Strategy

Six personalisation strategies driving mobile commerce in 2025

Today we’re reapproaching the topic we originally wrote about in 2019 Three personalisation techniques to drive mobile sales.

Mobile isn’t “the smaller version of your site” anymore. For many customers, it is the shop.

Scroll habits, short sessions, and thumb-first navigation mean the old approach – squeeze a desktop journey into a narrow layout and hope for the best – simply doesn’t hold up. What actually moves the needle now is personalisation: using data and context to make a mobile visit feel relevant, quick, and low-risk.

The six strategies below reflect how retailers are really driving mobile revenue in 2025, drawing on Tom’s observations and the data points shared in his talk, rather than wishful thinking.

1. AI recommendations: from “also bought” to “actually helpful.”

Recommendation engines in 2019 mostly did one thing: push related items based on broad patterns. Today’s AI-driven systems behave more like a member of your team watching what a customer does and reacting in real time.

They combine:

• Browse history and search behaviour
• Past purchases and returns
• Product relationships and live sales patterns

Retailers that get this right are seeing around 40% more revenue than those that don’t. ¹ 

Senior leaders have noticed: more than 60% of executives now see better engagement through personalisation as a core growth driver. ²

To make this useful on mobile, treat each surface differently instead of dumping the same carousel everywhere:

Example:
A customer lands on a category page from a TikTok home makeover video.

• On that category page, recommendations prioritise in-stock products at the right price band.
• On product pages, suggestions focus on genuinely complementary items (paint + tools; dress + jacket), not just more of the same.
• In the basket, recommendations switch to “complete the job” items that increase order value without feeling pushy.

The shift is simple: pair your data model with intent, not vanity. The question to ask is, “What is this shopper trying to achieve on this screen, on this device, right now?”

2. AR and VR: confidence for big-ticket decisions

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are no longer gimmicks you stick on the homepage once a year. In higher-value categories, they quietly remove doubt.

Think about a customer:

• Checking whether a corner sofa overwhelms a small living room
• Seeing if a paint colour clashes with the flooring
• Trying on glasses or trainers without visiting a store

On mobile, AR helps with three very practical questions: Will it fit? Will it suit the space? Will I regret this? If a purchase is in the hundreds or thousands of pounds, those questions decide whether the basket reaches checkout.

Where AR and VR tend to work hardest:

• Furniture and homeware where size and proportion are hard to judge
• DIY and home improvement, where lighting and surfaces matter
• Fashion and accessories where “try-on” reduces returns

You don’t need an AR version of every product to see value. A focused rollout on a few key categories, with clear tracking on conversion and returns, will tell you more than a slick brand film ever will.

3. Mobile checkout: make the last 30 seconds boring

Checkout is the one part of the journey that doesn’t need to be exciting. It needs to be predictable, short, and easy to fix if something goes wrong.

The move from “desktop shrunk down” to truly mobile-first design has had the most impact here. Mobile users are several times more likely to abandon if the journey is clumsy, and payment behaviour has followed suit – more than half of online transactions globally in 2024 used a mobile wallet, with the UK already at around 40% and tracking upwards to close to 68% by 2030. ³

A useful way to review this with your team is to map friction against what you can personalise:

The target state is a checkout that feels familiar after the first use. If you need to explain how to pay, it’s already too complicated.

4. Push, SMS, and WhatsApp: messaging that earns its place

Customers still read email, but they live in messaging apps. That’s why push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and in-app messages have become such important parts of the mobile experience.

The raw numbers explain why retailers have moved quickly:

• App notifications can hit open rates close to 90%. ⁴
• WhatsApp sits between 90–99% open rates. ⁵
• Over half of users prefer marketing and order updates through WhatsApp. ⁶
• Roughly 72% are more likely to respond when the message feels tailored to them. ⁷

What’s changed is how these channels are used. Strong teams tend to split their thinking:

Operational messages

• Order confirmations
• Delivery updates and delivery slot changes
• Returns progress

These build trust and cut support tickets.

Commercial and engagement messages

• Back-in-stock alerts
• Price-drop nudges for wish-listed items
• Targeted campaigns based on category interest

These drive repeat visits and extra revenue – if you show restraint. Volume is the quickest way to lose permission.

A simple rule that works: if the message doesn’t either answer a question the customer already has or offer real value based on behaviour, don’t send it.

5. Unified data: a single view that actually gets used

For a long time, personalisation projects stalled because data was scattered: ecommerce platforms, point-of-sale systems, email tools, apps, marketplaces, all telling slightly different stories.

Unified data modelling has started to fix this. Retailers are pulling together:

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) records
• Store and call-centre transactions
• Ecommerce and app behaviour
• Marketplace orders and returns

…and attaching it to one customer profile, rather than a long list of IDs.

The commercial upside is clear:

• Retailers using unified commerce models have seen revenue growth multiply compared with previous approaches. ⁸
• Brands using unified data for personalisation report customer spend rose by 38%. ⁹
• Strong omnichannel strategies correlate with customer retention close to 89%, versus around 33% where that connection is missing. ¹⁰

To move from theory to practice, focus on three questions in your own setup:

1. What counts as a customer record?
   Agree on a single definition and ID structure across teams.
2. Which events matter most for personalisation?
   For example: first purchase, first return, high-value order, first app install, churn risk signals.
3. Where do those events need to show up?
   Think very specifically: “Product listing page on mobile”, “search results”, “post-purchase flows”, not just “the website”.

Mobile sits at the centre because it’s the one device people use across every context, from sofa browsing to in-store checks. If your unified data doesn’t flow into your mobile experiences, you’re only doing half the job.

6. TikTok and social: personalisation in the wild

The social landscape that mattered in 2019 – mostly Facebook and Instagram – has changed. For discovery, especially in younger and trend-driven segments, TikTok now sets the pace.

TikTok Shop has sped this up:

• Around 75% of UK TikTok users say they’re likely to buy directly from the platform. ¹¹
• Over 80% of users say user-generated content (UGC) makes brands feel more authentic. ¹²
• UGC is responsible for the majority of brand engagement on TikTok. ¹³

Rather than treating TikTok as just another ad channel, retailers are using it as a live research and personalisation source.

Some practical patterns:

What people see in their feed shapes what they expect from your site
If a customer arrives from a TikTok clip showing a “£100 bedroom refresh”, and your mobile product listing page starts with £600 bundles, the experience breaks.

Creators point you at real questions to answer
Comments under popular videos are full of objections and edge cases. Those can feed directly into FAQs, product copy, and even filters on mobile.

UGC doesn’t have to stay on TikTok
Shoppable galleries, real-home photos, and short clips on your own product pages help close the gap between inspiration and purchase.

The aim isn’t to copy TikTok’s style everywhere. It is to make sure that when TikTok sends you traffic, the mobile journey feels like a natural continuation, not a completely different shop.

Bringing it together

Across all six strategies, the pattern is straightforward:

• Use AR and VR where customers are nervous about getting it wrong
• Let AI recommendations respond to intent, not just push stock
• Treat mobile checkout as something to simplify relentlessly
• Reserve push and messaging for moments that genuinely matter
• Invest in unified data, so personalisation has something solid to stand on
• Let TikTok and UGC inform how you support real-world discovery

You don’t need to do everything at once. Pick the parts of the mobile journey where customers currently hesitate or disappear, and apply personalisation there first. That’s where you’ll feel the commercial impact fastest.

JH – The Breakthrough Agency.

We work as an extension of your team – caring as much about turning visits into revenue as you do. Our strategy, UX, and development work helps ambitious ecommerce brands use personalisation to remove doubt, sharpen mobile journeys, and keep performance moving in the right direction.