Ecommerce in the AI era: Four problems. One solution.

Ecommerce brands have never had more technology at their fingertips. You’d think that would make life easier. So why does it still feel so complicated? 

AI can analyse enormous amounts of information in seconds. Automation can remove hours of manual work. Brands have more data about their products, customers and operations than ever before.

But at the same time, regulation is increasing, margins are being squeezed, customers are harder to win (and even harder to keep), and AI isn’t just changing how brands operate – it’s changing how people find and choose what to buy.

The opportunity is enormous. But the infrastructure underneath ecommerce needs to catch up. We see four areas where better technology can make a significant difference.

You’re leaking revenue through cracks in your customer journey

Imagine losing $18billion and then realising it could have been easily avoided? That’s what we’re seeing in ecommerce at the moment.

Across the industry, an estimated $18bn is lost to preventable issues. And around 70% of cart abandonment comes down to poor UX and broken journeys.

Those figures can’t all be blamed on high competition or dire market conditions or even rising costs across the board. It’s down to small, simple friction points. Things that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place.

Returns that are harder than they should be. Subscriptions that are awkward to manage. Clunky pre-order or made-to-order journeys. Individually they may not seem particularly dramatic, but collectively it’s costing brands serious money in conversion, time and margin.

This is where the opportunity lies. Growth doesn’t always have to mean finding more customers. Sometimes it means making it easier for the customers you already have to buy from you. 

Remove those friction points and plug those leaky holes in your buyer journey. 

Stop thinking about compliance as a necessary evil

Legislation is going through the roof. EPR. Plastic taxes. Digital Product Passports. Right to Repair. Sustainability reporting. Carbon reporting. To name a few! 

This is not tomorrow’s problem. It’s already in play. The regulatory landscape for ecommerce is expanding rapidly and it doesn’t show signs of slowing down. 

For most brands, it’s creating a huge amount of manual data processing, often managed through spreadsheets stitched together across multiple teams. And with the risk of calculation errors, missing data or going over regulation thresholds, compliance is becoming one of the most expensive parts of running an ecommerce brand.

But we need to stop thinking about this as a burden. Firstly, the regulations exist for good reasons – more accountability, less waste, better visibility of environmental impact. And secondly, there’s something far more valuable to be gained.

If you want to be one of the brands leading from the front, you’re going to need reliable data foundations that make information more useful to customers and make your brand more discoverable to the technologies they’re increasingly using.

With the right structured data and automation, not only can brands track and manage the impact of what they’re ordering, producing and selling, they can reduce costs, give customers clearer product information and create a feedback loop with suppliers that helps improve future decisions.

The legislation isn’t going away. But the hours of manual work surrounding it don’t have to be inevitable. And with the right system, compliance reporting doesn’t just tick a box, it creates value elsewhere in the business too.

Build trust with customers – and visibility with LLMs

Trust can’t just be something you curate. It needs to be something you can prove.

For years, ecommerce has relied heavily on visible trust signals: reviews, ratings, badges, claims and carefully crafted brand messaging. But consumers are becoming increasingly sceptical of what they see online. They want hard facts. 

Not only that, but as LLM-powered discovery becomes a bigger part of how people research and find products, the brand information available online is even more important. And token claims on your website won’t cut it. Your data needs to be reliable, authoritative, structured – and accessible. 

This is where there is going to be a divide amongst brands. The ones that can clearly demonstrate what their products are, where they come from and the evidence behind the claims they make will be in a very different position from those that can’t.

And if  you want to be one of the brands leading from the front, you’re going to need reliable data foundations that make information more useful to customers and make your brand more discoverable to the technologies they’re increasingly using.

You need the information before the decision, not after 

Margin pressure is hardly the sexiest subject in ecommerce. But it affects almost every decision a brand makes. One of the biggest is merchandising.

Buy too little and a successful product sells out while demand is still there. Buy too much and you’re left discounting stock to shift it. Neither is good for margin. And constant discounting isn’t great for brand reputation either.

Brands know this. They also know what good merchandising looks like. The problem is they’re trying to make fast, SKU-level decisions with incomplete datasets, disconnected systems and manual reporting.

This is an area where AI has enormous potential. Not as a replacement for experienced merchandising teams, but as a way of making those teams significantly more effective. A merchandising engine that can provide live, granular data, so that you can make better decisions while there’s still time to act on them.

Human judgement stays firmly in the driving seat. It just gets much better information to work with.

Four challenges. One common thread.

On the surface, these look like four very different problems. Customer journeys. Compliance. Trust. Merchandising. But look underneath and they start to converge.

Preventable losses are exacerbated by disconnected journeys and workflows. Compliance becomes difficult when product and supply-chain data is fragmented. Trust becomes harder to prove without reliable, structured information. And merchandising decisions become harder when teams can’t access the right data at the right time.

Different problems, same foundation – data. 

And that’s the focus of what we’re building. An operating system for retail and ecommerce that takes messy data and turns it into live, actionable insights. Focused apps that solve specific problems and work together as part of something much bigger. 

The more information the apps gather, the more powerful the infrastructure becomes. Better data. Better infrastructure. Better decisions.

Four big problems. One connected approach to solving them.

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