BigSummit Panel Unveils Strategies for Engaging Tomorrow’s Shopper

In August 2024, we launched BigSummit, our flagship thought leadership conference designed to empower ecommerce leaders. Throughout the event, we hosted several panel discussions that allowed industry experts to share their knowledge and insights on the ecommerce landscape. 

During our Navigating Tomorrow's Shoppers: The Future of Consumer Behavior panel, Melissa Dixon, Sr. Director of Brand and Content Marketing at BigCommerce, sat down with Brian Lange, Co-founder and CRO of Future Commerce; Philip Jackson, Co-founder of Future Commerce; and John Affourtit, Sr. Director of Strategic Sales at Attentive, to discuss emerging ecommerce trends and how the "omnimodal" consumer mindset will reshape the path to purchase.

Here are some highlights and key takeaways from the panel that brands can use to elevate their ecommerce presence.

Understand evolving consumer behaviors

Melissa Dixon: This session is anchored in research that Future Commerce and BigCommerce worked on to produce a new report. Brian and Phillip, can you give a little background on our research, goals, and why we partnered with you?

Phillip Jackson: “We believe that we're starting to see a behavior shift, especially from the brand side as they're investing in channels and technologies, but more so on the consumer side as they're falling into new patterns and online behaviors. We hypothesized in the research that they're shifting from an omnichannel to an omnimodal shopping journey.

“When we did our research, we found three psychographics emerged. The first is people like me, who we call technostalgians. These are people who are nostalgic for technology's past. We're very set in our old ways and like how we do things online. We like the brands we shop with and frequent and have a mode of operation with them.

“We also have the scroll set at the very opposite end of the spectrum. These are people who were raised with a certain style of emergent technology, and they're rapidly adopting the new and next thing.”

Brian Lange: “It was really interesting to see what people had to say about how behaviors were changing among their shoppers and consumers. Shopping is by far the most common thing people do online. Four out of five consumers can't go a week without shopping. And 87% of the respondents said that purchasing was one of the top five activities they did on the Internet. So shopping is the culture right now. Commerce is the culture.”

Key takeaway.

Consumer behaviors are evolving from an omnichannel shopping journey to an omnimodal approach, where diverse and flexible interaction points define the customer experience. To stay competitive, brands must adapt to these emerging shopping patterns and meet consumers where they are.

Understanding key psychographics is essential for brands to align with shopping habits. As commerce becomes a dominant part of online culture, tailored strategies can foster deeper connections and ensure relevance in today’s fast-changing digital landscape.

Embrace the shift to omnimodal shopping

Dixon: Can you explain the concept of omnimodel a little more?

Jackson: “There is a new modality emerging, and that is that the customer wants not just to make a product decision wherever they happen to be able to purchase a product or to harvest that intent to buy wherever they happen to be. Omnichannel in the past might've required you to be in wholesale, at Target, and driving Instagram ads to your direct-to-consumer market, in addition to a B2B strategy for the more long-tail wholesale doors. All of these things did equate to a wonderful and ubiquitous brand experience, but omnimodal is something different.

“A shopping mode emerges when people go throughout their day, and they're inspired by their newest influencer or a new piece of algorithmic content that comes into their feed that they didn't specifically go looking for. If they want to be part of that trend, they can purchase it right there at that moment. What happens after that is a lot of product research is happening in channels that we don't have direct control over yet as brands and retailers.

“So, these data sets are going into small and large language models, and there's no true means of discovery. We can't optimize our websites to be more discoverable. There's no true index, and it's sort of fragmented. In the report we show where the first channels for these new modes of discovery and product research come from.”

Key takeaway.

Omnimodal redefines how consumers interact with brands, focusing on spontaneous moments of inspiration driven by influencers, algorithmic content, and emerging digital channels. Unlike traditional omnichannel strategies, which prioritize presence across platforms, omnimodal prioritizes immediate purchase opportunities wherever inspiration strikes.

This shift highlights the fragmented nature of product discovery, with consumers turning to things like language models and decentralized research channels. For brands, staying relevant means adapting to these new habits and finding ways to stay visible in a fast-changing shopping landscape.

Offer tailored experiences that eliminate friction

Dixon: We have three key insights that really stood out as a result of this data, and this is the first one. It's essentially the idea that consumers have higher expectations and brands have more opportunities to customize these user flows to meet and exceed expectations. Can you dig into this a little bit?

Lange: “I think one of the things that we found super interesting is that the scroll set, which is the youngest generation, is highly influenced by how they feel when it comes to shopping. This is a challenge because context is collapsing right now. People might be shopping on their phones while driving — hopefully not. They also might be shopping on the phone right after their dog throws up on the carpet.

“The challenge is being able to control the environment that people are in while they engage with your brand, which is hard. This means you need to have incredible experiences built that are easy to use and frictionless. I think this is an important thing to talk about because, at Future Commerce, we talk about friction quite a bit. There is good friction, and there is bad friction.

“In fact, 97%, as you can see here of the scroll set, said that if a brand's website is hard to use, they actually think less of the brand itself. And so that's actually significantly higher than the other two sets that we drew on, which were at 89%. It is a really big deal across all generations, but it’s going to have a huge effect on this new generation. Additionally, 80% of respondents said how they feel about a brand can change based on their mood, whereas the other generations were in the low 60s. Again, huge difference.

“Recommendations are another huge part. All generations and all psychographics had issues when product recommendations were irrelevant. They said that irrelevant product recommendations are actually worse than having any recommendations at all, and it hampered them from making a purchase. That causes a lot of friction in the buying journey, which happens on almost all websites now.”

John Affourtit: “This is dramatically reinforced from my experience, which is good. I think something we've seen specific to this, what I'd call change from channel to modal, is that the consumer doesn't care. The mediums in which they're communicated to are pretty much irrelevant to them. Knowing that, we work with tons of customers that think of channels, and we educate them to think of channels separate from strategy.

“So, instead of channels being the strategy, strategy dictating the channel specifically, which has allowed us to provide guidance in a way that's generating more ROI, that's engaging the consumer in a better way. It’s also avoiding the experiences specific to social media application. Avoiding those channel-based decisions and focusing on those modal-based decisions, which obviously come down to identity and data, is key.”

Key takeaway.

Consumers expect seamless, personalized shopping experiences, with younger shoppers in the scroll set especially sensitive to usability and relevance. A difficult-to-use website or irrelevant recommendations can significantly damage brand perception and disrupt the buying journey.

Mood-driven shopping is also key, with the majority of the scroll set saying their feelings about a brand change based on their mood. To stay competitive, brands must focus on frictionless experiences and let strategy, not channels, guide their approach, delivering tailored interactions that resonate across touchpoints.

Bridge the gap between time spent and purchase decisions

Dixon: Let’s go to the second insight. Tell us a little bit more about omnimodal within the context of this data.

Jackson: “Let's stretch the word out a little bit and say it's more about moods and attitudinal alignment. Am I in the mood to shop right now? I could be persuaded to be in the mood to shop, but I have to be in a certain frame of mind when I'm going to use multiple channels to make a buying decision. How do I reduce that?

“If everything in the world around the consumer is giving them more control, not less, how do I reduce my number of dependencies to make a qualified buying decision? Can I go to one place, one resource? I can't just go to Google anymore. They're going to make me try to opt into Gemini, for crying out loud. There are so many things that are now hurdles where there are bits of information, and now it's on me to have to assemble it.

“A few things that came out of this study is where people make buying decisions that aren't always relegated back to the times they spend most channels in. I think that this is a room where we can get really caught up in that sort of thing. People are on TikTok, so we need to invest in TikTok. That's an important insight, and I don't want to take anything away from it. But of the people in our study, 7% will have spent time in the past month on a platform like Twitch, which is live-streaming for gaming or live-streaming parasocial relationships, and 37% say they use that for a buying decision.

“Looking at where these gaps exist for where people spend time, where they're making these purchase decisions, and how they're going to use that in this new mode of shopping is an overlooked insight for people that make decisions around the future of commerce.”

Key takeaway.

Understanding omnimodal shopping means recognizing the importance of aligning with consumers’ moods and simplifying the decision-making process. As shoppers gain more control over how and where they make purchases, brands must focus on reducing friction by consolidating resources and streamlining the buying journey.

The data also highlights a gap between where consumers spend their time and where they make buying decisions. Platforms like Twitch, for instance, account for only 7% of time spent but influence 37% of purchase decisions. This underscores the need for brands to look beyond traditional channels and invest in spaces where consumers are actively making purchasing choices, paving the way for smarter, more impactful commerce strategies.

Build brand affinity through contextual relevance

Dixon: This third and final insight revolves around contextual relevance. One of the things this study clearly demonstrates is the need for contextual relevance and how it's on the rise, and if you're doing it right, it can be a catalyst for brand affinity. What does that mean for this audience?

Lange: “I talked a little bit about how context is collapsing and how it's really hard for people to know where things are at. Brand loyalty is way down, and so it's really hard for people to get a sense of where they're at and what they've done before. There are some great tools that are available right now to help provide some of that context to people, like email, texts, and recommendations.

“As people enter the journey, bad friction is a big challenge. People don't like to have to repeat themselves. They also don't like to have to orchestrate their whole lives. Right now, when you go search for something on Google, it's going to bring up a whole list of stuff that you have to sort through on your own. People want more control, as Phillip said. They need things to help bring it together.

“We saw this on the last set of data. The younger generation is going to things like Perplexity AI almost in an exact inverse proportion to the way that they're leaving Google. The amount of usage of Google was down from the previous two generations by almost the exact same percentage that usage of AI was up.

“I think the difference was between 22% and 29%. So, that new generation is leveraging tools like Perplexity to help consolidate and bring together all those pieces to eliminate friction.

“You need to think about the tools available to you in your experiences — whether that's AI-powered recommendations or connecting your history with the client between email and purchase history, even in a B2B context. Then, bring those things together and connect the dots between their history and how they're purchasing, what they have purchased, what they might need next, and the channels that you see them most active in.

“Try to gather that information. That helps them be able to assess what they need to do next, then provide those relevant recommendations that are essential given this collapse of context. With people having their brains everywhere and having data everywhere, they need to have a way to sort through that and make sense of their next shopping step.”

Key takeaway.

Contextual relevance is key to building stronger connections with consumers in today’s digital world. With brand loyalty on the decline, people are looking for tools that simplify their decisions and cut down on bad friction — like AI-powered recommendations or personalized emails and texts.

BigCommerce and Future Commerce data shows a big shift in how younger shoppers find what they need, moving away from Google and turning to AI platforms like Perplexity AI to make sense of their options. Brands can tap into this trend by connecting the dots between purchase history, preferences, and activity across channels. By offering personalized, relevant recommendations, they can make shopping easier and keep customers coming back.

The final word

Building a successful ecommerce strategy means embracing the shift to omnimodal shopping, prioritizing contextual relevance, and delivering seamless, personalized experiences. By leveraging AI-driven tools, simplifying the customer journey, and aligning strategies with evolving consumer behaviors, brands can foster stronger connections and stay ahead in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Watch the full panel discussion and download the New Modes: Redefining Personalization in the Age of AI report to explore insights and strategies for navigating the future of ecommerce and meeting the needs of tomorrow’s shoppers.