In 2025, leading ecommerce technology vendors have baked artificial intelligence into a range of new AI tools that promise improvements to nearly every part of ecommerce websites and operations.
For online retailers, making the best bets through investments and infrastructure choices requires alignment between capability upgrades and outcomes in areas such as customer experience and conversion.
New survey results that appear in Digital Commerce 360’s 2026 edition of the Leading Vendors to the Top 1000 Retailers Report shed some light on what online shoppers care about where they see value when they shop from merchants’ sites and apps. In addition to ranking the most commonly used technology vendors among North America’s leading online retailers, the report also incorporates shopper perspectives on topics such as personalization, search and more, to highlight where they see AI features adding meaningful innovation.
As the 2025 holiday shopping season descends, retailers will get a glimpse at how shoppers use AI tools that have arrived in time for the year’s busiest sales period. And those results will undoubtedly play a major role in determining technology budgets for the year ahead. In the meantime, here are areas where online shoppers already see AI technology adding value to their ecommerce activities.
Where AI tools improve ecommerce experiences
It should come as no surprise that a quarter of online shoppers surveyed in October by Bizate Insights and Digital Commerce 360 remained skeptical of AI tools. However, consumer use of AI tools is on the rise in ecommerce, and three key areas appeared more frequently than others when survey participants were asked, “What is the primary benefit you get from AI features when shopping online?”
Among the 1,026 online shoppers surveyed, 23.9% responded that AI helps them to find better deals. That was the No. 1 use case and one that should come as no surprise in a year when holiday shopping forecasts anticipate both an increasing use of AI and focus on deals as economic pressure influences purchase decisions, as well as early deal hunting.
Nevertheless, next to saving money, at No. 2 in the survey results, was another known priority among shoppers: saving time. 19.7% of those surveyed flagged time savings as the primary benefit they see when they turn to AI tools.
At No. 3, shoppers chose a benefit that online merchants and search platforms remain actively obsessed with in the age of generative AI. 17.6% of participants checked improved product discovery as AI’s most desirable solution.
Which technology vendors online retailers use
The 2026 edition of the Leading Vendors report gets even deeper into the solutions online merchants are integrating into the tech stacks to achieve these outcomes. Some examples include Etsy’s work with OpenAI, Saks Fifth Avenue’s use of Salesforce for personalization and Best Buy’s work with Mirakl on its online marketplace.
As retailers work to optimize aspects of their businesses, ranging from marketing to fulfillment and 22 other categories covered in the report, AI is arriving everywhere, especially at the ecommerce platform level. With the peak holiday shopping just weeks away, all of these retailers will get to find out if they’re giving shoppers what they really wanted.
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The post Ecommerce Trends: Which AI tools deliver the most value? appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.
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