How do brands create trust in ecommerce?

If ecommerce was a band, 2025 was the breakthrough debut. We had the excitement of Generative AI hitting the mainstream, the concretising of TikTok shop and social commerce, and significant changes to Google’s platforms and features. 

This makes 2026 the difficult second album. Sure, the band are back together but expectations are incredibly high - even if we know we’ll likely get more of the same as a result.  

More leveraging of AI, including some walk-back on the initial promise, social media platforms and search engines looking for new ways to retain and monetise their users, and ongoing growth in competition for attention, margin, and new customers will be the narrative we’re met with. 

In the Shopify Growth Playbook, the Herd team and leading Shopify technology partners share insights, advice, and case studies showing how brands can navigate these challenges. But as much as we’d love to have covered everything we wanted to, we couldn’t without outstaying our welcome. So here are some of the ‘deleted scenes’ from the customer acquisition and brand chapter of the playbook for you to splice back in and recreate the ‘director’s cut’. 

Recommendations are more powerful than ever, even if they come from strangers

With social commerce and discoverability growing, customers are exposed to products from a widening array of brands at incredible pace. But before trusting a business with their personal data and payment details, customers are consistently fact-checking the validity of the brands they buy from, as well as the quality and value of their goods. 

Data from YouGov shows just how critical recommendations, UGC, and verified reviews are for UK buyers. 1 in 7 customers check reviews or ratings before they make a purchasing decision, but critically the source of those reviews has a significant impact on your likelihood of securing a sale. 

Reviews hosted and managed by the store are outweighed by verified review platforms to the tune of 2.5 to 1 when convincing users that a brand is reliable and provides value. Using a platform like Yotpo or Trustpilot to capture detailed, verified reviews significantly improves evidence of trust and value around your store. 

Evidence of product and service quality, positive discussion, and user-generated content all help grow organic visibility. Reviews can also inspire improvements in on-site FAQs, content calendars, and CTAs in paid media, so customer-led content is an obligatory investment for ecommerce brands in 2026.

Content creators and community content grow reach and reputation 

Just under 40% of US social media users surveyed by Pew Research self-reported that content creators’ recommendations influenced their buying behaviour. But thinking about content creators as a performance channel ignores a significant value of their value as brand partners.  

As with every activation channel, a significant portion of your audience is not in-market on the day. Introducing brands to new audiences, supported by compelling content, grows opportunity over time by improving the impact of subsequent marketing. By reaching audiences through multiple channels over time, brands develop familiarity and key messaging beats, while proving their ongoing trust and value in the market.  

A tertiary benefit of social media platforms that brands often sleep on is the visibility of the content creators themselves beyond their native audience. It’s been widely discussed through 2024 and 2025 how LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok have all had bites of the Organic Rankings and AI visibility pie at different points. 

Content creators can support brands in search and beyond by ranking in positions that are otherwise off-limits to the brand itself. Brand partners need to be aligned with our audience, values, and marketing strategy to build our presence online, but we’ve found that brands can grow even faster by leveraging social media content and partners that rank for keywords their ecommerce domain cannot. 

Agentic commerce isn’t here, but it pays to be prepared 

Inevitably, we have to look forward to the potential impacts of AI on search and consumer behaviour (whether that’s increased or decreased adoption). OpenAI has made no secret of the limited uptake of its instant checkout feature in the last 6 months, but Google is continuing to invest in agentic features so adoption remains a possibility.  

But for now, suspicion over the judgement and accuracy of AI shopping agents remains. Hallucination, misunderstanding, or simple errors leave customers wary about relinquishing full control of their shopping. This is one possible reason that 1 in 3 shoppers surveyed by Adyen are only comfortable with agentic commerce if they can amend, cancel, or update the order afterwards. 

While these issues can lie outside of the brand’s control, poor shopping and customer care experiences harm consumer trust and our brand’s reputation. Add on the significant cost of returns to businesses, and a sound ecommerce platform is invaluable for brands embracing agentic features moving forwards. 

If AI adoption becomes popular, we may see an increase in the rate of accidental purchases, cancellation quests, or exchanges and returns as people acclimatise to agentic shopping. Platforms like Oder Editing offer more than simple cross-sell and upsell features in your store; they also help reduce customer care requests through post-purchase management up to the point of despatch. Investing in efficient customer care management, and empowering customer service content, will save significant value for brands as a result. 

2026 is the year where the summary of your brand is critical 

While these three strands are, on some level, disparate, they all speak to a single ongoing need for ecommerce businesses. As marketplaces, social-first vendors, and AI platforms are increasingly entering the mix, ownership of our relationship with the audience has become more contested than ever before. 

Customers look to platforms outside of brands’ control for reviews and information, and to understand the solutions that are available to them when faced with a problem. 

They also know what a good brand, product, or service looks like, and they’re open with that feedback in reviews, social media, and when it’s time to buy. 

So the brands that will grow in 2026 are the brands who will cultivate consistent evidence of their value and quality across channels. Through customer, media, and collaborator-led activations, brands need to be visible and accountable to their audience’s expectations. 

From there, making it easy for customers and search platforms to see proof that we meet and exceed our audiences’ needs will supercharge visibility and revenue growth over time. 

To understand more about the value of brand equity, how to grow and curate a brand narrative, and where brands can maximise the value of their budgets online, download the Shopify Growth Playbook.