MD Ecom 26, part of our MD Live events lineup, brought together the leading ecommerce brands and practitioners from the North West to explore the trends, technologies, and strategies shaping the future of online retail.
Held at Sister in Manchester city centre, the full day conference hosted more than 200 guests for an action‑packed day of engaging panel sessions, quickfire talks, along with networking opportunities.
Sponsored by leading tech businesses illuminise and AND Digital, the full-day event was also supported by Sister, Title Pro and Morvo. Here’s our round up of the day’s lineup:
Industry outlook - the forces reshaping ecommerce with Regatta
Starting the day with an industry outlook, Gary Young, Group Head of Tech for outdoor clothing brand Regatta talked about how AI and emerging tech is underpinning the next stage of the brand’s growth journey. The Regatta Group, is headquartered in Urmston at what is called Basecamp, and includes the brands: Regatta Great Outdoors, Craghoppers, Dare2b, and Hawkshead.
Gary said that AI has created a new interface for shopping. For the last 20 years we’ve interacted with a website with the same grid and menu format, and now entering into the age of gen AI where it will recommend products, based on what you ask it. He added that trust is the new conversion optimisation.
The Regatta Group is also in the process of automating their warehouse with robotics technology, which is estimated to improve their efficiency by ten times. This was a great talk to kick off the day and Gary demonstrated that Regatta is at the forefront of how ecommerce brands have to invest in new tech to maximise efficiency and productivity right from the beginning.
Gary Young, Regatta, speaking at MD Ecom 26Trust at Scale: Accessibility and Platform Risk in modern commerce
The next session was a fireside chat with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Nexer Digital and IBM to discuss risk, accessibility and the responsibilities that come with digital scale.
This panel was chaired by Manchester Digital MD Katie Gallagher OBE, and we heard from David Perry, Legal Director at the CMA; Molly Watt, Accessibility Specialist at Nexer and Ian Gardner, UK Client Technical Leader at IBM.
The conversation covered regulatory practice and consumer regulation, with conversation touching on the infamous issues around dynamic pricing for the Oasis tickets last year which caused a consumer outcry. The panel also covered how regulation can keep up with the fast pace of AI as well as data sovereignty.
David outlined how the CMA has its key principles - transparency, fairness, accountability - to create a level playing field for all businesses, as well as creating trust for consumers.
Molly talked through accessibility issues and how her own experiences of being registered blind and deaf are vital to the work that she does helping businesses to become more accessible-friendly. She added that 81% of disabled users will click away and buy elsewhere if they struggle to check out and that collectively businesses are missing out on £446bn every year by not catering to the ‘purple pound’.
L-R Katie Gallagher OBE, David Perry, Molly Watt, Ian GardnerOperationalising Al in Ecommerce
The next panel was chaired by Mark Dore, Client Partnerships Exec at AND Digital and brought together experts from Protein Works, White Stores, bet364 and THG Ingenuity.
The panel included: Alan Reed, Head of Platform Innovation at bet365; Jo Drake, CTO at THG Ingenuity; Ollie Chissell, Commercial Director at Protein Works and Damian Doorbar, Group Operations Director for Whitestores Ltd.
Panellists discussed how they’ve embedded AI into their workflows for tech teams to speed up their efficiency, and take away the more laborious tasks. Teams are shifting from execution to oversight, with AI specialists guiding processes rather than doing every task.
Inside their organisations, AI is also changing how teams work. Internal assistants like bet365’s short‑form video ‘BetTube’ and THG Ingenuity’s ‘Little Guy’ are boosting efficiency and freeing tech teams up to focus on higher‑value tasks. Jo added that Little Guy has shown that employees can do 3.9 times more work with its assistance.
The discussion also discussed the benefits of customer chatbots, with Damian pointing out the benefits of a chatbot having access to large amounts of data about each product, you don’t need to have absolutely everything on the website.
Overall, the panel’s thoughts demonstrated that Gen AI is changing the way that tech teams work within ecommerce, allowing them to build efficiency and increase work flow and outputs when used effectively. The leaders who thrive will be the ones who use AI themselves, set clear guardrails and bring their teams with them on the journey.
L-R Mark Dore, Jo Drake, Alan Reed, Ollie Chissell, Damian DoorbarLeading Business Breakthroughs: How trust and co-creation turn uncertainty into action with illuminise
Sanya Ristic, Director of Innovation and Client Services at illuminise, an Adobe Commerce and Magento agency, highlighted the power of creating trust and developing better teamwork to work through difficult problems and create better solutions for clients.
She said that the secret sauce to their successful client relationships was focusing on how the client and agency can work together as one team. She explained how they use AI co‑lab sessions to solve problems together and have been able to work through stalled investments and build stable, scalable solutions.
The overall takeaway was when you combine partnership, trust and shared creativity, one honest conversation can unlock your next big breakthrough.
Sanya Ristic, illuminise, addresses the audience at MD Ecom 26Inside Al Commerce: How Product Discovery Works in the Age of Al with Morvo
The first talk after lunch showed us that we’re now firmly in a new phase of commerce where answer engines and third‑party AI agents are becoming a key discovery channel for consumers.
Robert Stein is the founder of Morvo, an AI-powered Personal Shopper created to help online retailers turn passive browsing into guided, high-converting conversations. Rob talked through why product discovery in the age of AI depends on high‑quality, machine‑readable product signals and why protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Shopify’s emerging equivalents, are so important to help models truly understand your catalogue, rather than guess.
He also highlighted the rise of Answer Engine Optimisation and the opportunity for tools like Morvo, which layer in customer insights that general AI tools don’t have, to power more relevant, conversion‑ready recommendations.
Robert Stein presenting at MD Ecom 26Discovery Without Search
Robert Stein presenting at MD Ecom 26Discovery Without Search
This panel was chaired by Amanda Walls, director at Cedarwood Digital, and included Dan Wigley, Co-founder and Managing Director at Fabric Analytics; Rob Stein at Morvo and Joe Robertson, Client Services Manager at Novara Social Commerce.
The discussion centred on how product discovery is shifting as AI, social video and data-driven tools reshape the customer journey across channels. The panel explored how shoppers are now finding products through TikTok Shop, YouTube, Reddit as well as Answer Engines, and how live video and community are now as important as traditional search functions and SEO.
While older generations are still using traditional methods such as Google search, the younger generations have moved into using social media and gen AI to solve their consumer needs. Although Joe pointed out that TikTok Live is not dissimilar from QVC on television, except that the purchase process is now considerably quicker and easier for the customer.
A common thought was that the brands that will succeed will focus on trust and experience, as well as using insights to personalise journeys for customers.
The panel also stressed the need for brands to diversify channels, invest properly in analytics and AI, and build their own tooling to really understand intent, attribution and what’s driving conversion.
L-R Amanda Walls, Dan Wigley, Robert Stein, Joe RobertsonPrompted Podcast - Agentic Commerce & Al-Led Buying with special guest Mark Leach, Centre Channel
The final session of this hugely informative day was a live podcast recording of the Prompted podcast, created by Chris Nightingale, founder of Can Do Digital Marketing and Nick Handley, Performance Director at Connective3.
Their special guest for this episode was Mark Leach, founder and Principal Consultant at Centre Channel and previously was the Head of Ecommerce for Missguided.
Mark shared how he’s been hands-on with tools like Claude and Gemini to prototype real use cases for brands, from turning meeting transcripts into decks and insights to ensure that actions are not forgotten and to create ongoing accountability.
He explained how by using Claude Code he experienced the joy of being able to vibe code and deliver proof of concept ideas to clients.
Nick spoke about using AI to create his own recommendation engine for music because he didn’t like the experience he got with Spotify.
One of the takeaways for ecommerce was that AI should handle the boring stuff in the background, so humans can focus on strategy, creativity and doing the things we should have been doing for customers all along. Nick closed by saying, “AI can do the boring stuff, Let us do the cool things that humans are good at.”
L-R Mark Leach, Nick Handley, Chris NightingaleThe day was closed by Katie Gallagher OBE, with a huge thanks to all of the speakers, sponsors and contributors.
The Manchester Digital team is currently planning MD Fintech 26 - its annual fintech conference on 18th June - so anybody interested in speaking or sponsoring should contact ghislaine@manchesterdigital.com.
