to expanding their use of the open web … [It] can deliver many of the new customers the walled gardens can, often at a lower cost, and with a greater degree of transparency to enable advertisers to test different creatives and optimise towards the best-performing.
We need to stop pretending AI is going to replace every step of the shopping journey. It distracts from the real work. The priority should be modernising onsite infrastructure and product data.
If your site is slow, your taxonomy is broken, or your content is outdated, AI cannot save you. In 2026, retailers win through clarity, structure and speed.
Tapping into AI data insights will enable retailers to offer more authentic recommendations and create shopping experiences that feel highly personal for 2026. For the modern consumer, time is of the essence, and AI-powered checkout systems will also be key to increasing the likelihood of conversions to sales.
Loyalty programmes are also on the rise, with 71% of gen Zs and 72% of millennials saying they're more likely to join a loyalty programme now than they were a year ago. This creates great opportunities for retailers to turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers.
But traditional punch cards and basic points systems won't cut it anymore. Successful loyalty programmes must be omnichannel, easily accessible online and in-store, and offer personalised perks such as early access, exclusive product input, and tailored discounts, motivating customers to enrol and buy again and again.
Many online retailers are missing a trick. Traditional loyalty programmes have enabled the retailer to amass valuable, granular transactional data on their customers, and this is what has fuelled much of the retail media revolution.
However, the obsession with audiences and segments actually leads to a poor customer experience, missing opportunities to capture real-time intent, cross-sell and up-sell as modern machine learning and AI search technologies now enable.
Mindsets stuck in legacy keyword and segment-based advertising, and manual merchandising need to modernise to stay current. For advertisers and retailers, learning about how the hard tech works will pay dividends in 2026.
My outrageous prediction is that digital detox is going to be real - consumers will become fed up with noise and AI content, and I think we may see a rise in old-school channels and formats.
