Pulse Summit 2026: Conviction Beats Complexity

Pulse eCommerce Summit returned to The Brewery in London on 13–14 May, bringing together some of the most interesting voices in retail, ecommerce and brand-building.

The event covered everything from retention and checkout strategy to AI, creativity and the future of physical retail. But the clearest theme across the two days was simple:

Conviction beats complexity.

The brands performing best right now aren’t chasing every new channel, trend, or AI tool. They’re doubling down on what already works - stronger brand identity, better customer experience, smarter retention, and clearer commercial thinking.

Here are our biggest takeaways from the summit.

Brand experience matters more than channels

One of the strongest points came from Lynda Carnal Theard, Digital Director EMEA at Dr. Martens:

“Consumers don’t think in channel anymore… the brands that are winning right now are the ones delivering the best experience.”

That sounds obvious, but a lot of ecommerce brands still operate in silos with separate teams, separate reporting, separate KPIs for retail, paid social, CRM, marketplace, and ecommerce.

Customers don’t see any of that, they just experience your brand.

The takeaway wasn’t “launch on more channels”. It was the opposite. The focus should be on consistency across every touchpoint whether thats from ads to checkout to post-purchase to retail.

The brands doing this well are creating experiences that feel connected, not fragmented.

Discounting as a reflex is hurting brands

Percival’s Ian Mackey spoke openly about how the brand had become too reliant on discounting as a knee-jerk reaction to sales pressure.

The interesting part wasn’t that they stopped discounting entirely, they haven’t, but that they stopped treating discounts as the default solution.

According to Mackey, moving away from constant promotional behaviour improved both conversion quality and overall brand perception.

That feels increasingly relevant in the current market.

Heavy discounting might create short-term spikes, but over time it trains customers to wait for sales, compresses margins, and weakens brand positioning. We see this every year with BFCM.

The more interesting brands right now are protecting perceived value instead of constantly racing to the bottom.

Your checkout opt-in is probably worth more than you think

One of the most commercially actionable sessions came from Hoodrich and Loop Earplugs around consent capture at checkout.

Natalie Tobias, Head of Ecommerce at Hoodrich, explained how the team stopped treating the marketing opt-in box as a compliance exercise and started treating it like a revenue decision.

The results were huge:

• Email consent increased from 44% → 72% in 3–4 weeks

• SMS opt-in increased from 6% → 52% in 3 months

• Around 30,000 new marketable subscribers unlocked

That’s not just a CRM improvement, that fundamentally changes the efficiency of your acquisition spend.

If you’re paying to acquire customers through Meta or Google and failing to capture consent at checkout, you’re effectively renting those customers instead of owning the relationship.

This was probably the clearest reminder of the summit:

Retention infrastructure matters just as much as acquisition and in our opinion it actually matters more at the moment.

Retention is outperforming acquisition in a tighter economy

Unsurprisingly, retention came up constantly across the two days.

As acquisition costs continue rising and consumer confidence stays unpredictable, brands are focusing more aggressively on customer lifetime value rather than pure new customer growth.

VIP programmes, loyalty, subscriptions, post-purchase experience, and CRM sophistication all featured heavily.

The mood across the summit felt noticeably different to ecommerce conversations from a few years ago.

There’s less “grow at all costs”.

More focus on:

• profitability

• owned audiences

• repeat purchase behaviour

• operational efficiency

• brand equity

Agentic commerce is real - but still early

AI shopping came up repeatedly, particularly around ChatGPT, Copilot, and Shopify’s evolving integrations with conversational commerce (they have just this week launched a connector with Perplexity).

The consensus was broadly the same across sessions:

• The shift is real

• Consumer behaviour is changing

• But execution is still early

There’s clearly experimentation happening around AI-assisted product discovery and purchasing journeys, but nobody on stage was pretending this is fully operational at scale yet.

It feels similar to where voice commerce sat a few years ago, commercially interesting, strategically important, but still developing.

The bigger takeaway wasn’t “replace your ecommerce strategy with AI”.

It was that brands need strong fundamentals before any of these channels become meaningful.

AI won’t fix weak positioning, poor retention, or forgettable creative.

Creativity becomes more valuable as AI content explodes

As AI-generated content becomes easier and cheaper to produce, originality becomes more important.

That point surfaced repeatedly throughout the summit.

The brands standing out right now are the ones with stronger points of view, sharper identity, and more recognisable creative. Not necessarily the ones producing the most content.

Emma Bridgewater closed the summit with:

“There are no rules. Break the rules if they don’t suit you.”

That felt like an appropriate ending.

Because despite all the discussion around AI, automation, and ecommerce tooling, the strongest brands in the room still felt deeply human.

WhatsApp feels like the next retention land-grab

This wasn’t a dedicated theme of the event itself, but it came up around the wider retention conversation, especially alongside Hoodrich’s SMS growth numbers.

Right now, WhatsApp marketing feels very similar to where SMS was around 2018:

• strong engagement

• underused by most brands

• clear ROI advantages

• still early enough to create leverage

The economics are changing though. Meta is moving WhatsApp to per-message pricing in July 2026, which will almost certainly reshape how brands use the channel.

But for now, it still feels like one of the bigger untapped opportunities in ecommerce retention.

Final thoughts

The overall message from Pulse was refreshingly consistent:

The ecommerce brands winning in 2026 aren’t necessarily the ones doing the most.

They’re the ones executing fundamentals better:

• stronger brand experience

• better retention

• smarter customer ownership

• clearer positioning

• more confidence in who they are

Less complexity and more conviction.

Want to chat further or have a specific challenge…..give us a shout. Get in touch