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AI isn’t assisting discovery. It’s rewriting it.
Explore how AI is reshaping shopper behavior — and what brands must do to stay visible.
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Ebook: Win Customers Across Every Channel
Get expert insights on data, branding, and marketing strategies to grow sales on every major ecommerce channel.
In a recent webinar, Connected commerce for the modern shopper, three industry experts gathered to discuss a very real, very modern challenge: the multichannel journey of today’s shopper.
Today, shoppers don’t just land on a store page and buy a product. More often, their journey has many stops: search engines, social media, AI engines, marketplaces, and your ecommerce store.
Basically, modern customer journeys have more stops than a bus route across the Midwest, and if you’re not delivering consistency — people are getting off the bus.
Simply put: It’s imperative that modern businesses deliver a consistent experience across every channel.
This was the challenge the group tackled in the hour-long conversation. Panelists included:
Daniel Torres Dwyer, Founder, The FMCG Guys
Sian Wells, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, SportsShoes.com
Stephanie Adams, Senior Director, Sales, Commerce
These commerce gurus explored what winning brands are doing differently, and what you can do today to ensure you deliver the seamless, frictionless experiences customers crave in 2026.
Here are the top ten takeaways to help you deliver a modern customer journey:
Torres kicked things off by asking the ever-important, “Why?” question. What made this moment so important?
The answer?
The traditional funnel is now a whole lot shorter.
Today, customers easily move from one platform or channel to the next, oftentimes in minutes. Discovery, research, and purchase can even take place within a single journey, compressing the old funnel into a process measured in minutes — not days or weeks.
Agentic AI, a slightly newer addition to the modern journey and shopping experience, is at the heart of this, streamlining things for the customer while further complicating matters for brands.
“I think when we talk about this customer journey and consumer journey, it's not linear. It's no longer a straight road. It's really understanding and instead of asking where discovery happens, we need to be asking ‘in what context is the customer’ when they actually discover you.”
— Stephanie Adams, Senior Director, Sales, Commerce
Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, and agentic AI, such as Google’s Gemini, are quickly becoming a core part of product discovery for customers. In fact, a whopping 64% of shoppers are kicking off their product journeys with the help of AI.
AI’s role in shopping is bigger than just discovery. Wells commented that customers are using AI not only as an advisor, but also a shopper.
“In sports and retail, customers are using ChatGPT and other LLMs to build their training plans. For example: ‘I'm running a marathon later this year. Can you help me structure my runs, get advice on nutrition and gear, and find the perfect pair of running shoes?’ And sometimes that all happens in a single session. For us as a brand, the question is, how can we help shape that advice and get cited early in that journey?”
— Sian Wells, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, SportsShoes.com
If brands want to stay competitive and stay in the conversation, they need to make sure they’re in the customer’s line of sight as soon as possible. This means optimizing product pages for agentic AI and LLMs, on top of traditional SEO.
Shopping isn’t a mere activity anymore. It’s a state of being (sort of).
With so many channels in the mix, customers are almost always exposed to some form of commerce. You can reach them on their favorite site via an ad, appear in a sponsored post on Facebook, and haunt them in between memes on TikTok.
In other words, customers don’t have to seek out shopping — it will find them.
Once again, this means brands need to be present as early as possible. And, with your best foot always forward. (Which is why it’s important to have a solid omnichannel presence.)
“Shopping is no longer something we do. It's something we're always doing in the background. Consumers today maintain this perpetual mental shopping list. There's a recent stat that shows that nearly half of consumers are always in some phase of shopping.”
— Stephanie Adams, Senior Director, Sales, Commerce
Matching the pace of always-on commerce is a tall order. This is something Dwyer touched on, asking, “It's not only about showing up, it's when you show up, no? And when is that decisive moment to show up?”
Before always-on and AI and LLMs all entered the mix, there was a clear distinction between ends of the funnel: Awareness on one end, conversions on the other.
Today, brands have to balance awareness with conversion, as customers can encounter their products at various stages. Yet, as Wells points out, many retailers fall into a trap of thinking, “we need to be there at that point of conversion.”
Conversions are important, but the brands that win in today’s always-on space are those that prioritize awareness AND conversions.
“If we can broaden ourselves out and if we can warm people up to the brand and get people aware of them, then when they actually do reach that point of conversion, your click-through rates are stronger on your Google shopping ads and your conversion rates are stronger when they flow through that funnel.”
— Sian Wells, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, SportsShoes.com
There’s a clear need for brands to be present at all times, including in AI-powered answer engines. At the foundation of this presence, is data.
Without the right data, maintaining an omnichannel presence is a herculean effort. Furthermore, agentic AI is unlikely to recommend your products if you don’t have consistent data across platforms.
Brands that want to get ahead need consistent, quality data across channels. This means utilizing the right tools, like product feed management platforms that help you update across channels and marketplaces.
“At the end of the day your product feed needs to feed into multiple channels, whether that be retailers, LLMs, advertising channels, Google, anything. So the better your product data is and your feed is, the better you will show up for those channels.”
— Stephanie Adams, Senior Director, Sales, Commerce
Quality, clean data is always a good thing. But, this alone isn’t enough to succeed in today’s multichannel environment.
As Adams warned, “Just sending the same product feed to every single channel… you’re not feeding it the right information.”
Wells mentioned that it’s important for brands to think about what prompts they want to show up for, and then react accordingly. On top of this, brands should tailor their data to match each channel, using conversational language for AI, structured attributes, and so on.
Lastly, Wells said it’s important to ensure you always have the right context around your data and messaging.
“We sell wetsuits onsite, which feels weird for a running retailer. But then once you actually add in the context of triathlon it makes a lot more sense. So anyone then searching for, ‘What kit do I need to do a triathlon? How do I complete a triathlon? What do I need?’ That’s how we get put in front of them because we sell the wetsuits, the running shoes, the cycling gear, everything they need.”
— Sian Wells, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, SportsShoes.com
More channels means more attribution to keep track of, making it harder than ever for brands to stay on top of. And if you don’t, as Adams said, “You don’t actually know where that shopper came from…”
Yet, attribution is also more important than ever before. You need to know where customers are coming from and which tactics are working, otherwise you’re blindly throwing marketing efforts at a wall to see what sticks.
“Really challenge your attribution and try and get comfortable with it. Ask yourself: What has this channel actually done? Is my current attribution model in GA4 right for me? Do I need to look at different partners?”
— Sian Wells, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, SportsShoes.com
Customers can move along their journey faster than ever before. Again, in some cases discovery to purchase can occur in a single instance. This is especially true if someone has an agentic AI shopper surface results and purchase for them.
The speed at which customers move through the funnel, “lightning speed,” as Wells called it, has essentially collapsed the funnel.
You don’t need a faster engine to get ahead. Similar to the always-on dilemma, brands can get ahead of this problem by:
Getting in the conversation as early as possible
Ensuring data is accurate and connected behind the scenes
Delivering a connected experience
“The consumer is literally just hopping between all of these different channels. So how do you follow them on that path? it all goes back to connectivity. Where we see consumer journeys collapsing the most isn't a lack of channel or lack of presence, it's actually just lack of connectivity between those channels and across that consumer journey.”
— Stephanie Adams, Senior Director, Sales, Commerce
Dwyer asked Adams the question on everyone’s mind, “What are the winning brands doing?”
Countless channels and attribution challenges and AI, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But, Adams had a clear answer.
“The brands that are winning today are not actually the ones with the biggest budgets, but the ones with the most connected systems. They're treating the feeds as a growth engine, showing up across every discovery surface they can think of, and investing in truly flexible, composable commerce architectures… they're building for that adaptability, that agility.”
— Stephanie Adams, Senior Director, Sales, Commerce
With how fast-paced and multifaceted everything is in ecommerce, it seems only fitting that the speakers wrapped up with actionable tips for businesses looking to make a move today, not tomorrow.
“Go back to basics, and not get too starry-eyed on AI and the big, big strategies. Just make sure you've got the basics and the foundational stuff in place: strong data, structured content, balanced channels in terms of focus and spend, and not over-investing in lower-funnel channels. I think if you can get that foundational stuff right, it will have a bigger impact than you suspect.”
— Sian Wells, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, SportsShoes.com
“We need to stop thinking in channels. I know it's really difficult because obviously we have to in a lot of circumstances when we're talking about investment, budget, etc. But we need to start thinking more in systems. The title of this whole webinar is about creating a connected consumer journey. Having those systems is how you turn fragmented shopping journeys into revenue.”
— Stephanie Adams, Senior Director, Sales, Commerce
“Stop thinking, imagining things, and start acting. Be aware about how important your product feed and data is and act upon it…”
— Daniel Torres Dwyer, Founder, The FMCG Guys
In a world where customers can discover your brand just about anywhere, it’s easy to think of connected commerce as being connected to your customers at every turn. To a point, it is. But more than that, it’s about consistency.
Consistent messaging, consistent data, and a consistent presence across all channels is HOW you stay connected. And what better way to achieve this than having an ecommerce platform that supports connecting all your systems behind the scenes?
Schedule a demo to see how BigCommerce can help you establish a strong ecommerce presence, connect your systems behind the scenes, and painlessly experiment and grow with composable commerce.
Ebook: Win Customers Across Every Channel
Get expert insights on data, branding, and marketing strategies to grow sales on every major ecommerce channel.
John Shieldsmith
Writer
