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Looking to stay on top of all the changes to the ecommerce landscape heading into 2026? Let's look at our ecommerce predictions to stay on top of the game.
Ecommerce might feel universal in 2026, but it’s still expanding at a rapid pace. Despite how widespread the industry might be, it’s still growing massive - 8.3% globally, and climbing.
That contradiction is what makes ecommerce so compelling. Although there’s a massive sum of cash up for grabs, the best ways to get your piece of the pie are always evolving.
Like all industries, advancements in technology, cultural shifts, and commercial trends will play their part, but so too will the techniques and strategies we deploy as the teams behind the scenes.
We’re still figuring out new ways to draw more value from the ecommerce industry, even as we enter our 10th year as an agency - so let’s look forward to our ten ecommerce predictions heading into 2026.
Want to see our predictions from last year? Check out our ecommerce predictions 2025.
If 2025 was one of the most transformative years in ecommerce history, 2026 will only push things further. Whilst businesses en masse were led by the promises of AI throughout 2025 - promises that did indeed come to fruition for many - throughout 2026, the question will be “how do brands return to some sense of ownership?”
Customers have clocked on to AI-adoption. Now the question is “how can brands innovate in an AI-first world?” From the customer-facing visual elements of creative, web design, and email design to the fuel that powers everything behind the scenes - the marketing strategies, website infrastructure, and business strategies - here are our ecommerce predictions for what brands need to do to win in 2026.
We’ve said it once, we've said it 1000 times - if 2023 and 2024 were the years where brands first tested the waters of AI, 2025 is when they dove in headfirst. In fact, mid-year Adobe reports found that 89% of businesses (not just ecommerce) were implementing it in their workflow.
AI behind the scenes is one thing, what we’re focused on is Generative AI - how AI tools like Nano Banana Pro, VEO3, and ChatGPT can create imagery and video from text-based prompts. Ecommerce is a digital industry, and therefore graphic design that can pop off on a phone is always going to play first fiddle to paper and pen - but this has opened up new opportunities for brands to differentiate themselves.
In the last few months of 2025, we saw multiple brands effectively cut through content overload en masse through a return to the physical form.
From Apple’s puppet-led iPhone commercial to Stripe’s use of literal craft paper in their Black Friday campaign - a traditional, art-direction-led shoot can create just as much buzz as it always has, if not more so. So if you have skilled artisans at your disposal who can make an impact within the visual world, 2026 should be the year you give them a shot.
An Omnisend report surveying 1000 customers found that 65% of customers use AI-powered discovery tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find new brands and products, and that 25% go to these platforms before going to Google. That’s a quarter of your potential customer base who are more likely to discover your brand through AI than a traditional Google search.
Whilst it’s scary that such a big shift has happened in such a short period of time, the question you should now be asking is “how do we get our brand to show up in AI searches?”
This is where conversational SEO or GEO, comes into play. Conversational SEO is an approach to writing web content that understands how AI search engines - like ChatGPT - prioritise and respond to natural, human language. The process involves creating content that directly answers users' questions in a conversational tone, using long-tail keywords that mimic how people speak or ask questions. The goal is to get your brand, or its products, to rank for these natural-language queries, which often include full sentences and question-based phrases.
Actually doing this is a bit more complicated.
In a similar fashion to Google’s EEAT ranking system, AI prioritises content that it has determined actually provides valuable information to the customer. This can be answering customer questions, showcasing reviews, or providing educational content. It’s no longer a case of ranking for thin keywords whilst providing minimal value, your site needs to demonstrate an understanding and that you deserve to be in position 1 of Google for a reason.
In the speed-to-market-obsessed world we live in today, you may think that AI search tools rewarding more content-dense pages would mean you can skip out on prioritising the technical seo and markup schema of your website.
When we look at what’s going on behind the scenes when making a search on an AI tool, that idea very quickly fades.
AI can only decipher the content it can see. If your content isn’t visible or marked correctly for whatever reason, ChatGPT isn’t going to waste time making sense of it; it’s going to move on to another brand
AI search tools pull data in chunks, and structured markup schema labels content explicitly, making it more likely to be cited by AI. Therefore, in addition to the conversational SEO we want to implement, making sure your site is structured correctly from a technical SEO point of view is essential.
From metadata to markup schema, there’s a ton you can dive into - the best route is just to make a start.
For UK ecommerce businesses, international expansion into the United States has historically been a major milestone to push for and celebrate. However, with the uncertainty around Donald Trump’s tariff-based financial strategy, and how it affects the entire supply chain, you may be better off looking westwards first.
In 2026, Europe presents a much larger - nevermind easier - opportunity for international expansion than North America. Plus, in Shopify’s Q2 earnings call, they reported a 42% GMV growth in Europe, which was their ninth consecutive quarter with more than 30% growth and roughly 15% of total GMV came from cross-border sales.
All of this is to say, the path to expanding into Europe is not only easier, but likely bears riper fruit than the path to America.
Milking a photoshoot from 2 years ago for all it's worth is all well and good, but it might be time to diversify your ad library somewhat if our findings are anything to go by. Comparing 2024 to 2025, the brands that had the best year-on-year statistics, were brands that had majorly diversified their ad libraries - sometimes running more than twice or three times as many different creatives than before.
This makes sense, just like we’d diversify our ad copy, or email targeting, depending on a customer's behaviours - the fact that more value comes from doing the same with the creative shouldn’t be much of a surprise. ,
From our tests throughout 2025, meta ad accounts with more creative assets in place at once just perform better overall. In fact, all metrics point in the green - from revenue, conversion rate and average order value all increasing to cost per click decreasing.
Traditional best practice would tell you to segment your audience based on key demographics - age, gender, region - and whilst all of those segments remain important, customer behaviour has emerged as the far more powerful indicator of purchase intent.
A 25-year-old in London and a 45-year-old in Manchester might have completely different demographic profiles, but if they've both abandoned cart twice, browsed the same product category, and opened your last three emails, they're exhibiting the same buying signals, and that's what makes an impact.
Behavioural segmentation looks at what customers do rather than who they are - browsing patterns, purchase frequency, email engagement, time spent on site, cart abandonment triggers, and product affinities. These actions tell you far more about someone's likelihood to convert than their age or postcode ever could.
This shift becomes even more critical in light of regulatory changes. A document leaked in November 2025 revealed plans within the EU to significantly reform GDPR laws as we currently know them. Whilst the full implications remain unclear, what is certain is that collecting and owning first-party data from your customers has never been more important.
It means the brands that will thrive in 2026 are the ones building robust first-party data strategies now. So incentivise account creation, run quizzes and surveys in emails, and - most importantly - actually use the behavioural data you're collecting to create smarter campaigns.
In 2025, YouTube’s watch rate on American Television sets peaked at 13.4% - meaning 1 in every 8 switched-on TV’s were tuned into YouTube - a platform that just so happens to be owned by Google.
Google advertising strategies have long been synonymous with search intent and text-based advertising, whilst Meta owned the creative-first approach, but that division is blurring fast.
YouTube display ads are now being consumed in a lean-back, TV-watching context, which means they need to be just as scroll-stopping and visually compelling as anything you'd run on Instagram or TikTok. The creative bar has been raised significantly.
We've seen this first-hand with brands like Hardlines and others in the DTC space - the accounts performing best on Google aren't just optimising for keywords and bidding strategies anymore. They're treating their YouTube and Display creative with the same level of investment and iteration as their Meta campaigns.
This means high-production video content, multiple creative variants for testing, and an understanding that someone watching YouTube on their 55-inch TV needs a different visual approach than someone scrolling on their phone. The days of repurposing your Meta ads with minimal adjustment are over - Google demands creative excellence now too.
The era of one-size-fits-all homepages is over. In 2026, customers expect your website to adapt to them, not the other way around.
Hyper-personalisation tools like Athos Commerce, Nosto, and Dynamic Yield are making it possible to deliver individualised shopping experiences at scale. We're talking about product recommendations that actually feel relevant, search results that learn from browsing behaviour, and homepage layouts that shift based on what each visitor is most likely to engage with.
The magic happens when you combine first-party data (what customers actually do on your site) with smart merchandising rules. Someone who's browsed running shoes three times should see your latest trainers front and centre, not your winter coat collection. A returning customer shouldn't have to scroll past the "New Here?" banner every single visit.
The beauty of modern personalisation platforms is that they don't require a complete site rebuild. Many integrate directly with Shopify, BigCommerce, and other major platforms, allowing you to start testing personalised experiences in no time at all.
“Inclusive web design” (design that removes bias and assumptions about a user’s abilities)has long been treated as a late-stage checklist, but it’s likely to become a core part of design thinking.
As laws like the European Accessibility Act come into effect, inclusive practices become more expected on a cultural level, and accessibility is now both a legal requirement and a creative advantage.
Prioritising cleaner structured content, better colour contrast, and clearer navigation doesn’t just make the experience better for users with visual impairments, but for all site visitors too.
By building inclusively, you can expand your reach, protect your businesses from legal challenges, and strengthen trust by showing that you care for all users.
The EAA imposes immediate and ongoing compliance for all retailers and service providers in the EU. These obligations include:
Less of an ecommerce prediction, more of a way of thinking that’s going to define ecommerce next year.
Our final ecommerce prediction is something we’ve actually known for a long time: your website shouldn't just be a digital storefront - it should be an experience worth exploring. In 2026, the brands winning online are the ones treating their websites like living, breathing content hubs rather than static product catalogues.
Showcase your products in as many ways as possible. From vertical video modules that mirror the TikTok viewing experience to editorial-style photography that tells a story to UGC customer testimonials woven throughout the journey, a content-dense site just invites a user to keep exploring.
Some of our favourite ecommerce websites built this year have been built on these foundations. By prioritising content density and variety, websites become a living expression of a brand and keep users exploring for longer. They create opportunities to build community around your brand and showcase that community on your website in the same way you would on your socials.
This approach also plays directly into the conversational SEO and technical markup we discussed earlier. Provided these content-rich pages are clearly structured for AI search tools, you’ll massively improve your discoverability.
2025 was one of the most transformative years in ecommerce history a,nd its effects will be felt long into 2026. As we fight to understand this evolving landscape, we’re sure there’ll be more changes that we haven’t touched on here and new trends appearing throughout the year too.
Provided your brand has a strong content and marketing strategy throughout the year, with enough flexibility to navigate trends as they appear, you’ll be able to cut through the noise effectively.
If you want help growing your ecommerce business in 2026, contact us, we’d love to hear from you.
Don’t let all that work on your website go to waste, start building an ecommerce marketing funnel that converts with our guide.
Read : How to Build an Ecommerce Marketing Funnel That Converts
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Read: Ecommerce Marketing in 2026. The Tactics You Need to Grow
