Online retailers are preparing earlier for the 2026 holiday season, with a sharper focus on promotion timing, artificial intelligence and fulfilment.
The shift reflects a practical need to spread demand, improve product discovery and reduce delivery pressure during the busiest shopping period of the year. Retailers that prepare earlier can give themselves more time to process orders while improving the customer journey from initial search to final purchase.
Artificial intelligence is becoming more important in ecommerce traffic generation.
Retailers are seeing more visitors arrive from AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. That is pushing companies to think more carefully about how their products appear in AI-generated recommendations and how those visitors behave once they reach an ecommerce site.
Retailers are paying more attention to product information, site content and the way their catalogues are presented. Clearer data can make it easier for AI platforms to understand products and surface them in relevant shopping queries.
Physical stores are also playing a bigger role in online retail. Retail chains that show local store inventory on their websites recorded an average conversion rate of 3.1% in 2025, compared with 2.9% across the broader retail-chain dataset. The difference is modest, but it points to the value of giving customers better visibility into where products are available.
itim Group plc (LON:ITIM) is a SaaS-based technology company that enables store-based retailers to optimise their businesses to improve financial performance and effectively compete with online competitors. Itim adds retail value by helping multi-channel retailers optimise their business and their stores to improve financial performance and compete more effectively with the “Amazons”.
