Every side of the counter: from shop floor to digital shelf
A customer walks into a café in Covent Garden.
You smile. You acknowledge them. You watch, you listen, and you try to read what they need. Sometimes you recommend something. Sometimes you suggest something they hadn’t thought of. Sometimes the best thing you can do is leave them alone.
That was my first real lesson in commerce, as assistant manager at Café Mode.
The food, the drinks, the room and the service all had to work together. When they did, something valuable happened. Customers came back. Some came back so often they became regulars. The tips told you when you’d got it right.
Nobody called it “customer lifetime value” then. But that’s exactly what it was.
Then the customer became a number
Over 30 years, I went from that shop floor to store concessions in Topshop and Selfridges, then to Tesco’s homepage, its first marketplace sellers, and brand-side accounts with retailers like Boots, THG, ASOS and Amazon.
When I moved into e-commerce, the excitement was clear: how do we recreate that experience online, from the first click to the repeat order?
But somewhere along the way, the language changed. The customer became a session. A conversion rate. An AOV. ROAS. Margin.
These numbers matter. I’ve run a P&L, and I watch them as closely as anyone. They tell you whether the business is working.
But they don’t tell you whether the customer was served.
What the digital shelf is missing
At Tesco, I looked after the sellers on its first marketplace. Many of them had good products and poor product information: missing details, weak titles, no clear reason to buy. The products were there. The shopper couldn’t see why they should choose them.
It is still one of the biggest issues I see today. In Syndigo’s 2025 survey of more than 8,500 shoppers across the UK, France, the US and beyond, 44% said they had abandoned a purchase because the product information wasn’t good enough. The bigger the catalogue, the bigger the problem. Hero lines get the attention, the best images and the best copy. The rest of the range is left to speak for itself, and often it can’t.
On the shop floor, a customer can pick the product up, look at it, feel it, and ask someone who knows it. There is a person supporting that sale.
On a product page, the page is that person. Too often, nobody has briefed it.
Before you buy more traffic
Most trading conversations start with traffic. More ads, more visibility, more sessions.
But think about what it means when someone lands on your product page. The interest is already there. They’re looking for a reason to say yes.
So before spending more to bring people in, ask the shop floor questions: - Does this page tell them why they should buy it? - Does it answer the questions a good sales assistant would? - If they’re not ready today, can they save it easily and find it again? - Can they share it with the person they want to ask?
Fix the offer before you present it. Otherwise you’re paying to bring customers into a shop where nobody greets them.
Nurture the customers you already have
While you work on your product pages, don’t forget the customers who are already in your store.
Take something as ordinary as an out-of-stock product. A shopper arrives, and the item they want isn’t there. A good page says sorry and asks: would you like us to email you when it’s back? They say yes.
That moment is gold. The customer has told you exactly what they want. On the shop floor, you’d take their name and call them the day it arrived. And you’d make sure you called.
Online, too many brands collect the request and never follow through. Or the email arrives weeks later, generic and cold, or after the stock has sold out again.
It’s worth getting right. Omnisend’s 2025 data shows back-in-stock alerts convert at around 6.7%, the highest of any automated email it measured.
Follow up with reassurance: we know what you wanted, it’s back, and here’s how to get it before it goes again. That’s service. And it’s commercial.
The customer is still in your data
This isn’t about less data. It’s about listening to the right data.
Your customers are talking to you every day: in return reasons, reviews, search terms, customer service questions and marketplace Q&A. That’s the digital version of the regular telling you what they think.
And care shows up in the numbers. In PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 52% of consumers said they had stopped buying from a brand because of a poor product or service experience. The same survey found a striking gap: 90% of executives believe customer loyalty has grown, but only 40% of consumers say they feel more loyal.
That gap is the dashboard talking, not the customer.
Better service means better conversion, fewer returns and more repeat orders. That’s not soft. That’s commercial performance.
Why this matters even more with AI
AI assistants are starting to discover, compare and even buy products on a shopper’s behalf. This is already happening. Adobe found that traffic from AI tools to US retail sites grew 393% year on year in early 2026, and those visitors now convert 42% better than other traffic.
An AI agent can’t see your smile. It reads your product information, your answers, your reviews, your delivery promise and your returns policy. Yet Adobe’s analysis found product pages are the least machine-readable part of retail sites: only around two-thirds of their content can be understood by AI.
Brands whose pages clearly explain what a product is, who it’s for and why it’s worth buying are more likely to be understood and recommended.
In practice, that means answering five questions well, everywhere you sell: - Can they find you? - Is this for them? - Can they trust you? - What happens after they buy? - Why would they come back?
Same job, new counter
The technology will change. The platforms will change. The dashboards will get cleverer.
The job stays remarkably familiar: understand the customer, remove the friction, earn their trust, and give them a reason to come back. Turn them into regulars.
The counter has changed. The customer hasn’t.
Sources: PwC, 2025 Customer Experience Survey; Syndigo, 2025 State of Product Experience Report; Omnisend, 2025 ecommerce email data; Adobe Analytics, AI traffic to US retail sites, 2026.
I’m Hamida Said Omar, founder of HSO Consultancy. I help brands selling across their own site, retailers and marketplaces turn customer understanding into traffic, conversion and visibility.
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