Running a business online comes with numerous challenges due to the fast-moving environment , where customer expectations are higher, competition is just a click away, and technology keeps evolving. Still, moving online is clearly worth it.

In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), 73% of people shop online, so if your business isn’t there, you’re missing a large share of customers. The European e-commerce market itself is huge, too, expected to reach €353.5 billion in 2026 and keep growing.

AI is changing how consumers discover and purchase products online, and it’s happening fast. AI-referred shoppers on Shopify convert at nearly 50% higher rates and carry 14% higher average order values than organic search. Here’s what the early data says about how AI is reshaping commerce—and why the window to act is right now. Seemingly every week, there’s a new update or capability that makes a more compelling case for shoppers to use AI as their default shopping channel. But for all the discussion about what’s changing and what it means, most of it is heavy on predictions and short on actual behavioral data.

Not every tool that calls itself an AI popup builder earns the title. The word “AI” gets attached to everything from basic exit-intent rules to genuine machine learning, so it’s worth knowing what to look for before you commit. A truly AI-powered popup tool does at least some of these things without manual input:

1. AI-assisted creation

You describe what you want in plain language, or simply enter your URL and pick a goal, and the tool builds a complete, branded popup for you: copy, design, and targeting rules included, in minutes.

Consumers arriving from AI search and chat may be high-intent and ready to buy, but the early evidence is uneven and easily misread. AI-referred visitors are engaging more deeply and converting at higher rates, according to the April 2026 Adobe Digital Insights “Quarterly AI Traffic Report” ( PDF).

Premium Engagement

AI-referred visitors in March were 42% more likely to purchase, according to Adobe, generating 37% more revenue per visit than visitors from other channels.

Conversion is the primary job of ecommerce product pages. Ranking in search engines has always been a close second. Until now. It’s near cliché in 2026 to note that search and product discovery are changing. AI Overviews, AI Mode, various answer solutions, AI chat interfaces, and emerging shopping agents are remaking how consumers find and buy, from luxury items to everyday goods. Conversion is the primary aim of a product detail page. But it should also attract traffic via traditional rankings and generative AI visibility.

This report synthesizes consumer behavior and other market insights across a dozen major destination markets in Europe, North America and Australia, some of Landmark Global’s key destination countries, to help e-tailers understand where expectations converge, where operational choices matter most, and how e-logistics performance increasingly determines success in cross-border expansion.

What you’ll find inside:

Beauty is the 3rd most popular spending category for Gen Zalpha, with 40% of young people who love to spend on beauty. Despite this desire, 29% of young consumers actively search for a discount before purchasing. How can beauty brands capture young people’s attention with value-driven messages, and successfully convert that attention into purchases?

This comprehensive study delivers both the hard numbers and the real-life qualitative insights you need to capture the youth market.

Retailers are entering a new era of discovery. As AI-powered search reshapes how consumers find products, retailers are realizing they have a significant blind spot: anonymous customers. For years, the retail industry has optimized around known customers. Loyalty programs, CRM systems, personalized emails and app experiences are all built on the assumption that the most valuable shoppers are the ones who log in, return regularly and leave a trail of behavioral data behind them.