eCommerce Expo 2026 | what we saw, and what it means for retailers
JH-ers Nick (Customer Success Manager), Vicki (Marketing Manager), and Solutions Specialists Tom J and Tom G, spent last Wednesday and Thursday at ExCeL London for eCommerce Expo. We run Meet Magento UK every year, so two days on a show floor is a walk in the park for the team, but still a regular part of our calendar.
Five different stages ran sessions on agentic AI this year, from OpenAI and Shopify’s How agentic commerce is reshaping retail to Adobe’s live demo of agent-ready commerce and Fastly’s take on the emerging bot economy. It’s clearly a theme retailers were meant to leave with, so here’s what the JH team made of it – and what it means if you weren’t in the room.
Agentic AI is a data problem before it becomes a search problem
Between Agentic Commerce: designing for a world where AI decides first and Fastly’s Mastering the bot economy, the message across the AI stage was consistent:
Shopping is moving from search to autonomous agents comparing, deciding and buying on a shopper’s behalf.
We’ve watched discovery tech go through a few of these cycles, and our view hasn’t changed:
An agent is only as good as the data it’s reading. If your product data is inconsistent, or if stock levels don’t update in real time, or if your APIs don’t talk to each other cleanly, no amount of agent sophistication will fix that.
So before anyone spends on the shiny new conversational search layer: get the taxonomy clean, get inventory live and get the APIs actually connecting. The front end can only be as smart as the back end allows it to be.
The team also noticed that several of these sessions doubled as live demos for the platform speaking, so it’s worth keeping in mind that the specifics are from a vendor’s own roadmap, rather than independent research. Consider it a signal on industry direction, rather than a specific direction on how to get there.
Elsewhere on stage, Incard’s Managing Director, Klaas Van Raaij, made the case for AI governance well:
“Give AI a career path, not the keys.”
A grounding statement, based on the excitement elsewhere: know what your agent can actually access before you switch it on.
Retention still wins, because the fundamentals haven’t moved
Panels like how brands earn loyalty and trust in an age of infinite choice, and Loop Subscriptions churn is a choice kept retention and lifetime value central, which isn’t surprising. Acquisition costs are still high, so keeping the customers you already have is what keeps the needle moving.
A talk worth watching was TALA and Klaviyo’s, which walked through how TALA turned one-off buyers into repeat customers, with real numbers behind real decisions, rather than a platform pitch. The wider message on the stage followed a more regular drumbeat: loyalty programmes and personalised marketing help, but the real differentiator is more boring than that – a site that’s easy to check out on, a commerce platform, ERP and warehouse system that actually talk to each other; delivery tracking that doesn’t leave people guessing. Get that right, and loyalty tends to follow on its own.
Peak season is starting earlier… again
IMRG’s Black Friday forecast took place at Ecommerce Expo too. Health and beauty – haircare especially – and electricals are tipped to perform strongest this year, and promotional calendars keep creeping earlier. 15% of retailers were live with offers by Halloween 2025, slated to rise to 21% by 3 November this year. If your promo calendar isn’t locked yet, that’s the biggest steer you need for the direction it’s heading.
The best part was the floor, not the stage
For the JH-ers in attendance, the real value was catching up with partners, running into clients we hadn’t seen in a while, and meeting with others we’ve only chatted to via screens or Slack.
We’ve organised massive community events ourselves, so we know what goes into pulling one off: the people and businesses in attendance. It’s always great to see a community in one place. For Marketing Manager, Vicki, who was at her first ecommerce event, learning more about how the industry operates outside of the Magento and Adobe community was insightful – but seeing how the community showed up to Ecomm Expo was also impressive; well done, all.
If you were at ExCeL last week and want to know what any of this looks like for your stack, we’ll tell you – straight – what it would actually take to build. The trends are the easy part, and trade shows are great at surfacing those, but that’s not where the work happens. Contact us today.
