eCommerce Experimentation: 17 Industry Experts Make Game-Changing CRO Predictions

Search experience optimization is going to blow TF up! Watch this space. You can rank at the top of Google all day, but it's a wasted effort if your landing page doesn't deliver what people are searching for. By 2025, Search Experience Optimisation will be where all is at. This is my biggest bet for 2025.

Why This Matters: Search Intent vs. Page Intent: Krasimir Bambalov and I worked with financial brands, and we've seen how often landing pages miss the mark. Users search with a clear intention but bounce if the content or UX on the page doesn't align. We've seen this do massive damage to searchability and discoverability. Reducing Dissonance with AI: For a financial client, we used NLP to identify gaps between what users searched for and what landing pages offered. AI revealed where better navigation, clearer CTAs, or more motivating content were needed. Calculate to what extent you meet your users' intent. Krasimir and I created this metric called "Similarity" to measure the relevance between a user's search query and the content of the landing page that they land on.

Hey, I love all these tools, but the way intent is measured in third-party tools is not the same as in using your specialised model. The gap lies in the lack of contextual understanding. Third-party tools provide helpful metrics but don't align user intent (what they want) with content intent (what your page is offering). This is where specialized AI models come in. Using custom-built AI models or intent-analysis tools, you can bridge the gap and connect the dots in a way generic platforms simply can't. What You Can Do: Analyze whether your top-performing pages truly meet search intent. NLP tools can help map search queries to user-friendly page designs. Think Holistically! SEO, CRO, and UX teams must work together for seamless experiences. (this reminds me of this tweet from Jono Alderson, whom I met at SMX London this year, and all I could utter to him was some fangirl stuff lol).

Juliana Jackson Celebrated for her ability to blend data and behavioral insights to create impactful eCommerce strategies. She has a proven track record of helping brands optimize user experiences and drive measurable results.

Amrdeep predicts a stronger emphasis on user-centricity in eCommerce experimentation. While technology will continue to evolve, he believes that the key differentiator will be understanding and prioritizing human behavior. Simplified user journeys, coupled with addressing key pain points, will dominate experimentation strategies. With AI enabling deeper insights, brands must balance technological advancements with empathy-driven design to truly succeed.

Amrdeep Athwal Specializes in analytics and experimentation with a focus on enhancing conversion rates. He is known for blending data-driven insights with practical, user-focused strategies.

Insights are going to become more automated using AI. Software products will emerge that quickly parse reams of user behavioural data (qual and quant), summarise the main findings and recommend experimentation hypotheses.

Whilst this won't remove the need for UX researchers and CRO practitioners, it will change the nature of their job. They'll now need to provide the right context to the AI analysts and sense-check their outputs.

On the positive side, this should hopefully improve win rates as hypotheses will be clearly based on user data rather than hunches/copying. It should also make it easier to manage stakeholders as practitioners can show that their tests are based on data and any Hippo hypotheses can be run through the AI to see if there is any basis in the evidence.

Alun Lucas Specializes in creating tools that identify problem sessions through in-form behavioral events, accelerating UX insights and hypothesis generation.

The rise of AI-based website optimization agents. This is already happening and sure, these tools might not be up to scratch just yet but they're improving by the day and deserve our attention. Will be interesting to see what career ramifications this has for the rest of us in the mid to long term!

Luka Nikolic Luka Nikolic is a CXL-certified experimentation expert who helps businesses achieve measurable revenue growth through data-driven research and smart hypothesis testing. He blends analytical precision with creativity to optimize digital experiences and solve real customer problems.

Brian foresees the emergence of tools that integrate automated heuristic analysis with analytics and user intelligence. These systems will unify processes, making it easier for CRO practitioners to develop, test, and iterate on messaging strategies. With the advancements in large language models (LLMs), creating multiple, distinct copy variations will become more efficient, allowing businesses to test diverse styles and tones to identify what resonates best with key audience segments. This data-driven approach will provide clarity on the voice that delivers the most impactful customer experiences.

Brian Massey Brian Massey is one of the pioneers in leveraging AI to drive A/B testing and create effective website messaging and product descriptions.

In 2025, I expect accessibility to become a key focus in e-commerce, particularly in Europe, due to the European Accessibility Act. Businesses will need to adapt their digital experiences to be more inclusive, benefiting all users. We'll see more experimentation around accessibility, such as testing better navigation for screen readers, improved color contrast and overall usability for people with impairments. I believe that accessibility won't just be a matter of compliance - it will be a competitive advantage.

Niklas Bräutigam Niklas Bräutigam is the Co-Founder of Conversion Stash and a CRO professional at C&A, with a passion for improving corporate culture, documentation, and communication in CRO practices.

Is 2025 going to be the year where AI-based auto-reviews are kicking off? I can see them as a starting point for quick discussions on potentials. Already AI fits into many research activities. We see AI doing live segmentation based on behavior, but have yet to see AI visitor emulations. But it's all coming. So 2025 will be full of that.

With so much data out there it is time to emulate human behavior online. We know most of the cognitive biasses, we have data from millions of visits. Forget cookies and consent, we will look at human behavior, not actual humans. A/B testing is all about probability through statistics, so we do not use a normal-distributed generic model of us.

Gone is the question "Do I have enough traffic to run tests?" We all do now.

Ole Gregersen Ole Gregersen is the CRO Lead at IMPACT Commerce, a leading eCommerce and omnichannel player in the Nordics, and the founder of Conversionboost, an annual CRO event in Copenhagen.

András predicts a rise in AI tools specifically designed to support CRO tasks, with a primary focus on reporting and troubleshooting. These tools will enhance efficiency by automating time-intensive processes, allowing CRO professionals to concentrate on strategy and experimentation. As these tools mature, they will simplify complex data analysis, making actionable insights more accessible and helping teams respond quickly to challenges.

András Kobza András Kobza is a CRO expert who successfully works with some of the oldest eCommerce businesses and is an accomplished speaker, including at CH2024 in Texel.

Ronny predicts that large language models (LLMs) will become integral to the ideation of experimentation hypotheses. These models will serve as creative and analytical partners, helping teams generate, refine, and prioritize test ideas based on data and context. By leveraging LLMs, CRO professionals will streamline the hypothesis generation process, focusing on higher-quality experiments that are more likely to yield impactful results.

Ronny Kohavi Ronny Kohavi is a leading authority on experimentation and A/B testing, known for his groundbreaking work on understanding and mitigating false positive risks in A/B tests. He has published research and influenced industry practices at companies like Expedia and Optimizely.

AI-generated product videos will be more common in the eCommerce experimentation. Not necessarily because it works, but more because the technology is available to companies to explain product features etc. The only issue for them to solve is scale. AI-generated "User-generated content" is being a talked about a lot as well, and I have no doubt that will be a trend (for good or for bad). Overall, I think 2025 will specifically be focused on "how can I get AI generated video to work for me?"

Iqbal Ali Iqbal Ali is the creator of Ressada, a text-mining app, and a seasoned CRO expert who turned a challenging 2024 into an opportunity by innovating and running workshops to supplement his income.

It depends on the market. For Europe, accessibility will certainly become more important with the upcoming European Accessibility Act in 2025. Also, the importance of sustainability will continue to increase. Of course, AI will keep growing, making data collection and data quality even more important. And over the last few years, in mature markets, experimentation has been making its way into product teams, allowing for bigger, better, and possibly more impactful experiments. We will continue to see this trend in 2025.

For the less mature markets, CRO and experimentation will continue to grow steadily, as we have seen years ago for the now mature markets.

Ruben de Boer Ruben de Boer is a seasoned experimentation expert and educator whose Udemy courses have reached over 18,000 students across 147 countries. He is also a keynote speaker and a driving force at Online Dialogue, where he helps organizations build impactful experimentation cultures.

Valentin predicts AI will continue to revolutionize eCommerce experimentation. By analyzing vast amounts of data in real time, AI will enable faster, more actionable insights, replacing what previously took weeks of human effort with results in mere minutes.

As competition intensifies, experimentation will shift from a nice-to-have strategy to a core business requirement. Mid-size to large eCommerce companies will adopt continuous testing and refinement, moving away from static "set it and forget it" approaches. AI-powered tools will also democratize experimentation, making it accessible to businesses with limited resources.

Furthermore, experimentation will expand beyond marketing and product teams, influencing all departments - customer service, supply chain management, and beyond. Companies that leverage organization-wide experimentation will align their efforts to improve customer journeys, drive profitability, and stay competitive. CRO will transition from being a project to the backbone of innovation and growth.

Valentin Radu Valentin Radu is the Founder and CEO of Omniconvert and a pioneer in eCommerce optimization. He spearheaded the first AI-powered CRO audit and benchmark initiative, which has already run over 2,500 CRO audits and analyzed 2,000 eCommerce websites.

2025 will be the year of authenticity. My super spicy take is that social proof (on websites) has declined in importance due to the abundance of "fake" everything. AI-generated everything, influencers being paid to shill for things they don't even use... I even saw people celebrating using AI to generate fake testimonials. WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE.

People have been opening their eyes more and more to the inauthenticity of many things in their personal and professional lives. This is the year people will be looking for products, services, and humans which are genuine, authentic, and real. Not AI-generated. Not fake.

REAL shit.

What does this mean for e-com experimentation? Source out people who are fans of your products. Use real humans in your photos. Use real photos of your product. Be real with humans on customer service chat when someone is complaining that their product doesn't work. Use real humans to run your marketing and branding (and personality). TALK to your real humans on your site. Keep it real, yo.

Shiva Manjunath Shiva Manjunath is a passionate CRO professional and co-host of the 'From A to B Podcast,' where he explores marketing, experimentation, and authenticity in the digital age.

We can expect more server side testing, greater maturity when it comes to experimentation across all sizes of businesses and markets. CRO roles will be increasingly moving to the product side. We will get to attend the Inaugural Experimentation Island in GA, USA!!

Maria Luiza (Ziółkowska) de Lange Maria Luiza (Ziółkowska) de Lange is a CRO leader and accessibility advocate, named one of the 2024 Top A/B Testing Influencers. With over 12 years of experience, she has built in-house experimentation teams at Electrolux and Tele2. She is also the winner of the 2023 Experimentation Culture Award and the 2024 Experimentation Thought Leadership Award.

I think teams are starting to realise now that they should be focussing more on meaningful experiments (i.e. those that solve real customer problems) rather than just moving UI elements around. If we can spend just 80% of our time on solving real customer problems then businesses will be in a much better place.

Chris Gibbins Chris Gibbins is a seasoned CRO expert passionate about driving impactful experimentation that focuses on solving real customer problems rather than surface-level UI changes.

Ton foresees a significant division of labour between AI and humans in experimentation. AI will take over the automation of smaller, tactical experiments, enabling faster iterations and quicker insights. Meanwhile, humans will focus on larger, strategic business experiments that require creativity, critical thinking, and a deep understanding of organizational goals. This shift will allow businesses to optimize at both micro and macro levels, leveraging the best of AI and human expertise to drive impactful results.

Ton Wesseling Ton Wesseling is a globally recognized Experimentation Evangelist, organizer of industry-leading CRO events, and a consultant with over two decades of experience helping businesses master experimentation. He's known for his thought leadership, workshops, and hands-on approach to CRO innovation.

I really hope in 2025 more companies start thinking beyond conversions when it comes to their CRO initiatives. Software tools should be more and more capable of reporting on financial metrics will help us all drive real growth for our companies.

Carlos Trujillo Carlos Trujillo is an agency founder and Experimentation Consultant who has spearheaded web development and CRO projects for over 100 brands across diverse regions and industries. He specializes in crafting CRO strategies tailored for eCommerce growth.