Hazarding what will happen in ecommerce is a dangerous game. Game changing technologies that are going to disrupt the industry can disappear overnight, whilst innocuous new products quietly become part of how we all do business.
That said, as we head towards 2027, there are some clear changes taking place.
AI is clearly one, but perhaps not quite in the way some of the more dramatic predictions suggest. At the same time, B2B buyers are becoming far less tolerant of poor online experiences, businesses are trying to get more value from the data they already have, and ecommerce platforms are increasingly expected to connect with a much wider technology landscape.
Here are some of the developments we think are worth paying attention to.
AI Will Start Doing More of the Shopping
We’ve spent the last few years (not least on the pages of this blog) talking about what AI can do inside an ecommerce website: recommendations, chatbots, content, search (the list goes on).
A more interesting development now is what happens when AI sits on the customer’s side of the transaction.
Agentic commerce, the idea that an AI ‘assistant’ can carry out parts of the buying process on somebody’s behalf, is moving relentlessly from theory towards something businesses really need to consider.
Imagine, if you will, a manager in the facilities sector, who needs 100 replacement light fittings. Instead of visiting five suppliers, searching through their catalogues and comparing specifications, they could ask an AI assistant to find suitable products that meet a set of criteria: a particular specification, are available within a week, are in budget, etc. That then changes the nature of the ecommerce site.
For years we’ve designed websites primarily around people navigating them. Increasingly, businesses may also need to make sure their products, prices, specifications and availability are understood by the software acting for those people.
Fear not, we don’t expect websites to disappear in 2027 in a puff of AI-generated smoke, Far from it. But the website may no longer be where every buying journey begins.
Search Is Changing Too
This, of course, has implications for SEO.
Google ain’t going anywhere, but customers now have more clever ways of researching purchases. AI assistants will answer questions, recommend products and compare alternatives without anybody following the traditional search engine journey.
There’s a tendency to respond to this by inventing new acronyms and declaring SEO dead. We think that’s premature. Rumours of Google’s demise are greatly exaggerated, to misquote Mark Twain. In fact, much of what makes a business visible to AI systems is actually very familiar territory: good content, well-structured information and quality product data.
If you sell a technical product, for instance a PC, for example, a vague two-line description isn’t going to be particularly useful. Dimensions, materials, compatibility, technical specifications, applications, availability and other attributes will need to be present for necessary context.
Good product data has always helped customers, that’s nothing new. But, in 2027, it will increasingly help machines understand what you’re selling too.
AI on the Website Will Become More Useful
Of course, AI within ecommerce will continue to develop as well, but we fully expect the focus to shift from novelty towards usefulness.
Search is a great example. Traditional ecommerce search works well when customers know the name or SKU of the thing they want. It’s less effective when somebody describes a problem.
A customer might search for “waterproof work gloves suitable for handling small components outdoors in winter”. A conventional search engine has to interpret and make sense of these keywords. As anyone who has used LLMs can testify, an AI-powered system has a much better opportunity to understand what the customer actually means.
This will be particularly valuable in B2B. Extensive B2B stock levels can sometimes contain tens or hundreds of thousands of skus, often with very complex specifications and descriptions. Helping a buyer identify the right product is a genuine sales problem. And if AI will make that easier, it obviously has a far stronger business case than adding a chatbot simply because everybody else has one.
B2B Buyers Will Expect to Do More for Themselves
Of course, not every important ecommerce trend for 2027 involves AI. B2B self-service is hardly new, but expectations continue to soar.
Customers increasingly expect to log into a supplier’s website and see their own prices, check stock, access previous orders, download invoices, reorder products and manage their account without having to telephone somebody. And why shouldn’t they?
People who can manage their banking, book a holiday and arrange a supermarket delivery online don’t suddenly lower their expectations when they arrive at work. There will always be a role for account managers, particularly where products or purchasing arrangements are complicated. Good B2B ecommerce doesn’t replace that relationship (despite the fevered nightmares of sales teams). What is does do is achieve much of the administration surrounding it.
If an account manager is spending time emailing copies of invoices or manually entering repeat orders, there’s every likelihood technology should be doing that instead.
Personalisation Will Become Less Obvious
Personalisation has been an ecommerce buzzword for a very long time (again, on this blog in particular), although for some people it seems to mean little more than putting someone’s first name at the top of an email.
The more useful form of personalisation is almost invisible. A returning customer might see products relevant to their previous purchases. Search results might reflect their preferences. A B2B customer could see only the products available under their agreement, with their own contract prices already applied.
That’s where personalisation starts saving customers time rather than simply demonstrating that a website knows who they are.
AI will undoubtedly make some of this more sophisticated, but once again the limiting factor is likely to be data (see a theme yet?). You simply can’t create a genuinely personalised experience if customer, product and transactional information is incomplete or scattered across systems that don’t communicate with one another.
Getting the Basics of Data Right Will Matter More Than Ever
This may be one of the less glamorous predictions for 2027, but we’d argue it’s one of the most important. Businesses have spent years accumulating technology. An ecommerce platform might now sit alongside an ERP, CRM, PIM, warehouse system, analytics platform, marketplace software, or wherever your data is held. The real challenge is getting them to talk to each other.
Stock needs to be accurate. Customer-specific pricing needs to reach the website. Orders need to reach the ERP. Product information needs to be consistent everywhere it appears.
AI adds another imperative to get this right. There’s hardly any value in an intelligent shopping assistant if the information being fed into it is nonsense. Ironically, businesses may get more from an old school approach of cleaning their product data and integrations in 2027 than from investing in the latest AI technology. Without the one, the other is pointless.
Composable Commerce Will Grow Up
Composable commerce has been one of the industry’s (and our) favourite subjects in recent years. And we stand by it. Being able to combine specialist technologies for commerce, content, search, payments and personalisation will give businesses a lot of flexibility.
But flexibility comes with a cost. More systems mean more integrations, more suppliers and potentially more things to maintain. We think the conversation in 2027 will become less about whether a solution is “composable” and more about where composability actually makes sense.
A business shouldn’t build a complicated hybrid technology architecture simply because it’s fashionable. If Adobe Commerce, Shopify or BigCommerce provide 95% of what you need, replacing perfectly good native functionality with several additional platforms will achieve little beyond increasing cost and complexity
Then again, when a specialist search engine, PIM, CMS or other system delivers a genuine advantage, the ability to integrate it is extremely valuable. At the end of the day, the right architecture is the one that suits the business.
No Ecommerce System is an Island
Apologies for mangling John Donne, but if there’s one theme running through all of this, it’s that the ecommerce website is more and more becoming part of something much bigger.
The same commerce technology and data may now support a B2C website, B2B ordering portal, mobile app, marketplace, international stores and internal sales teams. Before long, AI agents could become another consumer of that information. This changes the way businesses should think about ecommerce investment.
Rather than asking only what the next website needs to do, you need to understand the digital commerce capabilities the organisation will need over the next three, five or even ten years.
Will the platform integrate easily? Will product information be accessed elsewhere? Will new channels be added without rebuilding everything? And, more importantly, can your business realistically maintain the architecture it is creating?
Don’t Forget the Customer
With AI, composable architectures and ever more sophisticated technology dominating the conversation, there’s a real risk of making ecommerce sound much more complicated than it actually needs to be. And, let’s face it, customers still want much the same things they always have.
They want to find the right product. They want accurate information and pricing. They want the website to be fast. They want the checkout to be straightforward and they want their order to arrive when it was promised to be delivered.
For B2B customers, you can add accurate stock information, sensible account management and an easy way of repeating previous purchases to that list. Technology matters when it makes those things better.
Fundamentally, this is the most useful lesson online businesses should take into 2027. Don’t invest in AI because AI is fashionable. Don’t adopt composable commerce because everybody is talking about it. And don’t replace a platform that’s doing its job fine just because something newer has appeared.
Start with the customer and the business problem, then decide which technology genuinely helps solve it.
At PureNet, we work with businesses to develop ecommerce solutions using Adobe Commerce, Shopify and BigCommerce, as well as integrating those platforms with the ERP, PIM, CRM and other systems behind them.
If you’re considering where your ecommerce strategy needs to go next, we’d be happy to talk about what 2027’s changes could mean for your business.