Creator programs become table stakes: Pacsun and David’s Bridal are the latest retailers to rely on social commerce and user-generated buzz to boost sales.

Social commerce is booming in the UK, but the era of hyper-growth is coming to an end. Even so, social will continue gaining share of the digital wallet through 2029.

2025 challenged many of retail’s long-held assumptions. What looked like familiar patterns often turned out to be something different entirely, and in the process, a few key trends were either missed or misread by brands trying to make sense of shifting shopper behavior. Here are three trends from 2025 that were either overlooked or misunderstood, and why they will matter in the year ahead.

As consumers grow more comfortable with using AI, retail industry leaders see 2026 as a pivotal year in shaping how the emerging technology disrupts the way people shop.

Shopify has introduced 150 updates, headlined by two major tools aimed at expanding reach and boosting conversions: an “agentic storefront” that lets consumers buy products directly through AI platforms like ChatGPT and a new Shopify Product Network that helps merchants fill product gaps via cross-store recommendations. The agentic storefront should give merchants an early advantage in AI-powered commerce, while the Product Network should boost conversions, and create new revenue streams without adding inventory or operational burdens.

Retailers experimenting with agentic AI are doing so with commercial urgency, not curiosity. In an EMARKETER interview, Criteo’s Michael Greene said retailers now see onsite AI as “mission critical” for owning the shopping journey—especially as consumers increasingly use chat-based tools for early discovery. Generic LLMs lack real retail signals like inventory, regional availability, and nuanced category expertise, making proprietary data the retailer’s strongest edge. With Gen Z already leaning heavily on AI for purchase research, retailers must build systems that deliver more relevant, trustworthy guidance than general chat interfaces. The mandate is clear: build AI that improves baskets, conversion, and shopper retention.

AI isn’t replacing search—it’s moving earlier in the journey. OpenAI data shows only about 2% of ChatGPT prompts mention purchasable items, yet product suggestions appear in nearly one-third of prompts unrelated to shopping. For health and productivity queries, those rates jump above 40%. Meanwhile, AI minutes have quadrupled year over year while Google search usage remains slightly up, meaning AI is adding a new discovery layer, not cannibalizing intent-based search. For marketers, this creates a new upstream battleground where LLMs shape category awareness before comparison shopping begins. Brands must map the non-shopping conversations where their products naturally surface.

"[The oldest members of Gen Alpha are] turning 16 next year, so we are on the eve of them becoming pretty powerful consumers," said Dani Mariano, CEO at Razorfish. "[GWI found that] 30% of 12- to 15-year-olds said that they had used AI in the last seven days. I think it could be even higher."

Search advertising is entering a new era where Amazon and other retail media players are reshaping how discovery and intent are monetized. Brands must revisit their “search mix.” Google may remain indispensable, but allocating more spend to retail media will future-proof campaigns against cookie loss and capitalize on where shopping intent now begins.

AI shopping assistants are boosting discovery and personalization, but trust issues and fulfillment challenges could limit their impact on channel migration.

PayPal’s Honey browser extension will start recommending products based on users’ conversations with chatbots, per a press release. Relying on the Honey browser extension rather than striking individual partnerships with each major AI platform is a far more expedient pathway to broaden Honey’s reach across AI-based shopping. And by keeping the selection and checkout processes squarely in the province of the user, Honey gets to reap the benefits of the rise in AI-enabled product discovery without the associated risks of agentic commerce.

The news: Despite consumers’ rising use of AI agents for search, shopping, and discovery, brands are falling behind on generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies. 47% of brands have no deliberate GEO strategy or have no idea if they appear at all in AI agent responses, per a new report from Cordial. Another 47% have only just begun optimizing content for AI discovery. Our take: To boost visibility, brands should optimize for conversational context and create structured, machine-readable content that AI can index, like clear website FAQs, TL;DR summaries, and detailed product specs. Expanding presence across social platforms that feed AI training models, such as Reddit, Quora, and YouTube, can also improve chances of surfacing in AI-generated responses.

The situation: Amazon and Google, once bound by a symbiotic relationship in which Amazon funneled ad dollars into Google Search and Google indexed Amazon’s pages, are now veering toward open conflict as generative AI (genAI) blurs the lines between ecommerce, advertising, and search. Both companies are determined to own the entire journey from discovery to checkout, and that ambition is unraveling what remains of their former détente. Our take: Amazon and Google are racing to define where and how consumers discover and buy products in the genAI era. If Amazon succeeds in walling off its marketplace data and steering shoppers to its own AI interfaces, the retail landscape could splinter into walled gardens where tech giants cooperate far less. That winner‑takes‑all dynamic might suit the victors, but it risks degrading the overall consumer experience with fewer choices and less transparent pricing. At the same time, it could lead brands and retailers into a margin‑sapping race to the bottom inside whichever closed ecosystem proves most dominant.

Though TikTok Shop faces the dual challenges of economic instability and a tenuous presence on US app stores, marketers are still taking advantage of its positioning as both a social platform and ecommerce engine.

Community threads—not search bars—are where product discovery now begins, challenging marketers to join the conversation. CVS Media Exchange and Reddit are bridging data and dialogue to turn real-time discussions into measurable sales wins.

Lens integration sidesteps users to search without leaving the app. It sets up future monetization even if beta excludes ads and affiliate links—for now.

Google has entered the AI shopping arena: The company’s AI Mode experience aims to assist consumers throughout every step of the shopping experience—from finding inspiration to buying at the right moment.

Agentic AI gains momentum: As Amazon, Walmart, eBay and others experiment with AI agents, retailers need to to figure out how to market to bots in addition to humans.

ChatGPT's shopping tool threatens retail media revenues: Its product search could siphon ad dollars from retailers struggling with tariffs, higher prices, and weak demand.

Could OpenAI turn ChatGPT into a shopping hub? The company is reportedly partnering with Shopify in an effort similar to other genAI shopping efforts by Perplexity and Microsoft.