This playbook explores the evolution of barcodes, best practices for QR code use, and the distinct advantages of Flowcode QR codes. Retailers face intensifying pressure to turn in-store and on-package attention into identified customers and revenue. Static QR codes fall short, unable to capture crucial first-party data or offer tailored product information. However, Flowcode’s enterprise-grade QR platform empowers retailers to easily measure performance, personalize the customer journey, and collect actionable data.

Consumer expectations have never been higher. In a world of mobile-first browsing, instant comparisons and AI-powered everything, retailers face a simple challenge: Make it effortless or lose the sale. The Pixel in conjunction with Athos Commerce ran a survey of 1,000 shoppers and here’s what the latest shopper behaviour data reveals about how people search, browse and buy online, and importantly what it means for your eCommerce strategy.

Europe is getting harder, not easier. New regulations are changing the rules of commerce, sophisticated fraud attacks are forcing your systems to evolve, and the shifting payment landscape is drowning your operations team in noise.

This friction has a price tag: wasted time, lost sales, stalled growth.

Mollie’s new report gives you the model to automate that complexity away. We show you how to use technology to handle the heavy lifting of routing, compliance, and reconciliation – allowing your human experts to stop fighting fires and start driving new growth.

The most consequential customer a brand will acquire in 2026 may never read a promotional email, react to a banner ad or feel the emotional pull of a well-crafted rewards tier. It will be an artificial intelligence (AI) agent, querying product catalogs, comparing subscription value and executing purchases on behalf of a human who has already delegated the decision.

That structural shift is forcing brands across retail, payments, telecom and financial services to rethink what loyalty means when the customer is a machine. The response, increasingly, is to stop designing loyalty programs for human feelings and start engineering them for computational legibility, making brand value queryable, parseable and optimizable in real time.

Learn how leading brands and agencies are evolving their full-funnel strategies, embracing AI, and rethinking their tech stacks to stay competitive. The 2026 programmatic benchmarks confirm a market in lift-off. Data shows that 75% of marketers expect budgets to rise in 2026, and 84% report stronger year-over-year performance.

Yet beneath this optimism lies a widening maturity gap between those simply keeping pace and those pulling ahead. Our research shows that top performers consistently excel in five areas: unifying fragmented workflows, consolidating their tech stacks, adopting AI where it delivers immediate impact, investing earlier in emerging channels, and redefining performance around attention and creative quality.

This report highlights the trends in data, AI, and analytics to watch for in 2026, based on a survey of data and technology enterprise leaders. Large enterprises have invested heavily in modernizing analytics and preparing for AI at scale. Yet despite this sizeable financial outlay, fragmentation is rampant and the execution gap is wide. Leaders understand that the path forward must include semantic consistency, governed AI, and portable data foundations. 

Your customers move fluidly between online discovery, in-store browsing, digital comparison, and physical purchase, often within the same decision cycle. Learn how to bring audience-led thinking into your omnichannel strategy and build a clearer, more connected view of your customers. 

What’s inside the guide

A clear breakdown of the modern omnichannel customer See how shoppers move between digital and physical environments and what actually drives decisions at each step.

When every second counts during peak season, manual supplier onboarding and poor product data quality can cost you conversions. New research shows that 40% of executives identify data synchronisation issues as critical barriers to competitive performance, with the impact felt most acutely during high-stakes holiday periods.

What you’ll discover:

Why slow supplier onboarding directly threatens assortment sustainability and revenue