What your agency probably didn’t tell you this September
If you’re a regular subscriber of Friday Five, you’ll know that September gave UK ecommerce four weeks of the same question asked in different ways. Retailers assume loyalty schemes buy loyalty; that product pages carry weight with AI shopping agents; that return fees won’t cost them a customer.
Most of this month’s Friday Five stories have tested one of those assumptions against actual evidence – and the gap between the two was usually wider than expected.
Here’s what happened across AI, security, returns, deliver and the wider market. A month of stories your agency probably didn’t tell you.
AI is changing who gets chosen. Not just how people search.
Discovery is now more agentic leaning than ever. Checkout hasn’t caught up – and shoppers don’t trust the gap to close on its own.
MACH Alliance research across more than 1000 UK consumers found two-thirds already use AI to search for and discover products. But only 9% trust an agent to complete a purchase alone.
The average spending cap people set for an AI agent sits at £149, ranging from £67 for Baby Boomers to £235 for Millennials.
Discovery is agentic already. Checkout still needs a human to say yes.
UK shoppers are also the most skeptical in the room. Research spanning the UK, France and Germany found 41% of Brits trust no one to run an AI shopping agent, and only 23% expect AI to drive a tenth of their purchases within a year, against 33% globally. The three things that would actually build trust:
- Easy cancellation
- Instant permission revocation
- Mandatory review step before purchase
What’s actually feeding these agents matters more than most brands realise. An analysis of over 43,000 products found 83% of ChatGPT’s shopping carousel matched Google’s top 40 Shopping results, and feed-sourced listings carried complete merchant and brand data 100% of the time, against 0% for anything scraped from a page. Product pages scored just 63.5 for AI readability, well below the low 80s that homepages managed. Feed quality is starting to outweigh the page itself.
Visibility doesn’t follow traffic either. A new index scoring 59 UK fashion retailers on their ChatGPT, Google AI and Gemini citations put Harrods and Whistles at the top. Next came last, despite 21.6 million monthly UK visits. The gap came down to editorial coverage and credible mentions elsewhere – not traffic or ad spend.
And, when an AI agent does have a recommendation? Most shoppers still ignore it. Bazaarvoice and Kiri Masters found that when shown alternatives, 65% of shoppers picked a brand they already knew over the AI’s top pick – and more than half wanted a discount of 50% or more before trying an unfamiliar one. It’s a vendor-funded study, but the direction is that AI is raising the bar for proof, rather than lowering it.
That bar for proof is already tripping brands up. M11 Labs‘ first look at the skincare category found 47% of brands lack independently verifiable evidence for the claims on their own product pages – and only 1 in 20 evidence links actually confirm what they’re citing.
Klaviyo‘s answer to the same problem: its latest update pulls live review data into its AI customer agent, so a shopper’s question gets a real rating and a verified quote, instead of static product copy. Reviews are turning into training material, not just page decoration – and most brands review content isn’t structured well enough to be useful in that way yet.
Worth checking in October: would your product feed and reviews give an AI agent – or a skeptical human – enough evidence to switch?
A zero-day that moved faster than most incident plans
StyleSmuggler, the Magento and Adobe Commerce zero-day, scored a maximum 10 out of 10 on the industry’s severity scale when it broke cover on 4 September. One tracked server went from first hit to fully backdoored in under an hour.
Whether your own platform was hit is almost beside the point. What matters more is whether your agency can say – confidently – where it stood at each point on the clock:
- Discovery
- Mitigation
- Patch
- Verification
Most teams weren’t able to, and the gaps in that sequence were the most revealing.
Returns and data rules are tightening around retailers
Free returns are becoming the exception, not the default. Across the UK’s top 100 fashion retailers, 35% now charge for returns, up from 23% in 2023 – and none that introduced a fee has walked it back. Luxury brands are following the same path now too. 0% charged for returns in 2023, 12% do now.
Enforcement is catching up too. Which? sent mystery shoppers to test more than 200 items across 17 retailers. River Island and Sports Direct refunded none of the delivery fees they owed. Boots, Halfords, Pets at Home and Superdrug failed almost every time. UK law entitles customers to their delivery cost back on a full return, not just the price of the product – and several big names aren’t paying it.
Meanwhile, most shoppers don’t know their own data rights have changed. Accenture‘s UK research found that 68% are unaware of the Data (Use and Access) Act, in force since June 2025. This brings easier analytics cookies, looser AI-personalisation rules and cleaner grounds for legitimate-interest marketing. At the same time, 59% say data-safety worries shape which brands they buy from, explaining that trade off is truly a real trust advantage right now – and almost no one is using it.
Delivery speed keeps resetting the baseline
IGD forecasts UK quick commerce reaching £5.5bn by 2031. Sainsbury’s is already past £700m in sales, up 69% year-on-year, and Tesco Whoosh has passed £400m, up 51%. Getir and Gorillas both burned out and left the UK in 2024; the supermarkets simply absorbed the demand they left behind without missing a beat. A sector written off after those exits is now one of the clearer growth signals in the market.
Amazon pushed the pace once again by expanding its 30-minutes-or-less delivery to Manchester and Birmingham. It’s also added fresh fruit and veg to the same-day grocery service, with London next for roll out. Amazon is folding groceries into the same infrastructure it runs everything else through, rather than treating it as a separate proposition, and as a result, every UK retailer’s delivery speed baseline just moved again.
What the market numbers are actually saying
Two Office for National Statistics (ONS) retail releases came out this month, covering July and August. Together, they show a less than tidy picture than either standalone report suggests.
In July, overall retail sales were up 1.6% year-on-year, but online’s share of that spending fell to 28.3% to 29.2% in June, even though the value of online spending still grew 6.5% year-on-year.
In August, online’s share rose again to 28.8% – the highest it’s been since spring – alongside a 0.5% rise in overall retail volumes for the month, and a 2.4% rise year-on-year.
In other words: the share of shopping happening online fell, then rose, while the money being spent online kept growing throughout both months. Anyone quoting from these figures should check which month it’s from – and what it’s actually measuring.
American Express published its latest UK Rewards Report this month, looking at how loyalty schemes are actually used. It found that 90% of British adults now belong to at least one loyalty scheme. What’s more, the average loyalty scheme member is signed up to 12 different schemes at once, with shoppers believing they earn rewards on more than a third of what they spend.
McKinsey published B2B research this month comparing retailers that are growing quickly with those that aren’t. It found most B2B sellers have now reached what McKinsey calls the survival threshold: selling across multiple channels, running an online store, and keeping product information consistent wherever it appears.
That used to set a retailer apart. Now it’s just the baseline. The retailers actually pulling ahead to go further are offering one-to-one personalised recommendations four times as often as slower-growing competitors – and they use generative AI tools twice as often. 60% of these faster-growing retailers hit double-digital revenue growth, against 21% of everyone else. Reaching the survival threshold keeps a retailer in the market. The extra steps past it are what decide whether it grows.
The thread underneath all of it
Assumptions rarely announce themselves as wrong. The evidence simply stops backing them up – and September did that to retailers four Fridays running.
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