No matter what’s in store for digital commerce in 2025, the most important consideration for brands is to ensure they’re set up to move at the speed of ever-evolving consumer, technology and marketplace trends. Key trends in the new year include acceleration in consumer-facing and back office AI, unified commerce and composable. Astound Digital is partnering with our clients to help them navigate this innovation. Our top considerations for commerce in the new year include:
Trend 1- More Impactful Consumer-Facing AI
In 2025, brands will focus on further adoption of consumer-facing AI, leveraging new opportunities like Salesforce Agentforce to create, customize and deploy autonomous AI agents.
Consumers have become increasingly comfortable shopping with retail chatbots and ecommerce agents. However, there’s room for significant improvement in the experience. To illustrate, only 25% of people feel that retail chatbots always/often understand their questions or needs (Statista). And retail chatbots aren’t yet aiding in driving sales at their full potential. While 25% of shoppers say that retail chatbots answered their question perfectly and they bought the product, 16% say that retail chatbots didn’t answer their question correctly, causing them to abandon the purchase (Ipsos, iAdvize).
Enter Agentforce from Salesforce, which is already showing an impressive ability to deploy agents to support business and service scenarios very quickly. With this fast adaption and executive-level advocacy from Marc Benioff, we expect swift consumer feedback–and commensurate improvement–to these AI results. With commerce use cases set to launch in Q1 2025, Salesforce Agentforce can be particularly impactful in helping brands build and customize better agents that accelerate consumer engagement and sales.
And the work isn’t done after building the agent. Brands must ensure that the agent is functioning at the highest level, employing testing programs to continually optimize based on data (customer interactions, engagement, sales, etc.).
While most of the AI buzz is around bots, there’s many other ways in which AI will improve customer experiences in 2025. This includes: understanding how SEO will be impacted as users move to ChatGPT and similar platforms; AI-powered commerce marketplaces like Perplexity and Daydream.ing; more impactful email/SMS content; more relevant and personalized product suggestions/recommendation engines/product substitutions; AI-powered digital advertising campaign management and optimization; scalable long-form website content; virtual store fronts or try-ons.
Trend 2- AI Back Office Transformation
AI is far more than what meets the eye. Brands will certainly continue to leverage AI for the unglamorous, back-end part of commerce, from operations to business intelligence; customer data and analytics; call center; decision-making; and efficiency.
For example, at Astound we infuse AI into how we deliver projects internally and for our clients. We’re using tools ranging from Github Copilot and Fireflies.ai to make development and communication more effective. We empower our team members with ChatGPT to expand our individual and organizational knowledge. All of these, and more, are tested and governed by our AI Center of Excellence, a function we promote to our customers as well.
Similarly, we’re hearing from our clients that service is the umbrella that covers most AI innovation to date, but we don’t expect that to dominate generative AI use cases indefinitely. There are various merchandizing and supply chain implications to artificial intelligence as an assistant to improve predictability and growth.
That being said, the potential of AI in transforming both the back-end and consumer experience hinges on the ability to create an actionable data foundation for your brand. Harnessing customer data to optimize AI is still a big challenge for many brands, and should be step 1 on your 2025 AI journey.
Another major challenge that brands will face is how to justify the investment without fully understanding the ROI associated with the cost of AI tools, business process adjustments and organizational change management. Ultimately, long-term winners will be those companies that embrace the change, create a sense of urgency in their teams, develop strategic vision, and–through experimentation–gain experience, generating small wins that gradually accelerate and institute global change.
Trend 3- Commerce Everywhere
Industries like retail have always set the pace in innovating the online shopping experience. Retailers are often first to embrace evolving consumer trends, meeting shoppers within intent moments and customizing experiences to their needs. Over the years, we’ve seen retail lead the way in areas like digital advertising, marketplaces, mobile-first shopping, user experience, social commerce, one-click checkout, native app, influencer marketing, loyalty, payments (e.g. buy now, pay later), AI, personalization, etc.
Now, online retail has changed the way that consumers want to shop for everything—from travel, tourism and hospitality; to insurance and financial services; CPG; and even B2B goods/services.
Following in the digital footsteps of retail presents a huge opportunity for non-retailers online. Let’s take a look at B2B. In the U.S. and Europe, 2023 B2B ecommerce sales were twice the size of B2C sales (U.S. Census Bureau, Statista). Amazon (obviously the dominant B2C ecommerce player) has now grown its B2B marketplace to $53B in merchandise volume in 2023, a 12% year-over-year increase (Yahoo Finance, Amazon). And what’s the main challenge that online B2B shoppers faced in 2024? 55% of European B2B buyers cited poor user experience as the primary barrier to purchase (Hokodo), encompassing things like lengthy processes, product availability, inflexible payment options and lack of repeat order capabilities. Meanwhile, online retailers have been continually optimizing the user experience for decades. And while the nomenclature is different (e.g. B2C “buy-now, pay later” vs. B2B “trade credit”), the goals are the same: understand and cater to customer needs; streamline the purchase process; enable flexibility; increase speed; boost conversion rates.
In 2025, look for all brands in all industries to seek to bring their sites to the level consumers have become conditioned to, no matter what they’re shopping for.
Trend 4- Unified Commerce
What once may have seemed revolutionary in commerce is now likely table stakes: interactive experiences, product reviews, one-click checkout, payment options, fast sites, etc. What’s differentiating in 2025 is connecting all of these experiences across the entire shopping ecosystem: store, app, off-site channels (e.g. social), POS to engage the connected consumer, and provide a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
What once was called “omnichannel” is now called “unified commerce,” and it speaks to this consistent brand experience at every interaction.
In 2025, this unified approach will also be focused on profitability over growth for many brands. To illustrate, brands will prioritize targeted merchandising and promotion strategies as opposed to one size fits all. Loyalty programs, in particular, will come under spotlight with a focus on high margin efforts (VIP access, product drops) vs. discounting. We see this already with brands that leverage Affiliate Marketing moving away from coupon sites.
Trend 5- Composable for Agile Innovation
For brands to embrace all of the above trends, from AI to unified commerce, they must be able to move quickly, at scale, and leverage technology that is flexible enough to react to ever-changing consumer and landscape dynamics.
Time to value and agility are key. The ability to make changes to your commerce tech stack and storefronts fast, without huge amounts of custom development or a backlog of IT tickets is imperative in getting time to value from your commerce efforts. Sites that can quickly address shifting market and consumer trends win business. In 2025, it’s vital that brands build and optimize their commerce experiences in a way to boost time to market for innovation.
Composable commerce can be the means to this end. Reasons for brands to adopt a composable commerce solution in 2025 include not only better site performance, but also ease in making updates, integrating with other technology, less complexity, support of multiple business models, and lower cost of ownership.
That being said, brands still encounter challenges when implementing composable solutions, including employing people with the right skill set, selecting technology and managing vendors.
If you’re ready in 2025 to embrace innovation in front-end AI, back-office AI, digital evolution in industries like travel or manufacturing, unified commerce, composable and beyond, Astound Digital can help you navigate what’s next.