This year has delivered a wave of trends. Some will fade, some have become ecommerce staples, and some still have yet to crest. We made predictions on ecommerce trends back in January; now we review how they went, and where we’re at now as we prepare for 2026.
Analytics
The Prediction: The best commerce companies will lean into zero-party data collection and cookieless tracking. This is where consumers choose what to share, and in return, they get a better, more personalized experience, creating a mutual benefit and increasing trust with the end consumer.
What Happened: The industry hasn’t seen much adoption of either zero-party data collection or even cookieless tracking overall. We’re seeing the standard cookie-acceptance pop-ups with most businesses opting to use their existing technology to stay compliant with laws. We hope to see cookieless tracking techniques, like server-side tracking, trend upward in the coming years.
Security
The Prediction: Single Sign-On (SSO) services replace companies hosting their own authentication and databases full of passwords, allowing businesses to offload the responsibility to specialists who understand the security requirements and can also offer a better customer experience. This will help protect against current threats and impending security risks that quantum computing poses.
What Happened: Security has indeed been front and center this year, even if people aren’t talking as much about the longer-term quantum computing threat. Data breaches still run rampant; Anthropic’s recent press release delves into hackers in China using Claude to break into a system. So while quantum computing isn’t here yet, AI-powered hacking already is.
Companies should continue to double down on security to be sure they’re in the best position possible for when new threats break. Once quantum-proof security is cracked, everyone’s cryptography will be in jeopardy. The companies preparing now will survive.
Location, Location, Location
The Prediction: Focus will shift from big box stores back to local experiences, causing the demand for services such as hyperlocal delivery, geofencing for marketing and user experience, real-time inventory management, and edge computing to go up.
What Happened: Retailers are shifting away from large, centralized warehouses toward local store-based fulfillment, shipping products from whichever location has the inventory. Some retailers that don’t have traditional warehouses at all distribute products directly to stores and fulfill online orders from those locations. This aligns with the rise of hyperlocal delivery and the use of stores as logistical hubs requiring real-time inventory management.
There’s also the marketing aspect to this; retailers with physical locations can target customers differently based on in-store behavior. This type of store-driven marketing and activity tracking has grown significantly. Companies with brick-and-mortar stores increasingly see them as a competitive advantage, especially against players like Amazon that lack physical retail space.
All of this demands that software and infrastructure become more local. No one talks about edge computing anymore because it has essentially become the default. Platforms like Vercel, AWS, Amplify, and Cloudflare all rely heavily on edge-based services. In practice, edge computing has become ubiquitous and is now simply an assumed part of modern infrastructure.
Rethinking Software Divides
The Prediction: Inventory, order processing, customer data, and payment information will be consolidated into a cohesive ecosystem known as unified commerce for a more accurate and responsive experience.
What Happened: Companies have reached out to us all year long because they’re feeling the pain of disconnected systems that lead to fragmented customer insights, inconsistent experiences, and limited visibility into sales and inventory. A unified approach delivers the exact opposite: a clear, connected, real-time understanding of the entire customer journey. And no, “unified” does not mean buying one colossal, do-everything platform. That’s actually the worst path you can take. The key is still breaking things into smarter, modular, manageable pieces.
That’s where composable commerce comes in, and it’s exactly why so many teams ask us to guide them through the transition. Composable is a modular, flexible way to build commerce experiences by blending best-in-class APIs with custom components that express what makes a brand unique. Just as Google dominated by mastering search, composable vendors excel by owning one domain, like product or content, and doing it far better than any all-in-one platform. With API-powered services, companies can reuse capabilities across touchpoints, add or swap components as they grow, and evolve their tech stack without costly overhauls. It’s this agility and the business impact that comes with it that keeps organizations coming to us to help them move into the future of digital commerce.
Robust Architectures
The Prediction: All of the above requires robust architectures, such as MACH-based products.
What Happened: MACH remains the driving force behind the future of composable commerce. While composable is the strategic approach to assembling best-of-breed capabilities, MACH provides the modern technical foundation that makes this approach scalable, flexible, and, one of everyone’s favorite buzzwords, future-proof. Though the two are often confused, they’re distinct: composable is the philosophy, MACH is the engine. And while you can build composable without MACH, the companies behind the MACH Alliance pioneered the movement and continue to push it forward, making MACH solutions the most reliable path for organizations embracing composable architecture.
Event-driven architecture completes this modern commerce blueprint by enabling real-time data flow across the entire ecosystem. Instead of relying on slow batch processes, event-driven systems broadcast key activities such as purchases, inventory changes, and customer interactions the moment they happen. This keeps connected systems up to date, delivering accurate inventory, consistent experiences, and seamless operations.