Most trend pieces for 2026 will tell you to add AI to your stack. A few will highlight TikTok Shop. Most will remind you that email marketing still has the best ROI.
They’re not wrong. They’re just not the conversation that matters.
The market context is real enough. Global ecommerce sales are projected to reach $6.88 trillion in 2026, with online retail accounting for 21.1% of all retail sales worldwide. The number of online shoppers will climb to 2.86 billion, close to a third of the global population. The opportunity is large. That’s precisely why the structural shifts happening underneath it matter so much.
The question I think a lot of D2C founders haven’t sat with yet is whether their business model still makes sense in a world where the customer journey is increasingly being navigated for customers, rather than by them. That’s not hyperbole. It’s already happening, quietly, in ways that don’t show up cleanly in your attribution reports.
I’ve already seen the early version of this play out. In a recent conversation with a D2C founder, we were looking at a sudden drop in product page traffic for a hero SKU. Nothing obvious had changed, conversion rate was stable and paid spend was flat. What had changed was that customers were increasingly arriving with a decision already made, asking fewer questions and skipping comparison behaviour altogether. The website still mattered, but it was no longer where the decision was happening.
Here’s what I’m actually paying attention to.
The customer is starting to leave the building
Agentic commerce has been discussed in tech circles for a year or more, but it’s now close enough to practice that it belongs in your strategy conversations, not just your reading list.
The premise is simpler than it sounds. A customer sets their preferences once and their AI assistant handles everything else: comparing options, reading reviews, checking delivery times, placing the order. The customer never visits your website. In some cases, they might not even know which brand they ended up buying from.
Shopify has been investing significantly here. Not because it’s theoretical, but because they can see what’s coming in transaction data. The platform’s entire AI tooling roadmap is built around the assumption that a meaningful share of online purchases will soon be initiated by agents rather than humans browsing stores.
The uncomfortable implication for brands: the point of differentiation is shifting from storytelling and visual design toward product data quality. An AI agent cannot be moved by a beautiful homepage. It can read a structured product specification. If your product data is incomplete, inconsistent, or hard to parse, you’ll be filtered out of consideration before a human ever sees you.
The brands that win in an agentic world are the ones that are clearest, not the ones that are loudest.
The search landscape changed while most brands were looking elsewhere
In one of my previous blogs, I wrote about how evaluation is increasingly happening before customers reach a website. Much of what's driving that shift is what's now being called GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation
When a consumer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview for a product recommendation, there is no page two. There is no second chance. The AI either cites your brand or it doesn’t, and the factors that determine that outcome are different from what drove traditional SEO.
All the usual signals still apply — authority, content clarity, how consistently your product information holds up across third-party sources. What's changed is what they're in service of. AI systems reward brands that are easy to understand, not brands that are hard to resist.
Traditional ecommerce conversion was often built on persuasion: the right image, the right copy, the right urgency trigger at the right moment. GEO doesn’t reward persuasion. It rewards reliability. Brands that show up reliably across third-party sources, with clear information and decent reviews, are the ones that get recommended
Most brands haven’t started adjusting their content and SEO strategy for this. The ones that do in 2026 will have a meaningful head start that compounds over time, in the same way that brands who took organic search seriously in 2012 compounded an advantage for years.
Social commerce has outgrown being called a channel
I’ve watched brands treat social commerce as a bolt-on for years: something that sits alongside the main website strategy, managed by a separate team, measured by a separate set of metrics. That framing is now a liability.
For younger consumers, TikTok and Instagram have replaced Google as the starting point for product discovery. That means the first impression your brand makes, the first evaluation a customer forms, is happening on platforms that your website team often has no visibility into and your traditional analytics can’t adequately capture.
The social commerce strategies that are working in 2026 aren’t brand-led. They’re creator-led. The most effective brands are giving creators genuine latitude to represent their products in their own voice, accepting that authenticity (which often means messiness) matters more than message control.
That’s a harder cultural shift than it sounds. The instinct to approve every piece of content, to protect brand guidelines, to keep the narrative consistent. It runs directly counter to what actually sells on these platforms. The brands winning in social commerce have learned to hold their brand standards loosely enough that creators can do their job.
First-party data is no longer a future priority
There’s been noise about the death of third-party cookies for years. In 2026, the practical consequences are no longer something you can defer.
The precision that brands got used to from Facebook and Google ads is degrading. The precision that came from targeting exactly the right person at exactly the right moment based on cross-web behaviour is eroding. Not disappearing, but degrading in ways that are now showing up in CAC, in ROAS, in the general feeling that paid channels are working less predictably than they were two or three years ago.
The answer isn’t to find a new third-party workaround. The answer is to build direct relationships that don’t depend on rented access to someone else’s audience.
Email lists that people actually want to be on. SMS that earns its place in someone’s inbox. Quizzes and preference centres that give customers a reason to share information directly with you. Loyalty programmes that generate behavioural data as a byproduct of real customer value.
These aren’t marketing tactics. They’re assets. And they compound in a way that paid audience access never will.
The brands in the strongest position right now are the ones who have been building owned audiences for years, not because they predicted this moment, but because it was always good practice. Most brands didn’t plan for this. They just did the unglamorous work early.
What ties all of this together
Agentic commerce, GEO, creator-led social commerce, first-party data: none of these are independent trends. They’re different expressions of the same underlying movement.
The customer journey is fragmenting. The moment brand awareness is formed, the moment a product is evaluated, and the moment a purchase is made are pulling further apart. And different rules apply at each of those moments.
What holds this together is the same principle I wrote about last month: the brands that are easiest to understand, safest to recommend, and hardest to misinterpret are the ones that benefit from every one of these shifts. Clarity is becoming the most durable competitive advantage in ecommerce.
The complexity of 2026 is real. But it’s not evenly distributed. If your fundamentals are right (clean product data, genuine brand presence, owned customer relationships), most of these trends work in your favour.
The question is whether you’re building for the version of ecommerce that’s arriving, or optimising harder for the one that’s already leaving.