AI is reshaping how consumers discover products. Search, product pages, and category browsing are increasingly compressed or bypassed entirely. The transaction still happens on the brand’s site, but the pages customers land on are now responsible for far more of the journey than they were designed to handle. Even as AI platforms pull back from owning checkout directly, the discovery shift driving customers to these pages is only accelerating.

Eliminate “silent pages” by syndicating authentic reviews and photos across a global network of retail partners. This guide reveals how to transform static reviews into liquid assets that follow your shoppers everywhere. Learn to leverage the Bazaarvoice Retailer Network to automate syndication, ensuring your best customer voices are live on every product detail page the moment they are needed.

We are excited to announce that our ‘The Ecommerce Returns Opportunity: Improving Experience, Conversion and Retention’ report in collaboration with industry expert nShift is available now! Returns have become a key driver of customer satisfaction, conversion and loyalty, making an effective returns strategy more important than ever.

Discover the latest insights from 1,000 UK consumers to understand changing expectations, identify opportunities to optimise your returns process, and learn how leading retailers are turning returns into a competitive advantage.

eCommerce conversion optimization is the practice of improving the share of shoppers who complete a purchase, using both on-site levers and engagement-driven ones. Conversion isn’t only an on-site problem. A lot also happens after the click, through cart recovery, personalization, and cross-channel messaging that bring shoppers back to buy.

In this guide, you’ll get a clear definition and a formula to work with. You’ll also find out realistic benchmarks, the on-site and engagement levers that move the conversion rate, and how to prioritize them.

For years, website marketing meant search visibility: ranking for the right queries and earning the click. The way people search has changed. They still use Google, but they also ask AI tools for direct answers. These tools draw on training data and the sources they retrieve to decide which brands are credible enough to surface or cite. 

That shifts the goal from visibility to credibility: proof that your brand is trustworthy enough to be recommended. The techniques are largely the same. What they’re accomplishing is different.

The early data on artificial intelligence shopping is in and it has a story to tell. Shopify reported that shoppers who arrive at e-commerce sites through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are 50 percent more likely to convert to purchase than those coming from organic search. Not only are they more likely to make a purchase but when they do, they spend 14 percent more per order. More than half of these AI-referred sessions land directly on a product page, ready to buy.

Most ecommerce welcome flows underperform for one reason: they rely on a discount to do all the work. A percentage-off offer might get the first purchase, but it does very little to build trust, educate the customer, or increase long-term value. The highest-performing welcome flows don’t remove discounts entirely — they build enough conviction before the conversion ask happens.

Key Takeaways

Discounts don’t fix weak welcome flow strategy

Running a business online comes with numerous challenges due to the fast-moving environment , where customer expectations are higher, competition is just a click away, and technology keeps evolving. Still, moving online is clearly worth it.

In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), 73% of people shop online, so if your business isn’t there, you’re missing a large share of customers. The European e-commerce market itself is huge, too, expected to reach €353.5 billion in 2026 and keep growing.