At this year’s Ecommerce Expo, we brought a lot of merchandise and came away with even more insight and food for thought.
There is no shortage of entertainment available at the Expo. Yet amidst the games, competitions, simulators and never-ending queues for free coffee, conversations repeatedly returned to the same themes: AI, trust, visibility and customer sentiment.
Here's what we heard and what it could mean for retailers over the next 12 months.
What were retailers talking about at Ecommerce Expo 2026?
We spoke to hundreds of retailers over the two days. Many arrived wanting to talk about reviews, have a moan about the competition (ours, usually, not theirs) or simply say hello – but the conversation rarely stayed there for long. Questions about visibility in AI search, trust and customer sentiment kept pulling discussions in the same direction.
Unsurprisingly, the question we heard most was about visibility in LLMs. Retailers wanted to know how product discovery changes when customers increasingly get recommendations from AI tools, and where reviews fit into that process.
Purchaser-verified reviews also resonated, particularly with people who are sceptical of open platforms. And our Trust Advantage 2026 research backs that up: 63% of consumers are concerned about fake reviews and Feefo is seen as twice as trustworthy as open platforms.
If AI tools draw on reviews to recommend products, the source and verification of those reviews could affect whether your brand gets recommended. It feels like SEO in the early days: if you’re providing recent, relevant, verifiable sources the quality of the data is likely to count for more than ‘trying to rank’.
What did the Growth Summit reveal about retailer priorities?
The Growth Summit, run alongside Ecommerce Expo, reinforced the conversations we were having at the stand. According to delegates, these were their top strategic priorities for 2026:
- AI (25%)
- Digital marketing (22%)
- Acquisition and retention (21%)
- Routes to market (14%)
- Checkout and payment (10%)
- Delivery and logistics (8%)
While AI topped the overall priorities, amongst the more specific topics covered at the summit, personalisation and recommendations led the way, followed by analytics and forecasting. AI appears to be threaded through personalisation, analytics and acquisition rather than sitting on its own.
In Jen Wright's workshop, an audience word cloud on Leading Through Customer Change, showed that customer sentiment was the biggest theme, with uncertainty close behind. Excitement, innovation, adaptability and collaboration all featured too.
That highlights an interesting gap. While retention and loyalty ranked highly among retailer priorities, the post-purchase activities that help drive them received far less attention. Yet customer sentiment is often captured after the sale.
Reviews sit in that gap. For retailers already collecting reviews, there is significant untapped opportunity to make better use of them after the sale, in loyalty, retention and product decisions.
It's also where the conversation at our networking drinks – a collaboration between Feefo, Brave Bison, Mention Me and Nosto – tended to move. Away from AI and towards using reviews after the purchase, to support loyalty and to understand wider trends across product ranges.
What should retailers take from Ecommerce Expo and Growth Summit 2026?
Retailers are investing in AI, and they're anchoring that investment in customer sentiment. Personalisation led the Growth Summit topic list, customer sentiment led the word cloud, and the conversations on our stand kept returning to the same question: how do customers really feel, and can anyone, human or AI, see that clearly?
The post-purchase topics, where sentiment is captured, appeared far below the goals they feed. And if AI tools and shopping agents increasingly choose on a shopper's behalf, brands with recent, relevant, verifiable feedback are likely to be easier to recommend than those without.
A quick test for any company: could someone outside your business tell, from your reviews alone, that they come from customers who actually bought from you?
If you'd like to talk through how verified reviews could support discovery, loyalty and customer insight, we'd be happy to help.
