Episode 01 — The future of eCommerce

HOST A:  Okay, I want to start with a number, because I think it sets up this entire season. Forty-three percent.

HOST B:  Forty-three percent of what?

HOST A:  Forty-three percent of eCommerce leaders surveyed say they’ve already faced a web accessibility lawsuit or claim. Not “are worried about.” Not “have heard of someone who.” Have *faced* one.

HOST B:  That’s basically one in two.

HOST A:  It’s close enough that if you’re running an online store right now, the honest assumption should be: this is coming for you, or it’s already happened and maybe you didn’t even clock it as an accessibility issue.

HOST B:  Right, and that’s actually a good way to open the season, because I think a lot of people hear “accessibility” and they file it under compliance. It’s a checkbox. It’s a legal department problem. But the research we’re going to be working through this season — this is a survey conducted with Qualtrics, plus input from non-profit leaders and disability community organizations, capturing insight from over 300 eCommerce leaders and members of the disability community — that research tells a very different story.

HOST A:  Yeah, so let’s just say it plainly, because I think this is the thesis of the whole season: accessibility isn’t a side issue in eCommerce anymore. It’s becoming the thing that determines who wins and who doesn’t.

HOST B:  Which sounds like a big claim.

HOST A:  It does. But walk through what’s actually happening in the market right now. You’ve got litigation and regulation intensifying — we’ll do a full episode on that. You’ve got cart abandonment, which is bleeding an estimated 260 billion dollars a year in recoverable sales. You’ve got voice commerce, which has gone from a niche accessibility feature to a mainstream channel worth over 80 billion dollars this year. You’ve got AI chat search basically becoming the new front door to retail. And you’ve got hyper-personalization, where brands are trying to tailor every experience to the individual shopper.

HOST B:  Five completely different trends.

HOST A:  Completely different trends, on the surface. Different teams own them inside a company. Legal owns litigation risk. Marketing owns personalization. Maybe ops owns checkout conversion. But here’s the thing the report points out, and I think it’s the most important sentence in the whole piece: what ties them all together is accessibility.

HOST B:  Say more about that, because I want to make sure listeners don’t just nod along and miss it.

HOST A:  Sure. So think about it mechanically. Litigation risk — almost all of it traces back to inaccessible websites and apps. Cart abandonment — a huge chunk of that is driven by checkout flows that don’t work with assistive technology, so people just leave. Voice commerce — that’s literally an accessibility feature, originally built for people who couldn’t type or read a screen, that turned into something half of U.S. consumers now use to shop. AI chat search — the AI assistants recommending products to shoppers need structured, accessible markup to even understand what you’re selling. And hyper-personalization — you can’t personalize an experience for someone if the underlying experience doesn’t work for them in the first place.

HOST B:  So accessibility isn’t one item on a list of five trends. It’s underneath all five.

HOST A:  That’s exactly it. The report frames it as a thread — it’s the thing that turns compliance into resilience, friction into conversions, voice into loyalty, AI into visibility, and personalization into trust.

HOST B:  That’s a good line. I want to push on the “turning point” language for a second, because I think people are a little fatigued by being told 2025 is some massive inflection point for everything.

HOST A:  Fair.

HOST B:  But here’s what actually convinces me it’s real this time, at least for eCommerce specifically. It’s not one pressure. It’s multiple independent pressures converging at the same moment. Legal pressure is going up — lawsuits, regulation, the EAA in Europe, which we’ll cover in a later episode. Financial pressure is enormous — you’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in abandoned carts. And the channel itself is shifting under everyone’s feet, because how people discover and buy products is moving toward voice and toward conversational AI, away from a static webpage you scroll through.

HOST A:  And all three of those — legal, financial, channel shift — point back at accessibility.

HOST B:  Right. If your site isn’t accessible, you’re exposed legally, you’re losing money at checkout, and you’re going to become invisible to the AI assistants that are increasingly doing the shopping research on a customer’s behalf.

HOST A:  Let’s talk about who actually needs to hear this. Because I think there’s a temptation to say, “oh, this is for big brands, this is for retailers with massive legal exposure.” But the data doesn’t really support that being a big-company-only problem.

HOST B:  No, and honestly the survey respondents were eCommerce leaders broadly — not just enterprise. The cost of legal action they found was in the range of five thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s a meaningful hit for a mid-sized retailer. That’s not “call our general counsel and forget about it” money.

HOST A:  And the cart abandonment side of this hits everyone equally, arguably hits smaller retailers harder, because they don’t have the volume to absorb that kind of leakage.

HOST B:  So I think the honest framing for this season is: if you sell anything online, this affects you. It’s not a vertical problem, it’s not a company-size problem. It’s a “how the internet works in 2025 and beyond” problem.

HOST A:  Let’s preview where we’re going, because I think it’ll help people decide which episodes matter most to them, even though I’d argue listen to all of them.

HOST B:  Go for it.

HOST A:  Episode two, we’re going deep on litigation and regulation — why lawsuits are becoming, frankly, a cost of doing business, what the numbers look like, and why settling out of court doesn’t mean it’s cheap.

HOST B:  Episode three is the cart abandonment episode — that 260 billion dollar number, where it comes from, and why accessibility failures and abandoned carts are, in the report’s words, two sides of the same coin.

HOST A:  Episode four is voice commerce — how something that started as an accessibility tool turned into an 80-billion-dollar mainstream shopping channel, and what that tells you about the pattern accessibility innovation tends to follow.

HOST B:  And episode five is AI chat search — the idea that your storefront isn’t just your website anymore, it’s also however ChatGPT or Gemini or Amazon’s Rufus chooses to represent your products to a shopper who never even visits your site.

HOST A:  And then we keep going from there — EAA and UK regulation, hyper-personalization, and we’ll close the season with something practical: an actionable checklist for eCommerce leaders who are listening to this and thinking, okay, where do I actually start.

HOST B:  I think that last part matters. Because it would be easy for this season to just be five episodes of “here’s a scary stat,” and I don’t think that’s useful by itself.

HOST A:  Agreed. The goal isn’t to scare anyone into action. It’s to show the actual mechanics of why accessibility has quietly become infrastructure for eCommerce — not a nice-to-have, not a moral nice-to-have even, just infrastructure, the same way site speed or payment processing is infrastructure.

HOST B:  And I’d add — a lot of this isn’t really subtle once you see it. Once you know that one in four shoppers cites unexpected costs as a reason for cart abandonment, and that checkout pages frequently don’t work with screen readers or keyboard navigation, you start to see why those two things are connected, even though most teams treat them as totally separate problems.

HOST A:  That’s the thread we’re pulling on this whole season.

HOST B:  So if you’re an eCommerce leader, a product manager, someone in legal or compliance, or honestly just someone who’s curious about where online retail is actually headed — this season’s for you.

HOST A:  Next episode, we’re talking about the legal side. Nearly five thousand accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025 alone, a twenty percent increase year over year, and the majority of them are targeting eCommerce specifically. We’ll get into why, what’s driving it, and what the actual exposure looks like for a typical retailer.

HOST B:  See you there.

HOST A:  Thanks for listening.