TL;DR:

• Customer journeys are collapsing to a single conversation. The traditional browse-and-buy journey is giving way to AI-guided shopping that moves from discovery to purchase in a single exchange.
• 79% of brands say AI-driven conversational commerce has increased their sales and purchase rates.
• AI-only influenced orders grew 63% in a single year, from 2.7 million in Q1 to 4.4 million in Q4.
• Brands treating conversation as a revenue channel. They’re not just a support function, generating higher AOV, shorter buying cycles, and stronger retention.

The page-based shopping experience dominated for decades. Customers would search, browse, compare, abandon, get retargeted, return, and eventually buy (sometimes). 

That journey is no longer the only option.

Shoppers are turning to chat, messaging, and AI-powered tools to find what they need. Instead of clicking through product pages or reading static FAQs, they ask questions, have back-and-forth conversations, and get answers that move them closer to a purchase in real time. The path to checkout has changed, and the brands that recognize this are pulling ahead.

Read our 2026 State of Conversational Commerce Report to learn more about conversation commerce trends from 400 ecommerce decision-makers and 16,000+ ecommerce brands using Gorgias. 

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The shopping journey has collapsed into a single thread

The traditional shopping journey was a solo experience. A shopper had a need, searched for options, browsed across sessions, and eventually made a decision — often days later, after being retargeted multiple times. Support only entered the picture after the purchase.

The conversation-led journey collapses that timeline:

1. A shopper recognizes a need and starts a conversation via chat, messaging, or a search-triggered prompt
2. An AI agent asks clarifying questions about preferences, budget, and constraints
3. The AI provides personalized product recommendations in real time
4. The shopper validates concerns about fit, compatibility, delivery, and returns, all inside the conversation
5. The shopper completes the purchase directly within or immediately after that exchange
6. The AI picks up the conversation post-purchase for order tracking and proactive support
7. A human agent steps in only when the situation calls for it

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What used to take days now takes minutes. Discovery, evaluation, and purchase happen in a single thread.

Conversation is a revenue strategy, not a support upgrade

79% of brands agree that AI-driven conversational commerce has increased sales and purchase rates in their business. When brands were asked to rank the highest-return areas:

• 38% cited improved customer support efficiency
• 23% pointed to higher customer retention and loyalty
• 20% saw improved purchase rates

Those numbers reflect something important: the value of conversation compounds. Faster support reduces friction. Better retention raises lifetime value. More confident shoppers buy more often and spend more per order.

The brands seeing the biggest returns aren't just using AI to deflect tickets. They're using it to create one-to-one shopping experiences at scale.

What the data shows about AI-influenced orders

Looking at AI-only influenced orders across key verticals like Apparel and Accessories, Food and Beverages, Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, and Sporting Goods, the growth across a single year was significant. 

Across industries, ecommerce brands saw AI step into conversations, reduce shopper hesitation, and drive higher QoQ conversion rates. 

Learn more about AI-powered revenue generation in the full 2026 Conversational Commerce Report.

Why brands are making this a strategic priority

84% of brands say the strategic importance of conversational commerce is higher than it was a year ago. 82% agree it will be mainstream in their sector within two years.

That shift is registering at the leadership level because of what conversational commerce does to the buying experience. Creating one-to-one touchpoints earlier in the journey drives higher AOV, shorter buying cycles, and stronger purchase rates. Shoppers who get real-time answers to their questions are more confident.

What this looks like in practice: TUSHY

TUSHY, known for eco-friendly bidets and bathroom essentials, is a useful example of what happens when you take conversational commerce seriously.

Bidets aren't an impulse purchase. Shoppers have real questions about fit, compatibility, and installation. Those questions used to go unanswered until the CX team could respond, often after the customer had abandoned the cart.

TUSHY used Gorgias's AI Agent and shopping assistant capabilities to automate pre-sales support. AI Agent engaged shoppers in real-time conversations, addressed their concerns directly, and built confidence at the moment of highest intent.

This resulted in a 190% increase in chat-based purchases, a 13x return on investment, and twice the purchase rate of human agents.

How to apply this to your strategy

You don't need to overhaul your entire operation to start seeing results. The most effective approach is to start where the impact is clearest and expand from there.

A few places to begin:

• Pre-sales chat. Identify your most common pre-purchase questions (sizing, compatibility, shipping timelines) and ensure your AI can answer them confidently and promptly.
• Product page engagement. Use proactive chat prompts triggered by page behavior to start conversations before shoppers leave.
• Post-purchase follow-up. Let AI pick up the conversation after checkout with order updates and proactive support, reducing inbound volume and building trust.
• Human escalation. Define clearly which situations require a human agent – complex issues, emotional exchanges, high-stakes decisions. 

Want to see the full picture of where conversational commerce is headed in 2026? Read the full report to explore the data, trends, and strategies shaping the next era of ecommerce.

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TL;DR:

• AI is resolving tickets, not just replying. AI now handles 31% of customer interactions for ecommerce brands, and that number is expected to nearly double within two years.
• Every channel is becoming a storefront. Conversations are replacing the traditional browse-and-buy journey, with 79% of brands reporting sales from AI-driven interactions. 
• AI is shortening the buying cycle. 93% of AI-influenced purchases happen within the first 48 hours of the conversation. 
• CX teams are changing, not shrinking. Ecommerce brands are actively hiring for more technical roles to implement, coach, and maintain AI. 
• The winning model is hybrid. AI handles volume and speed, while humans handle complexity and judgment. 

The way shoppers buy online has shifted and customers are at the center. 

They no longer want to scroll through product pages, dig through FAQs, or wait 24 hours for an email reply. They open a conversation, ask a specific question, and expect a useful answer in seconds. Brands that can’t deliver these experiences at scale are seeing customer hesitation turn into abandoned carts and lost revenue. 

This shift has a name: conversational commerce. It's the practice of using real-time, two-way conversations as your primary sales channel, through chat, AI agents, messaging apps, and voice. 

What started as an experiment for early adopters has become a key growth lever, with 84% of ecommerce brands treating conversational commerce as a strategic pillar this year vs. last year. 

We surveyed 400 ecommerce decision-makers across North America, the U.K., and Europe to understand how conversational commerce and AI are reshaping the ecommerce landscape. These findings are complemented by aggregated and anonymized internal Gorgias platform data from 16,000+ ecommerce brands.

The State of Conversational Commerce in 2026 trends report breaks down all of the findings, including five key trends shaping the ecommerce landscape. 

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Trend 1: AI is table stakes for ecommerce and it’s no longer just about efficiency

A few years ago, adding an AI chatbot to your site that could provide tracking links and Help Center article recommendations was a differentiator. Today, it's table stakes. McKinsey found that 71% of shoppers expect personalized experiences, and 76% get frustrated when they don't get them. 

Right now, most ecommerce professionals use AI, with 93% having used it for at least 1 year. Enthusiasm is accelerating quickly, with only 30% of ecommerce professionals rating their excitement for AI at 10/10 in April 2025. Similarly, while AI adoption rose steadily year over year, it reached a clear peak in 2026.

The use cases driving this adoption are practical and high-volume:

• Order tracking and status updates
• Returns, exchanges, and refund requests
• Shipping FAQs and delivery estimates

These are the tickets that flood brands’ inboxes every day. AI agents resolve them instantly, without pulling teams away from conversations that actually require human judgment.

Explore AI adoption and use case data in more depth in the full report. 

Trend 2: Conversations are the new path to checkout

The traditional ecommerce funnel, visit site, browse products, add to cart, check out, is losing ground. Shoppers now discover products on Instagram, ask questions via direct message, and complete purchases without ever visiting a website.

Conversational AI is actively increasing revenue, with 79% of brands reporting that AI-driven interactions have increased sales and conversion in their business.

The practical implication is that every channel is becoming a storefront. Creating personalized touchpoints with customers earlier in the journey, through proactive engagement, is impacting the bottom line. 

Read the full report to explore how AI conversions have increased QoQ by industry.  

Trend 3: AI is accelerating the purchase cycle

Pre-purchase hesitation is one of the biggest conversion killers in ecommerce. A shopper lands on your product page, has a question about sizing or compatibility, can't find the answer quickly, and leaves. That's a lost sale that had nothing to do with your product.

Conversational AI changes that dynamic. When a shopper can ask a question and get an accurate, personalized answer in real time, the friction disappears. 

Brands using Gorgias saw this play out at scale in 2025. When AI Agent recommended a product, 80% of the resulting purchases happened the same day, and 13% happened the next day. 

Brands are further accelerating the buying cycle through proactive engagement. On-site features such as suggested product questions, recommendations triggered by search results, and “Ask Anything” input bars drove 50% of conversation-driven purchases during BFCM 2025. 

Explore how AI is collapsing the purchase cycle in Trend 3 of the report.

Trend 4: AI is making CX teams more technical 

There's a persistent narrative that AI is making CX teams redundant. The data tells a different story. 62% of ecommerce brands are planning to grow their teams, not cut them. But the scope of those teams is changing.

New roles are emerging around AI configuration and quality assurance. Teams are investing in technical members to write AI Guidance instructions, develop tone-of-voice instructions, and continuously QA results. 

CX teams are also bridging the gap between support goals and revenue goals, as the two functions increasingly overlap.

The result is CX teams that are more technical than they were before. Agents who once spent their days answering repetitive tickets are now spending that time on higher-value work: complex escalations, VIP customer relationships, and improving the AI systems and knowledge bases that handle the volume.

Learn more about the evolution of CX roles in Trend #4. 

Trend 5: The future is hybrid: AI-first, humans when it counts

Despite increasing AI adoption, data shows that ecommerce brands shouldn’t strive for 100% automation. Winning brands are building systems in which AI handles repetitive tier-1 tickets, and humans handle complex, sensitive cases. 

AI handles speed and scale. It resolves order-tracking requests at 2 a.m., processes return-eligibility checks in seconds, and answers the same shipping question for the thousandth time without compromising quality. 

Human agents handle conversations that require context, empathy, or decisions that fall outside the standard playbook. There are several topics where shoppers still prefer human support.

Successful hybrid systems require continuous iteration, meaning reviewing handover topics, Guidance, and reviewing AI tickets on a weekly basis. 

Discover how leading brands are balancing human and AI systems in Trend #5. 

Where conversational commerce is heading by 2030

The 2026 trends are about expansion and standardization. The 2030 predictions are about what comes next.

Voice-based purchasing is the biggest bet on the horizon. Only 7% of brands currently use voice assistants for commerce, but 89% expect it to be standard by 2030. The vision is a customer who can reorder a product, check their subscription status, or manage a return entirely over the phone.

Proactive AI is the other major shift. Rather than waiting for a customer to reach out, AI will anticipate needs based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and where someone is in their relationship with your brand. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a sales associate who remembers what you bought last time and knows what you're likely to need next.

Explore where ecommerce brands are allocating their AI budgets in the full report. 

Start building your conversational commerce strategy today

The brands winning in 2026 are creating smart, scalable systems where AIhandles volume and humans handle nuance. They’re treating every conversational channel as an opportunity to serve and sell.

The data is clear: AI adoption is accelerating, customer expectations are rising, and the revenue impact of getting this right is measurable.

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TL;DR:

• The Ecom Lab is Gorgias’s public research hub for ecommerce insights. It shares real, first-party data to help teams understand industry performance and trends.
• It exists to solve the lack of reliable ecommerce benchmarks. Most available data is self-reported or too broad, making it hard for teams to accurately measure performance.
• The goal is to give ecommerce teams a clear baseline for smarter decisions. With real benchmarks, you can better evaluate performance and opportunities.
• The Ecom Lab makes metrics like AI adoption, response times, and CSAT visible. These are segmented by brand size, GMV, and vertical so you can benchmark more precisely.‍
• The latest reports reveal major gaps in AI adoption and benchmarking practices. They also highlight how inefficient support processes are driving costs.

Industry benchmarks for ecommerce are hard to come by. Most of what's out there is self-reported, survey-based, or too aggregated to be usable. Teams are left wondering whether their AI adoption is on par with industry standards or if their response times are costing them revenue.

That's a gap we're in a unique position to close. 

Gorgias processes millions of customer conversations across thousands of ecommerce brands every day. This has given us a rare, unfiltered view into how the industry operates. But until now, we’ve kept those insights largely internal.

Today, we're making it public with the Ecom Lab. 

The result is years of first-party data from thousands of ecommerce brands, packaged into findings that give teams a real foundation to build their strategy on.

What is the Ecom Lab?

The Ecom Lab is Gorgias's public research hub for ecommerce. It publishes insights and reports on AI adoption, support performance, financial impact, and industry trends.

The goal is simple: give teams a real baseline to measure against and to uncover the industry's inner workings.

What data can you find in the Ecom Lab?

Metrics that actually move decisions. 

The Ecom Lab publishes metrics that matter to ecommerce professionals, including AI adoption rates, first response times, CSAT scores, conversion rates, and ticket intents, all broken down by brand size, GMV tier, and industry vertical.

For the first time, teams can see exactly where they stand in comparison to the broader market.

Read the first three reports now

AI is Everywhere reveals why roughly 4 in 5 ecommerce brands still haven't deployed AI in customer-facing support.

Stop Benchmarking Against the Average argues that support teams should benchmark response times against their specific industry vertical rather than the overall average.

Most Brands are Overpaying for Support breaks down the actual cost of support ticket volume and what happens when AI handles the load.

Go to the Ecom Lab →