What eTail Toronto Told Us About the Future of Retail Experience

The personalization discussion was one of the most energized of the two days and the friction point everyone kept returning to wasn't data collection. It was the stitching.

How do you connect what happens at checkout online to what happens at the point of sale, and then make that talk to your backend systems in a way that's actually useful? Most retailers are sitting on more customer data than they know what to do with. The gap isn't volume. It's coherence. Turning scattered signals into a single, actionable picture of the customer that's where the real work is happening right now.

One of the most memorable sessions came from Roger Emica of Browns, who led a workshop on the last mile of the customer experience, not the delivery, but the conversation that follows it.

Post-purchase communication is no longer a logistics update. It's becoming one of the primary stages where brands actually build relationships. The chat, the follow-up, the experience you create after someone has already bought, that's where loyalty is either solidified or quietly lost. For retailers who've spent years optimizing the path to purchase, this is the reminder that the journey doesn't end at conversion.

Frédéric Lecocq, CMO of Simons, brought two ideas to the floor that we think every retailer and brand marketer needs to sit with.

1. The first: the distinction between share of wallet and share of mind. In an environment saturated with messages, promotions, and AI-generated noise, the brands that win aren't necessarily the ones spending the most, they're the ones that mean something. Capturing a customer's attention for a moment is easy. Occupying the mental real estate that drives future decisions? That's the work.
2. The second: a quiet but important challenge to how we talk about returns. ROI is easy to dress up. ROAS can be massaged. But what's the actual behavior your investment produces? Lecocq's push toward return on engagement is a more honest question and probably a more useful one for brands trying to understand whether their e-commerce investment is building something durable or just moving numbers around.

Everything we heard in Toronto points in the same direction.

The brands that will pull ahead aren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated tech stack. They're the ones that invest in understanding the full customer journey, where the data comes from, how it connects, and how to activate it into experiences that feel coherent, intentional, and human.

LLMs are already capturing part of the discovery journey. New channels are fragmenting attention. In that environment, the quality of the brand experience you create in e-commerce isn't a nice-to-have, it's the competitive moat.

At Datmos, this is exactly what we work on with our clients: the connective tissue between data, experience, and commerce. eTail Toronto was a strong reminder that the industry is catching up to what we've believed for a while.

The retailers who invest in getting this right: the journey, the data, the experience are the ones who'll have something worth protecting when the next wave of disruption arrives.

Datmos was in Toronto. And what we heard only reinforced what we do every day with retail brands operating at scale:

• Connecting your systems so customer data flows where it needs to go
• Designing omnichannel experiences that hold up across every channel and touchpoint
• Building the post-purchase journeys that turn a first-time buyer into a loyal customer
• Turning that data into activation that drives real behavior.

If the conversations at eTail Toronto felt familiar, it's because this is the work. Let's talk about what it means for your business.