Digital vendors and e-commerce businesses enter 2026 facing a radically changed retail landscape, shaped by rising customer expectations, tighter margins, and rapid advances in AI-driven commerce technology.
The most significant and persistent challenge for e-commerce retailers in 2025 was ever-increasing customer expectations for hyper-personalization and immersive experiences, particularly the difficulty of building purchase confidence without in-person product interaction. Retailers made progress in basic personalization, but consumer demand for digital experiences that rival physical stores remains a margin-eroding hurdle.
Several forces drove this gap. Traditional 2D product images and generic descriptions no longer satisfy customers seeking one-to-one, hyper-personalized experiences. At the same time, privacy laws and ethical data requirements have limited how freely retailers can collect and apply customer data, complicating personalization efforts. Add in the rising costs of fast delivery and free returns, and the result is continued pressure on already thin retail margins.
The primary accomplishments that helped retailers make significant progress in 2025 centered on artificial intelligence (AI) and omnichannel integration, directly addressing pain points in efficiency and experience. Those innovations will burst forward in 2026.
Retailers moved beyond generic segmentation to deploy predictive AI that analyzed real-time behavior. They brought dynamically adjusted website content, better product recommendations, and dynamic pricing for individual shoppers. The result led to a higher average order value (AOV) and customer retention.
Also expect to see more retailers transition away from rigid, all-in-one platforms to a modular, “headless” approach. This approach will enable them to launch new social commerce channels and IoT integrations, and to integrate a new AI search tool more quickly to keep up with shifting consumer trends in a competitive market.
One of the most anticipated technological changes for e-commerce in 2026 will be a shift to recentering strategies on lowering the total cost of ownership while scaling globally and strengthening omnichannel execution, suggested Mariano Gomide de Faria, founder and co-CEO of connected commerce firm Vtex. Brands are leaving behind legacy systems with tool-heavy stacks in favor of unified platforms that simplify operations, consolidate inventory, and enable store-based fulfillment without added cost.
“Unified platforms will become the default digital architecture for retailers and brands in 2026. This will not be seen as innovation, but survival, since fragmented stacks cannot support the scale and flexibility modern commerce demands,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Agentic AI Becomes Mandatory Infrastructure
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AI is arguably the most significant technological innovation to race through commercial circles. But more capable relatives — generative AI and agentic AI — are the most powerful tools for e-commerce workers. Those two variants will take on more tasks related to the digital customer journey, shopping assistants, fraud detection, purchasing, and payment transactions, among others.
Valentin Vasilyev, CTO and co-founder at digital fraud ID firm Fingerprint, sees AI agents forcing e-commerce firms to reassess their fraud detection. AI agents will become even more common in everyday life, and more companies will launch their own.
“E-commerce companies that fail to adopt foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce will find themselves in a difficult position. They’ll either face a sharp decline in conversions and rising false positives by blocking legitimate, authorized purchases, or they’ll be forced to accept high-risk transactions,” he predicted.
According to Nick Blasi, co-founder and COO of relationship AI platform Personos, by the end of 2026, the novelty of AI that “gets things done” will fade.
“Tools that ignore human nuance, including tone, temperament, personality, and emotional bandwidth, will quickly feel obsolete. The next wave of AI will be judged by how well it adapts to each individual,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
In the New Year, he expects people to ask AI for communication advice more than they ask Google for information. Search engines find information. AI will increasingly solve dilemmas. That will extend to commerce as well.
“Teams will treat relationship intelligence as essential infrastructure. The most competitive teams in 2026 will use AI to better understand one another. Leaders will rely on AI to spot working-style mismatches, anticipate friction points, and personalize communication to reduce the human drag created by misunderstandings, assumptions, and avoidable conflict,” he offered.
Payment Automation Accelerates
Randy Modos, president and co-founder of PayJunction, envisions surcharging normalization, real-time reconciliation, and compliance automation becoming dominant forces in payments. Surcharging will shift from being an exception to an expectation in industries where margins are tight and card costs are rising.
“The big opportunity in 2026 will be tightly integrating Buy Now, Pay Later [BNPL] directly into business management systems. When BNPL options live inside the workflows practices already use, adoption will rise naturally,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
The next phase of growth will be driven by flexibility rather than exclusivity. Technologies like no-code integration will allow businesses to choose the BNPL provider that best fits their needs without requiring custom development, he explained.
“This creates a more open and competitive environment while ensuring reconciliation and compliance stay consistent across payment methods,” he said.
Joao Moura, CEO of CrewAI, predicts that by the end of 2026, every Fortune 500 company will have established a dedicated agents function. These teams will be tasked with deploying, monitoring, and governing AI agent systems at enterprise scale.
“2025 was the year AI started shifting from models to systems, and success isn’t just about autonomy or intelligence anymore. It’s about trust and scale. Large organizations will establish internal Agent Factories,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
These structured environments will house design, testing, and deployment of multi-agent workflows that deliver measurable ROI while maintaining control, he added.
AI Redefines Mobile Commerce
David Hunter, CEO of AI search visibility platform Local Falcon, shared that e-commerce is already starting to feel less like online shopping and more like having a personal virtual shopping assistant. Consumers no longer sort through endless tabs. Instead, they ask AI for precisely what they need and get exact, instant, tailored answers.
“As this trend continues to shift and evolve, retailers need to ensure their product data, reviews, pricing, and inventory are clean, consistent, and easily understood by AI systems. If not, they risk being left out of the conversation entirely,” he added.
He predicted that when agentic AI begins to place and manage orders autonomously, real-time accuracy on product availability will be crucial. The brands that adapt and make themselves easily discoverable and scannable will be the true winners of 2026.
Alex Campbell, co-founder of mobile engagement platform Vibes, views a rapid rise in mobile commerce as 2026 becomes the year rich communication services (RCS) replaces SMS/MMS messaging with richer visuals, essentially turning your native text messaging into an app-like experience.
“RCS will open up app-like experiences for people who don’t have a brand’s app, which is most consumers of any given brand. It expands functionality to people who may not be willing to commit to downloading an app, opening up new ways for brands to communicate and interact with customers whom they have always wished would download their app,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Packaging Predictions That Speed Fulfillment
Anant Parte, executive director for R&D at Sealed Air, is sure that e-commerce fulfillment will move aggressively toward mailer-first workflows as brands seek faster, leaner pack stations.
“We expect fulfillment operations that rely heavily on corrugated boxes today will shift toward mailer-first packaging strategies. The driving factors will be pack speed, packer decision fatigue, and space constraints,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Parte explained that the era of sprawling automation islands will give way to compact, modular systems that integrate into existing pack benches. Fulfillment operations will prioritize equipment that can mount on swing arms, fit into tight stations, auto-dispense materials, and support ergonomic workflow design.
Automated bagging could become one of the fastest-growing automation segments in e-commerce due to labor shortages and cycle-time pressure, according to Parte.
In 2026, brands will look for partners who can optimize the entire pack station from materials to ergonomics to layout, with retailers increasingly expecting packaging suppliers to deliver complete workflow engineering, not just materials.
