StudioForty9 celebrated its 20th birthday this year, which means we’ve been right there in the trenches for the entire evolution of ecommerce.
We’ve seen retailers go from asking, “Do we need a website?” to running highly sophisticated ecommerce operations.
But when you’ve reached this level of sophistication, where does the next wave of growth come from?
We believe there’s another evolution happening right now, as we enter what we’re calling the era of the customer.
Before we dig into what that means, let’s take a look at how we got here…
Remember when just being online was a win?
You’re of a certain vintage if you hear the words “dial-up” and immediately hear a number of beeps followed by a very distinct digital screeching sound.
So if you’re imagining that sound right now, you might also remember your first website being nothing but a fuzzy photo of your shopfront, the address of your physical location, and some contact details. If you were very fancy, maybe you had a contact form.
Back then, we weren’t even thinking about selling online, just getting online was the major milestone of the 90s.
Then, everything changed at midday on 11th August 1994, when a Philadelphia man named Phil Brandenberger bought Sting’s album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” for $12.48 plus shipping. The reason we know so much about Phil’s basket that day is because it was reported at the time as the first secure retail purchase on the internet.
From there things moved quickly. Secure transactions got easier to implement, content management systems and ecommerce platforms began to emerge, and brands like eBay and Amazon showed the world what was possible.
My first ecommerce project was on a beta version of Magento. Documentation for such a new and complex system was very thin on the ground, so progress came through back-and-forth with the Magento community: testing, comparing notes, and working through the details together. Basic tasks like positioning the logo could take days, and integrating our first payment gateway literally took weeks. Nowadays, most visual frontend work is drag and drop, and payment gateways are out of the box. Now we can spend less time worrying about the basics, and more time on the work that really matters: USPs, differentiation, and leveraging data to serve customers better.
Then ecommerce became the challenge
Despite all these innovations, it wasn’t easy to get an online shop set up. The challenges of the 2000s became all about figuring out the technology and logistics of trading online.
Even by 2010, only 18% of Irish businesses with 10 or more employees were selling online.
That said, if you were one of the retailers who had embraced the tech, it was clear that ecommerce was maturing and the 2010s would be all about optimising the experience.
Was your site fast enough?
What was the smartphone experience like?
How easily could people find products on your site?
Slowly but surely, all of the challenges of trading online were addressed, and a seamless online shopping experience quickly became the baseline.
We got very good at building digital catalogues
Today, in 2026, customers expect fast sites, easy mobile shopping, intelligent product search, reviews, stock visibility, and smooth checkout experiences. And we know very well how to deliver that experience to the shopper.
We don’t hesitate to say that StudioForty9 clients have ecommerce websites that display the kind of customer experience, technical integration and commercial sophistication you’d expect from serious retail brands anywhere in the world.
It’s been quite the journey, but the retail world has now pretty much nailed the whole concept of getting your products online and selling them.
- We’ve refined site speed and mobile experiences.
- We’ve improved navigation, search and merchandising.
- We’ve optimised product pages and checkout flows.
- We’ve integrated stock, payments, fulfilment and loyalty systems.
- We’ve fine-tuned attribution, automation and performance marketing.
The list goes on, and we now have these incredible ecommerce sites we couldn’t have dreamed of back when we first heard that dial-up sound connecting us to the world wide web.
Now, if you’re reading this as a retailer and you feel like you’re still figuring all this out, that’s understandable too. Your site may still need work. It may need to be optimised. You might be missing certain features or integrations.
But in terms of listing your catalogue on a world-class ecommerce site and selling online… you might have issues to address, but the solutions exist.
The challenges around the catalogue-based ecommerce site have largely been solved.
My first ecommerce project was on a beta version of Magento. Documentation for such a new and complex system was very thin on the ground, so progress came through back-and-forth with the Magento community: testing, comparing notes, and working through the details together. Basic tasks like positioning the logo could take days, and integrating our first payment gateway literally took weeks. Nowadays, most visual frontend work is drag and drop, and payment gateways are out of the box. Now we can spend less time worrying about the basics, and more time on the work that really matters: USPs, differentiation, and leveraging data to serve customers better.
Why the next era belongs to the customer
We spent the nineties getting online, the early 2000s figuring out the transaction, and the 2010s optimising.
Which makes you wonder, what’s the next phase?
Where is the next wave of growth going to come from, if we’ve done all this hard work of perfecting the catalogue site?
At StudioForty9 we believe we are entering the era of the customer.
You may have heard people declaring 2026 (or indeed any previous year) “the year of the customer” because, let’s face it, retailers would have to be very foolish to overlook the customer. That’s not what we’re talking about here.
The era of the customer will be all about figuring out how to make ecommerce more than a catalogue.
This new era will offer the shopper a fresh experience, tailored to their specific needs.
If it took this long to perfect catalogue-based ecommerce sites, you can imagine how long it will take to perfect a true customer-focused transformation of ecommerce. This is why we’re talking about much more than the year of the customer. We’re talking about the era of the customer.
A stockroom is not a shop
Right now, your site serves everyone the same way. No matter who lands on your site, they get the same experience, see the same products, follow the same checkout path. In many ways the average ecommerce website has more in common with the stock room than with the shop floor. It’s organised, categorised, signposted, and everything is available - but that’s about it.
Compare this to your actual shop floor, where your staff greets the customer, recognises the regulars, asks how they can be of assistance, and makes recommendations based on what the customer tells them.
A shop is more than a catalogue. It’s more than the sum of its products. A shop has a proposition. And by proposition we mean the answer to one simple question: why should this customer buy from you instead of anyone else?
You might be thinking that you already know your proposition. Maybe you’ve done the branding work to communicate your proposition on your homepage, or thought intensely about what it is that will draw people back repeatedly. It’s not that the concept of the proposition has been completely ignored, or that the customer hasn’t been a priority.
What we’re saying is that as an industry we haven’t yet systematically looked at the entire ecommerce experience through the lens of our proposition to the customer.
When Intersport Elverys came to us, their site didn’t reflect the full strength of their proposition. We rebuilt their product pages on Shopify Plus so customers could immediately see services like jersey personalisation, in-store reservations, next-day delivery and equipment assembly. Options that previously required digging, an email or a phone call. The result is a site honest about what Elverys actually is: not just a place to buy sportswear, but a retailer with the flexibility of over 46 physical stores built into the online experience. That clarity helps the right customers find what they need without friction.
Retailers already know how to do this
The good news is that retailers already know their customers. They interact personally with their customers on a daily basis in their brick-and-mortar shops.
You use your in-depth knowledge of the customer every time you buy for a season months in advance. You use it when planning your shop layout, your windows, or put together a bundle offer. At a more personal level, you use it when you know whether a shopper is price-sensitive or quality-driven. Or when you know what to recommend to a regular.
This kind of customer-led retail is already happening in your business every day.
The next opportunity is to bring more of that thinking online, so your ecommerce site starts to feel less like a catalogue of products and more like a shop built around the people you already serve.
Where AI fits into this new era
Technology moved fast as we evolved from brochure websites to fully-fledged ecommerce platforms. So it’s natural to ask what role tech advances will play in this next phase.
And yes, the hot topic everyone’s talking about, AI, is going to matter.
AI is already giving retailers new ways to understand customers, guide decisions, personalise journeys and build confidence online.
Here are four ways that is already starting to happen:
AI shopping assistants
On your shop floor your staff can guide shoppers, a personal experience that was impossible to replicate on an ecommerce website. But now a well-trained AI assistant could be that guide. An AI chatbot can engage the shopper in natural conversation, understand their needs, answer questions, compare options and recommend products in a way that feels closer to in-store service than traditional site search. Walmart says customers who use Sparky, its AI shopping assistant, check out with an average order value about 35% higher than those who do not.
AI-powered virtual try-on
One of the tricky parts of online retail is helping a customer feel confident without seeing, touching or trying the product. AI-powered virtual try-on is one way that gap is closing. Google’s Try-On tool allows shoppers to upload a photo and see how clothing might look on them. It’s not available in Ireland yet, but for categories like fashion, beauty, eyewear, and jewellery, it points to a future where the product page becomes more like a virtual fitting room.
Onsite personalisation
AI can help a website respond to the shopper. A first-time visitor might need reassurance and guidance. A returning customer might need a shortcut back to what they usually buy. A high-intent shopper might need proof, comparison or urgency. Used well, AI can help the site feel less like one catalogue for everyone, and more like an experience shaped around the customer.
Retailer-side customer insight
AI can also help retailers see patterns in their own data faster. Instead of relying only on standard dashboards, teams can ask better questions: which customer groups are buying repeatedly, where journeys break down, which products are attracting first-time customers, which segments are at risk of churn, and where margin is being lost. Shopify is already making this easier with tools like Sidekick and AI customer segmentation.
These are just a few of the ways AI is already ushering in the era of the customer, and there’s no doubt there will be further use cases and tools that will emerge to help us become more customer-centric.
That said, we don’t think of the era of the customer as a purely technological evolution.
Technology can help but the work is still human
This is not just about implementing the latest AI tools on your site and hoping for the best. AI will have an impact, for sure, but the era of the customer is still going to be deeply human.
AI cannot replace a retailer's human connection with their customer. The retailers who will forge ahead in this era will be the ones who best understand their customers, communicate a clear proposition, build trust, and create experiences people genuinely want to come back to.
Just last year, McKinsey published an article on how to compete in the second half of the decade in a world where disruption seems to be a permanent feature. In it they advised organisations to:
“Get even closer to the consumer. Consumer sentiment is no longer neatly aligned with consumer spending, and simple methods for predicting consumer behavior are insufficient. Companies need to build a 360-degree view of their consumers that enables proactive decision-making.”
Technology can help surface insights, personalise journeys and remove friction, but retail has always been about understanding people. Great retailers already know how to do that instinctively in-store. The challenge, and the opportunity, is bringing more of that understanding into the digital experience.
There are simple ways you can start doing that today, with no additional technology needed.
What are your next steps?
We would never downplay the importance of tech, but before you evaluate which AI tool to implement next, make sure you’ve answered the following: which customer are you trying to serve better, and where does your current ecommerce experience fall short?
At our Excellence in Ecommerce conference this year, Gerard Keohane, our founder and managing director, outlined seven simple steps to help retailers turn customer understanding into a practical ecommerce test.
Step 1: Start with one customer
Choose one real customer, someone who has bought from you more than once. Check if they’re on your email list, and what emails they opened. Look at what they bought, when they bought, whether they returned any items. Then write down what you actually know about them. Not just what the dashboard tells you, but what you know as a retailer, and what you can infer as a fellow human being.
Step 2: Check what they see
Then walk your website the way that customer would walk it. Look at your homepage, the category page, the product page, the email journey, the follow-up.
Imagine you’re the customer. Can they see your proposition clearly? Is it clear to them what makes your shop different? Is this how you would speak to them in-store?
Step 3: Ask them why
Find out why they actually buy from you. Not why you think they do. Businesses spend a lot of time trying to figure out what drives their customers, and very few think to simply ask them.
You might be surprised by the insights you uncover when you ask one simple question: “we’re doing some customer research and would love to know: what made you choose to shop with us?”
Step 4: Build the shop floor
Create one landing page for that customer and people like them. Not a standard product listing page, but a page that communicates your proposition clearly.
Tell your story. Show your expertise. Curate a tailored selection of products. Explain why these products matter, who they are for, and why buying them from you makes sense.
This is where the online experience starts to feel more like the shop floor. It gives the customer context, guidance, reassurance, and a reason to choose you.
Step 5: Find their friends
Once you understand that customer, look for more customers like them.
Use Shopify segments to identify people with similar buying patterns. That might mean past buyers, customers who bought related products, replenishment candidates, or lapsed customers who have not returned in a while.
Step 6: Send them there
Now create one targeted Klaviyo campaign for that audience.
One customer group. One message. One page. One clear proposition.
The goal here is not to launch a huge campaign or overhaul your marketing strategy. It is to test whether a more customer-led experience changes behaviour.
Send them to the page and measure what happens.
Step 7: Follow up
Don’t stop after one email. Follow up over 45 days with three simple touchpoints: one after seven days, one after fourteen days, and one after twenty-eight days.
Use those follow-ups to build on the same proposition. Remind the customer why this matters, answer the questions they might still have, bring them back to the experience, and capitalise on the interest you have created.
Then measure returning customer rate at 30 and 60 days.
Our bet is that this page outperforms your catalogue pages. Not by a little. By a lot. Because now you’re serving a specific person a specific proposition
No new tech. No major rebuild. Just a more deliberate and human way of using the customer knowledge already inside your business.
This is the era of the customer.
Your catalogue still matters. The tech you choose still matters. Your site still needs to be fast, accurate, integrated and easy to buy from.
But it’s time to focus on the customer with the same attention to detail we’ve applied to the catalogue.
To offer the same level of service, knowledge and care that already exists on the shop floor. To make the website feel less like a place where products are stored, and more like a place where customers are understood.
In the 90s, the work was getting online.
In the 2000s, the work was learning how to trade online.
In the 2010s, the work was optimisation.
Now, the work is the customer.
The exciting thing about ecommerce is that it keeps changing. We don’t know exactly what the next ten or fifteen years will look like, but we do know Irish retailers have already built exceptional catalogue-driven sites. StudioForty9 has spent twenty years helping shape that progress. The next challenge is bringing more of the shop floor online: the proposition, the relationship, the service, the reason to come back. That is the work we are excited to do with Ireland’s leading ecommerce brands. We’ve spent years getting our catalogue right. Now it is time to focus on our customer.
