Most ecommerce welcome flows underperform for one reason: they rely on a discount to do all the work. A percentage-off offer might get the first purchase, but it does very little to build trust, educate the customer, or increase long-term value. The highest-performing welcome flows don’t remove discounts entirely — they build enough conviction before the conversion ask happens.

Key Takeaways

Discounts don’t fix weak welcome flow strategy

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.

Learn how to increase checkout conversion by reducing friction, simplifying payments, and giving customers a faster, more seamless buying experience. To increase checkout conversion in 2026, you need to remove anything that slows customers down or makes them hesitate at the final step. This matters because the average 2026 checkout conversion rate in Europe is just around 20%. That means that out of 100 people who initiate the checkout process, only 20 actually go through with the purchase , while the rest drop off somewhere along the way.

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: