In March 2026, MD Ecom 26 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.
Following the conference, we asked contributors from across the ecommerce ecosystem to tell us what does the future of ecommerce look like - what’s changing, what’s working, and what businesses need to be thinking about next.
Part Two with more perspectives on the topic to follow.
MD Ecom 26 was delivered in partnership with illuminise and AND Digital, and supported by Sister, Title Pro and Morvo.
AND Digital
From Personalisation to Agentic Commerce
Mark Dore, Client Partnerships Exec
Driven by AI and the rise of agentic commerce, the ecommerce landscape is undergoing a strategic revolution. At AND Digital, we recognise that if we want to navigate this shift it will require more than just adopting new technology. The shift needs a completely new approach to the consumer relationship.
While personalisation has been a key aspect of ecommerce for a long time, the move into the AI world makes it exponentially more important. AI supercharges personalisation as it shifts the paradigm from static recommendation to agentic commerce. Instead of just reacting to past behaviour, autonomous AI agents anticipate customer needs in real-time. This curates dynamic, hyper-relevant journeys acting proactively to find the perfect outcomes for the user.
Now more than ever, brands need to build trust with the consumer. This trust then gives them a reason to stay loyal. Supercharged AI assists here by improving the reliability and relevance of the entire shopping experience. AI-driven operations directly translate into consumer confidence - from predictive supply chains that guarantee product availability to intelligent proactive customer service agents that resolve issues before they escalate. When a brand uses AI to consistently deliver on its promises and cater perfectly to individual preferences, it will create a frictionless environment where trust flourishes.
Find out more about AND Digital here.
Morvo
The Future of Ecommerce Will Be Conversational
Robert Stein, CEO
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how customers discover and buy products online, but much of the current discussion around “agentic commerce” risks oversimplifying how people actually shop.
Major technology platforms are promoting a future where AI agents complete purchases on behalf of users. A customer describes what they want and the agent automatically finds the product, compares options and completes the transaction. While this may work for routine purchases, most ecommerce decisions are not purely transactional.
Customers often want reassurance before buying. They want to ask questions, compare options and understand why a product is right for them. Fully automated purchasing removes that layer of confidence building.
The more likely future is conversational commerce rather than automated commerce.
AI will increasingly guide customer decisions, but brands should ensure that experience happens within environments they control. We are already seeing the rise of AI personal shoppers embedded directly into brand owned storefronts. These systems allow customers to ask questions, compare products and receive tailored recommendations in real time, while the brand keeps the relationship, the data and the revenue.
As AI becomes a new interface for commerce, the opportunity for brands is clear. Use it to make product discovery faster and more intelligent without handing control of the customer journey to external platforms.
Find out more about Morvo here.
Cloudguard
AI Is Reshaping Ecommerce. But Strategy Matters More Than Tools
Muhammad Fezzan, Junior SOC Analyst & Andy King, Principle Azure Security Consultant
AI is being readily adopted into retail businesses to keep up with competition, improve speed on reporting, monitoring, reducing overheads, and to improve customer experience. The challenge we see is around governing this, ensuring data remains secure, outputs stay factual and grounded, and AI delivers measurable value in a cost-effective way.
The rate of change in the AI space is explosive right now and will continue to be, keeping up with this and having the right skills to properly wield this and capitalise on it safely is in high demand.
What's equally exciting and often overlooked, is the opportunity AI creates for personalisation at scale. Data-driven models can analyse customer behaviour in real time, surfacing the right product, at the right price, to the right person. For smaller ecommerce businesses, this levels the playing field as the barrier to entry for sophisticated tooling has never been lower.
To ensure successful implementation, businesses must understand the data behind it. This means building systems that are scalable and trustworthy. Developers and technical teams who grasp this early on will be the ones shaping what ecommerce looks like tomorrow.
Find out more about Cloudguard here.
Fabric Analytics
The Future of Ecommerce: Competing When You Don’t Own the Journey
Dan Wigley, Co-Founder
AI-powered shopping is moving faster than most ecommerce teams are prepared for.
With platforms like ChatGPT enabling in-platform purchasing, we’re entering a world where the traditional ecommerce journey is being compressed. Discovery, comparison and checkout can now happen without the customer ever fully engaging with your site.
That changes the economics of ecommerce.
Attribution becomes blurred. If a customer researches with you but converts elsewhere, your data tells an incomplete story. Retargeting becomes less efficient. You risk spending budget chasing customers who have already purchased through an AI intermediary.
But the bigger shift is strategic. Customer ownership starts to erode.
When AI platforms control recommendation and transaction layers, your website can quietly become brochureware. A research spot rather than a commercial destination.
That forces a rethink.
If customers can buy your product anywhere, why should they buy directly from you? The answer has to be intentional. Exclusive ranges. Smarter pricing and discount strategy. Personalisation that actually adds value. Content that builds affinity. A faster, cleaner experience than any third party can replicate.
AI-led commerce isn’t a threat to ecommerce. It’s a redistribution of power.
Over the next 12 to 24 months, leaders need to double down on differentiation and data clarity. The brands that win won’t just be present in AI-driven channels. They’ll give customers a compelling reason to come back to their own ecosystem.
Find out more about Fabric Analytics here.
Fruition
The Future of Ecommerce: Why Manchester Is at the Centre of It
Kat Mellor, Director of Marketing
Manchester has always been a city that builds things. In 2026, what it's building increasingly looks like the future of ecommerce.
Across the city, retailers and digital businesses are accelerating their technology investment at pace. AI is being embedded throughout the commerce stack - personalised search, dynamic pricing, demand forecasting, fraud detection and logistics optimisation. The platforms powering online retail are getting smarter, and Manchester is home to much of the engineering and product talent making that happen.
This transformation is driving significant demand for tech professionals across the region. Retailers need backend and platform engineers, data and ML specialists, product managers with ecommerce depth, and cloud and DevOps professionals who can scale infrastructure quickly. At leadership level, competition for Heads of Digital and Technology remains fierce.
Businesses like Evri are a strong example of how logistics technology has become a genuine competitive differentiator - no longer back-office, but central to the customer experience.
What's shifted is the perception of retail tech as a career destination. It's complex, real-world and high-impact. For tech professionals in Manchester, ecommerce offers some of the most rewarding problems to solve right now.
The talent market is moving fast. Hiring teams need to move faster.
Find out more about Fruition here.
Adria Solutions
The New Shape of Ecommerce Teams
Jazz Thomson, Digital Marketing Manager
From a recruitment perspective, ecommerce hiring has shifted noticeably over the past few years. Businesses are no longer just searching for people who can manage an online store. They are building teams that can support fast moving digital operations where data, technology, and customer experience are tightly connected.
One of the clearest trends we see is demand for roles that translate insight into action. Data Analysts and Data Scientists are increasingly central to ecommerce teams because they help businesses understand how customers behave, where drop off happens, and what actually drives conversion. Alongside this, Product Owners and Digital Strategists are in high demand because they can turn those insights into practical improvements across platforms, journeys, and campaigns.
Another pressure point is infrastructure. As ecommerce platforms grow, so does the need for DevOps engineers and Cloud specialists who can keep systems reliable during major traffic spikes or sales events.
The biggest challenge for many employers is finding people who understand both the technical side and the commercial reality of online retail. The strongest hires tend to be those who recognise that behind every dashboard metric is a real customer decision.
Over the next 12 to 24 months, ecommerce leaders should prioritise building teams that combine data thinking, technical resilience, and a clear understanding of customer behaviour. That blend is increasingly what separates good ecommerce operations from great ones.
Find out more about Adria Solutions here.
Akoova
Why AI-Ready Architecture Is the Real Competitive Edge
As ecommerce enters its next phase, enterprise retailers are discovering that adopting AI is not simply about new tools. It requires the right architectural foundations. From operational efficiency and forecasting to customer experience and strategic decision-making, AI ultimately depends on access to reliable, well-structured data … and the ability to act on it quickly.
For many organisations operating across B2C and B2B channels, marketplaces and multiple customer touchpoints, this raises an important strategic question: does your commerce platform enable innovation? Or does it limit it?
This is where open-source commerce deserves renewed attention. Despite a persistent perception that open source is not built for enterprise brands, the reality is that many global retailers already rely on open-source platforms - including Magento Open Source - as the foundation for highly scalable commerce ecosystems. At Akoova, we’ve seen numerous examples of this.
Open architectures allow enterprise retailers to form an ecosystem of best-in-breed partners across cloud hosting, payments, search & merch and emerging AI capabilities, while retaining full ownership of their data - a critical foundation for meaningful AI adoption. Without that control, experimentation with AI-driven insights, automation and customer experiences becomes significantly harder.
Over the next 12–24 months, successful ecommerce leaders will focus less on chasing individual technologies and more on ensuring their commerce architecture is AI-ready: flexible, data-rich and capable of evolving in line with business growth.
Find out more about Akoova here.
Mason Advisory
Mastering Multi-Dependence in Modern Ecommerce
Jon De'Ath, Head of Consulting - UK&I
Modern ecommerce is built on other people’s platforms, cloud, payments, ad tech, marketplaces, social, logistics. That leverage is powerful, but it also concentrates risk: policy changes, pricing shocks, opaque algorithms and outages you don’t control. The next frontier isn’t “multi‑channel”; it’s multi‑dependence mastery, knowing which dependencies you accept, which you mitigate, and where you differentiate.
Three practical moves stand out. First, map decision rights around critical flows (pricing, promotions, payments, fulfilment). If no one can say who owns the decision when a platform fails or shifts policy, you will default to fire‑fighting. Second, build evidence: telemetry that proves your journeys are trustworthy, model behaviour, customer impact, and third‑party performance. Finally, design recoverability before scale: graceful degradation paths, comms playbooks, and commercial levers for when partners wobble.
The prize is strategic freedom. With clear ownership, observable systems and robust recovery, you can use platforms without being used by them and direct investment into the parts of the journey that create proprietary advantage. That’s how retailers will protect trust, margins and momentum through 2026.
Find out more about Mason Advisory here.
