3 Trends eCommerce leaders must watch

Welcome and Introductions

Sapir: Hello and welcome, everyone, to today’s webinar on three trends every e-commerce leader must watch. My name is Sapir Den. I’m part of accessiBe’s marketing department and I’m really excited to welcome you to today’s session where we’re going to cover some really interesting topics and data that has emerged over the past couple of weeks from a survey that we just conducted. So without further ado, I’m excited to introduce our speakers for today.

As mentioned, I work at accessiBe. I’ve been here for about four years. So, hopefully I’ll be able to answer questions that come up today. But with me are two very good friends.

So, I’m really excited to welcome Adrien and Kelly. And Adrien, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

Adrien: Thank you so much, Sapir, for having me today. I’m Adrien, CEO and founder of Fab Solution. We are a Shopify Plus design and development agency. We started the agency in 2019.

So we’ve been at this for six years now. We are serving brands mostly in the US in the mid-market segment. So 10 to 100 million in revenue across fashion, beauty and CPG verticals. And we’ve been working closely with accessiBe for I would say three years now.

Sapir: Awesome. Thank you. And you’re a great Shopify partner as well. So, we’re very excited to have your insights here today.

And Kelly, can you introduce yourself?

Kelly: Yes. Hello, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kelly Smino. I am based in Washington DC.

I’m an attorney and when I was 16, I was in a car wreck that caused me to become paralyzed and I’ve been wheeling around ever since then. And today I focus a lot of my practice on helping people in the disability community and also helping bridge the gap of understanding accessibility. So I’m happy to be here today to talk more about the legal landscape in web accessibility.

Sapir: So we have two rockstar speakers here today and I’m really excited to jump into the topic. So why are we really here today? Why is this topic so interesting and what’s all the buzz about? Well, recently accessiBe surveyed 300 e-commerce leaders to uncover specific trends and shopper behavior.

2025 has been a crazy year if we’re looking at AI trends, if we’re looking at shopping behaviors online, how we’re searching, what we’re searching for. So, we decided to consolidate all of that into research that we’ve done alongside Qualtrics and they’ve helped us reach those e-commerce leaders. On top of that, we’ve also conducted research or reached out to our community members through accessiBe’s nonprofit community, our inclusive product advisory board to reach out to the disability community and hear their feedback.

This is one of those really exciting opportunities where we get to hear both sides of the business, both the business itself and what are their priorities and also the customer side from the accessibility lens. This is going to be a very interesting webinar where we talk both about the concerns of the business, how you can prioritize and what the community thinks about that. So why don’t we get started from here.

Before we get started actually with our topics, I am really excited to invite Adrien to share a little bit about his perspective on the e-commerce industry as the owner of a web agency. Then we’ll go into the three topics that accessiBe wants to cover for today’s webinar. Our research is going to be all live on our website today. We have seven different reports available there.

So you’ll be able to access even more information after the webinar. Then after we go through those trends, we’ll have some actionable steps and checklists for you. Finally, we’ll close with a Q&A. So Adrien, what do you see for the holiday season this year?

Four E-Commerce Priorities for the Holiday Season

Adrien: It wasn’t easy to narrow it down to four, but these are the four that I think are top of mind and the most active. Number one, conversion rate optimization. With paid media costs up across all channels, optimizing the on-site experience is the growth lever I think nobody can afford to ignore anymore. Every click is expensive and CRO is no longer nice to have.

It’s the only way to make rising acquisition costs sustainable. Brands are approaching this with structured A/B testing programs. That means treating your website as a living experiment: testing, measuring, iterating, and focusing on speed, performance, user experience, usability, and clear value communication. It also means tying conversion-rate optimization outcomes directly to acquisition metrics, cost of acquisition, ROAS, and LTV.

Number two, compliance as a competitive edge. We’ve seen an explosion this year in terms of lawsuits, whether it’s accessibility or privacy lawsuits, new regulations implemented in your regions. I think that beyond avoiding fines, compliant brands convert better. That ties back to the first point.

Clearer content, better contrast, and clearer navigation improve the user experience for everyone. The brands and clients I speak with are staying on top of it. It’s top of mind for them. They’re building strong foundations to begin with and then they work on it regularly.

They keep iterating, auditing and keeping track of all the things they’re doing. AI is the big topic obviously on everybody’s lips but I think there are two sides to it. One side is what is happening on-site. How can you use AI on your website through conversational search and visual recognition?

So think how a piece is going to fit on you or identifying your skin tone to pick the right product in terms of makeup. Features like these are being used more and more and are really helping move the experience forward. The other side is off-site AI, generative engine optimization. There are many different words.

I do not think the industry has settled on one term for this yet, but it is essentially the AI-era equivalent of SEO. So for a traditional search engine, how do you optimize for surfacing your brand and products in these AI search engines? So ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, you name it. It matters because AI is pulling content directly into answers, and if your brand isn’t clearly represented, you risk being replaced by whoever is.

So here the idea is to structure your content for GEO, or generative engine optimization: product information, Q&As, specifications, having the right architecture and metadata and schema markup and then tracking how you appear in these searches.

So think of which prompts people may be using to surface your brands and then regularly prompt these and see which brands are showing because of which article because a lot of the AI engines will tell you which source is helping and then reverse-engineer what helps those brands appear. So yeah, I think these are the four key trends I’m seeing as we enter the holiday season and potentially beyond.

Sapir: And I love these because they’re very connected to what we’re going to be talking about for the rest of the webinar. So, I’m excited to jump right into that. For today’s session, we’re going to talk about how this holiday season isn’t just your typical holiday season. It really is a turning point in the e-commerce market with all of the emerging technologies and changes in shopper behavior.

And we’re going to be connecting the dots today between that business performance and customer experience. So, Kelly in a moment will cover digital accessibility lawsuits in the compliance space. And I really love what Adrien just shared about compliance basically being the price for market access these days. So, we’ll get into that a little bit.

AI is also rewriting the rules. What Adrien called generative engine optimization is closely related to what we will discuss as answer engine optimization and a few different ways that you can make your content and your website and your brand AI ready. And finally cart abandonment and some of the insights that we got from our research. I think this will be fascinating for everyone here today.

So, without further ado, Kelly, I’ll let you jump right in.

Trend 1: Accessibility Compliance and Legal Risk

Kelly: All right. Thanks so much. So, you know, a large part of what you have to do as a business owner, I’m a business owner myself, is assessing risk. And so, that’s a little bit of what we’re going to talk about today.

We are going to look at the legal framework that shapes web accessibility right now. There are quite a few things in the US and abroad. The framework for accessibility law in the United States is the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was passed in 1990 and it set the framework for so many aspects of our public accommodations and equal access.

I mean certainly as a person who uses a wheelchair like if I’m approaching a building and there’s a set of stairs, you know, I’m going to look for the ramp. I’m going to look for the access point. I’m going to look for the elevator. But what does that look like for a person with a disability in the landscape of digital access?

There are also other laws in the United States and abroad. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act establishes technical accessibility requirements for federal agencies and organizations receiving federal funding. Internationally, some laws are even more robust. The EAA, or European Accessibility Act, establishes accessibility requirements in Europe and applies in the digital space.

The ACA, or Accessible Canada Act, establishes accessibility requirements in Canada. Meaning that no matter where we go, no matter where our business touches around the world, there is going to be some law or regulation that deals with web accessibility and accessibility at the end of the day is really about the people. It’s about making sure that they have a good customer experience. You want to make sure that as many users as possible can access your digital experience.

Evaluating risk is one aspect, but at the end of the day, accessibility is also a good business decision because it is the right thing to do. It brings more attention, more people to your site. And I can tell you that the disability community is very brand loyal. And so if they find a site or if they find a brand that really embraces accessibility, like that means something and they’re going to be a return customer.

When we consider the ADA, we know it was enacted in 1990, when the digital landscape looked incredibly different from where it is today. And so the trouble is the ADA does not in its very specific terms list out what web accessibility should be. However, the Department of Justice and court cases that have come through have established that websites need to be accessible and have begun clarifying what that should look like.

And what we’ve seen is more and more people really caring about this issue. And what that translates to is that when a person is unable to access a website because it was not made in an accessible way, people are holding businesses accountable for that lack of accessibility. And that translation point is that there has been an increasing number of lawsuits being filed across the US related to web accessibility.

If you look at the map or the chart on this slide right here, you can see year on year after year, the number of lawsuits being filed is increasing. And that trend, I anticipate, is going to continue to increase. There was a 20% increase in the number of lawsuits filed in 2024. And we do think that is going to continue to increase in 2025, 2026, and beyond.

When we are thinking about what having an inaccessible site and what that means for a business risk, it means a risk of having to deal with accessibility through the process of litigation. There are many things that can be done before you find yourself facing a demand letter or a lawsuit alleging that your website is inaccessible. We’re projecting that at least 5,000 cases are going to be filed in 2025 related to web accessibility.

Meaning that there are businesses operating websites that do not have accessibility for people with disabilities and that a lawsuit would be initiated for them to correct their website. If you look at which type of website is most likely to encounter a legal claim, e-commerce is overwhelmingly the most common target. 69% of lawsuits that are filed related to web accessibility are filed against businesses operating e-commerce websites.

It makes sense because people visit these sites intending to buy a shirt, a product for their dog, or whatever else they need. And if they find a barrier and being able to access the website, that’s those little things in life that can really get people upset. And so 43% of the accessiBe survey respondents faced an accessibility lawsuit or claim.

Almost half of the survey respondents had that experience where they were given a demand letter or it escalated to an actual legally filed action in court. And that’s way too many people. Businesses need to focus on many other priorities. As a lawyer, I can tell you that litigation is complicated, messy, expensive, and rarely enjoyable.

Litigation is complicated. It’s messy. It’s not fun. It’s expensive.

And at the end of the day, you’re going to go back to having to make your website accessible. So that is why e-commerce brands cannot afford to ignore accessibility. Ignoring this risk has not worked. Operating an inaccessible website can be very expensive.

The average cost of a legal action could range from $5,000 to $25,000 and potentially much more, depending on how long the matter continues. Under some European regulations, including the EAA, fines can reach as high as 500,000 euros for an inaccessible site. That is real money and that is real consequences for not having an accessible site. And which is why you want to protect yourself, you want to protect your brand.

And accessiBe does have that support built in where if you receive a demand letter, if you receive an email or an inquiry saying, you know, your website’s not accessible, we may pursue legal action.

If a legal action is filed, accessiBe also provides litigation support and 78% of the surveyed e-commerce leaders recognized that type of support that built-in knowledge was very important because if you operate on the web, there is always a risk that a claim could be filed and you want to have the structure and support around you to support that.

Accessibility Audit Readiness

Sapir: Thanks, Kelly. That was really insightful and I love the point that you made, which is at the end of the day, you’re still going to have to go back and make your website accessible. So, it’s good practice to just get started with it and make sure that you’re doing everything that you can along the way. And we’ll get into that.

But for now, we have a short poll which I will try to start now. Apologies as I get it ready. And oh, we’ll see if it works. Can you see the poll?

So, how confident are you that your site would pass a formal accessibility audit today? Don’t be shy. We’re starting to see some responses. Okay, so the majority of the responses that we’re seeing right now are moderately to very confident, which is very interesting.

Can I share the results? Yes, I can. Here you go. Most responses fell into the moderately or very confident categories.

What did our respondents say? Well, of the 300 e-commerce leaders that we surveyed, 79% were not fully confident about meeting accessibility requirements. They were unsure. And we’ll get into a little bit more detail about what else they told us about their practices with accessibility as we go along.

But the really important insight here, and this is from a friend of mine and Kelly’s, Josh Basil. He’s the community relations manager here at accessiBe. He moderates our product advisory board, and he’s also a partner with Kelly at the spinal cord injury law firm. And he said, “Regulation is no longer a distant threat.

It’s here. It’s global. It’s costly. Retailers that delay accessibility risk facing fines and lawsuits that could have been avoided with proactive compliance.

And I think that really hones in on that point that you just made, Kelly. I am glad Josh reinforced that point.

Trend 2: AI Search and Product Discoverability

Sapir: Let’s jump into the next topic. And this one that I think everyone is burning to learn a little bit more about, which is AI chat and AI search and what that really means for your business. And this is something that a lot of businesses are talking about these days, but what does it really mean? So Adrien, I’m going to pose this question for you really quick.

How do you think customers are leveraging AI, and how can brands increase visibility? What are they doing?

Adrien: So I think before we get into that, we need to understand how users are leveraging AI chat. And one of the biggest shifts is people are no longer searching. They’re asking. Instead of typing for best vitamin C serum, they’ll say I have sensitive skin and I live in a humid climate.

What’s a good vitamin C serum that won’t irritate me? So completely different in nature. The way customers are using it they are using it to discover. So the way I just described it they’re using it for pre purchase validation.

They will try and verify some of the claims that brands are making on their website. Is this serum really crueltyfree? Does this shoe fit a wide foot? They will look into details into these trust summaries that are combining product specs, reviews and real world feedback.

We know that the LLMs are pulling the data from forums, from articles, from the website, gathering and then summarizing for users and then they’re also using it for post-purchase support. Many users now ask AI how to use or maintain a product instead of visiting a help page.

This is why structured FAQs on your website and care instructions matter even more today than they used to because AI is pulling directly from them and actually FAQs are among AI’s favorite types of content because it’s very easily intelligible. So AI chat search is becoming I would say the first touch point of the customer journey. This is where the discovery, the comparison, the education is happening.

So brands showing up clearly in those answers are the ones winning visibility before a shopper ever hits Google or a product page.

Sapir: You made excellent points. That was exactly what I wanted to hear before we jump into this section. And I’m glad that you the expert in e-commerce were able to make those points for me. So when we’re talking about AI, I do have some data here that we wanted to surface to everyone.

Just on ChatGPT, the research shows that there are 1 billion prompts daily. And as Adrien said, I’m probably, you know, a percent of those 1 billion. But when we surveyed our customers, we also found that 60% of shoppers are using or sorry, we’re we found that 60% of shoppers in the US are using generative AI for online shopping. And that as Adrien suggested is for the pre-purchase validation for comparing prices for comparing products ingredients whatever it may be.

And then finally we found that 78% of surveyed leaders say that AI referrals will be critical. So those e-commerce leaders from the mid-market, from your competitors or other businesses that you’re working with or you’re purchasing from are saying that AI will be critical for this holiday season.

And I really like that point that you made that before we even think about how businesses should be using it, we should be thinking about how individuals, how specific customers are using AI to find what they’re looking for online. That reflects the exact point you made: the same structure that fuels accessibility also fuels discoverability. What makes a website accessible also fuels discoverability.

And if your products aren’t going to be AI ready, then they’re not going to be searchable, discoverable, they’ll essentially be invisible to the LLMs and to the wider audience searching. So what does that mean about being AI ready and what can you do about it? So, this is where we will get into a few tactics for what we call answer engine optimization, alongside what Adrien described as generative engine optimization.

The first one that we have here today, and if you’ve been to a webinar with accessiBe before, you’ve probably heard about alt text. This is descriptive text that you add at the code level to make sure that an image is accessible for assistive tech, so screen reader users primarily. And this will read out what is happening on the website.

So rather than an image not having any description and just reading off image or saying blank, you want to describe exactly what is in that image and be as concise but also direct as possible because AI will also leverage that information as part of the search.

When we’re thinking about structured data, and this is also what Adrien commented on: schema and the markup of your website, making sure that everything is well labeled and structured properly, meaning that you have your headings and title or titles and headings in the proper structure, that all of your forms and buttons are labeled as clearly as possible to make sure that both people and machines can navigate and promote your products. And the last tip that we have is around product descriptions.

This is an interesting one because it concerns the content living on your website. So, similar to Adrien’s comment about FAQs, you want all of the content on your website to be very clear, very descriptive, and conversational. In the same way that someone is searching through an LLM, you also want to make sure that your content is in plain language in a way that the user and AI will be able to understand exactly what you’re selling and who it is meant for.

So, we do have a little bit of a comparison here for you. The benefits of accessible content versus inaccessible content. And when we’re talking about the benefits, it really relates to making sure that you have that structured markup on your website and that helps with the visibility of both your web page and what you’re offering.

It helps with conversion because if you’re able to provide more information, more reliable data, more people will arrive at your website and hopefully also make that purchase. And then finally, brand equity. More inclusive experiences can also strengthen brand equity in terms of what Kelly mentioned earlier, brand loyalty and customers wanting to return back for a better experience.

When we’re thinking about the risks of inaccessible content, well, first of all, as Adrien mentioned, not being searchable or discoverable will be frustrating if you’re putting all that investment into your conversion, but then not seeing the results with those LLMs. You’ll also be excluding customers, meaning if you’re not making your content accessible, you’re just not going to be reaching customers who can’t use your website otherwise. And that will affect your reputation, brand loyalty, and so forth.

So, those are some of the key points that we wanted to make today. And now I have another poll for you. Are you actively adjusting your content to be more AI chat friendly? So, as I set up the next poll, let’s see if I can do that.

No. Oh, seems that I’ve messed up the polls. I apologize everyone. Feel free to add in the chat any thoughts or questions about this.

But in the meantime, I’ll share with you another insight from our survey, which is that 74% of the respondents said that they are already adjusting product content to be AI chat friendly. And when we did ask our community members about this, here’s one comment from a nonprofit that supports those with developmental disabilities.

They are an independent living center specifically for independent living so that people with disabilities can live on their own, work on their own and have that independence to also make their own purchases. So AI depends on the query being worded properly to obtain the correct information. And this is critical for that specific community. And that’s just one community out of the entire survey.

So we can definitely get into more information about that.

Trend 3: Cart Abandonment and Checkout Accessibility

Sapir: But I’m also excited to get into our next topic, which is cart abandonment. This one was particularly striking. This is something that many businesses are familiar with. And we’ll talk about what the research has shown us.

The Baymard Institute conducted a study on e-commerce checkout usability and accessibility and they found that roughly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned and that $260 billion in sales could potentially be recovered by improving checkout usability. Adrien, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on this as an e-commerce web agency.

Adrien: Absolutely. I’m not surprised at all by that stat. We’re seeing it every day at Fab Solution. When we audit or rebuild websites, checkout is very often where the biggest leaks happen and most of them are entirely preventable.

Should I go into more detail or should we keep that for a bit later?

Sapir: I’ll come back to you on that because I’m interested to hear what you have to say, but I also want to share some of the interesting data that we have today. So, when we actually did our research, we found an interesting market contradiction between confidence and reality. According to that Baymard research, 70% is the global cart abandonment rate. But then when we surveyed e-commerce leaders, 72% of them said that they are confident that their checkout process is optimized.

That’s really interesting because how can you be confident that your checkout is optimized if the reality shows that most checkouts are abandoned? And then we get into an even more interesting data point when we see that 40% of the surveyed people haven’t audited their checkout process for accessibility in the past year. Meaning they have this false sense of confidence in their in their checkout process and in the usability and how optimized it is, but they haven’t audited it for accessibility.

And that conversation between usability and accessibility is something that we’ll come back to in a moment. But what else we found is that only 62% were concerned about checkout performance, which is slightly different because checkout performance and optimization for accessibility and usability are different things. But when we further honed in on this and asked how you feel about assistive technologies on your checkout page, one in four admitted that their checkout did not work properly with assistive technologies.

So definitely there needs to be more of an effort to audit and check your checkout process. Understanding cart abandonment can be part of that, meaning we can identify the causes or as Adrien said the leaks that are happening.

Usability is one layer of it, but accessibility is going in even deeper and identifying where that really is happening for a specific community where the benefits from addressing those accessibility barriers will help usability, will help conversion, will help brand loyalty and customer experience and we can go on and on from that. Adrien, did you want to respond to that?

Adrien: Just to add a little bit to that, I think Shopify is doing a great job at that. So by migrating to Shopify or building their e-commerce website on Shopify, I think brands will do 80% of the work. The platform has an incredibly well-optimized checkout from a user experience perspective and from an accessibility perspective out of the box.

Beyond that, it’s the things we’ve mentioned, you know, color contrast, clear CTAs, also things like shipping cost, discount logic, being as clear and straight to the point as as possible to remove any unnecessary friction. It’s maybe one of the most boring parts of optimizing a website, but it is extremely impactful.

Sapir: I love those insights. That was really helpful. And you’re right, it’s not completely random. There are a lot of friction points and barriers that are happening.

So, when we’re thinking about hidden fees or the extra step or anything that’s unclear, even thinking about feedback when you’re going in to enter your details and you’re getting an error, but it’s not clear what the error is. All of those can lead to that lost conversion. This is something you can test through user testing with accessiBe and through our work with the disability community.

You can test it with our manual testing and customer remediation if that’s part of your package which we’ll share more about in a moment. So being able to review that whole process and identify where those leaks or barriers are happening will help you identify how you can recover that revenue and build more customer loyalty.

Adrien: Just one more point on that before we continue. Letting people check out as guests that’s a big topic and debate. People are afraid that doing that will lower the number of people creating accounts and that they will not be able to do proper customer relationship management. Time and again, when we implement guest checkout, we see positive results.

So less friction. You don’t need to create an account which often the account-creation process can introduce usability and accessibility barriers. What we notice is an increase in conversion rate because less friction and actually an uptick in people creating accounts post-purchase. So the idea is just let them do their thing easily and smoothly.

You will win their trust and they will create an account.

Sapir: I love that. One more thing that you mentioned about Shopify having a really great checkout process and I love that you shared that because a lot of times people ask well we’re using specific templates or we’re working with a specific CMS and we know how to use it. That is all great.

And there’s this interesting story that I like to share of when I used to manage a website where they said, “Okay, you’re responsible for all of the content on the website.” And I started putting in headers and titles all over the place. Forms were not structured at all. Buttons just said click here. No specific identification of what you were clicking on.

And so if you really want to make sure that you’re optimizing that process because if you have someone who is as unfamiliar with accessibility as I once was when managing a website, you’re going to run into those issues. But if you are testing that process and making sure that both with the customer and with the experts on your team, you’re making sure that process is working in a good flow, you’re going to be able to recover all of that.

Okay, the poll is not working, but feel free to share your answers in the chat or also just think about this question for a moment. What do you believe is the number one cause of cart abandonment on your website? Is it unexpected costs, long complex checkouts, site errors, can’t calculate the total upfront, or as Adrien mentioned, maybe it’s all of the above.

And the insight that we got from our survey respondents is that 87% believe that accessibility best practices at the checkout would improve usability. So, it’s almost a no-brainer. It’s like, yes, of course, accessibility would improve the checkout usability. Yes, of course, doing things to make the experience more seamless will help make the conversions better and reduce cart abandonment.

It’s about actually testing it and making sure that flow is working for your website and that it’s accessible for all customers regardless of their ability. And this is a quote that we have from our accessLabs team. So this is a really great incubator team from our product department. It’s nine blind analysts who test and QA all of our products.

And they also completed our survey for the community and shared that chances are if a disabled person has reached your website, let alone the checkout process, we are interested in your product. However, we frequently encounter accessibility barriers and the more difficult they are to overcome, the less likely we are to make a purchase. So that is directly from the community and something that I think is really valuable for everyone on this call to understand.

Key Takeaways

Sapir: So what is the opportunity here? What do we do with all of this information that we got on today’s session? Well, I want to first start with key takeaways from you Kelly and Adrien. What do you think is most important for our audience today to take away from today’s session for e-commerce leaders to know?

And Kelly, you can go first.

Kelly: Well, I think that making sure that accessibility isn’t an afterthought. Go ahead and address it. You know, I’ve seen on my end, again, looking through the legal lens and risk mitigation. Lawsuits that have been filed against all sizes of companies representing all sectors of business, all types of e-commerce brands.

And so there’s really no business out there that would be protected from that type of risk. And so for that reason I always suggest that people become very proactive about this because it is not a risk worth taking.

Sapir: I appreciate that and I agree. Adrien, any takeaways that you want to share before we jump in?

Adrien: I think framing compliance as brand trust and performance, not just out of fear of being sued, but by genuinely being inclusive. I think I feel like when customers see clear accessibility features, transparent privacy controls, if we think of other compliance topics, it signals professionalism and credibility. It shows you care about their experience, you care about your customers, and beyond checking legal boxes, you’re doing the right thing.

Accessibility Readiness Checklist

Sapir: Great responses, both of you. Thank you so much. So, we did prepare a short checklist and we have more information in the industry reports that are on our website. So you’ll find that we have different reports for each of the different topics that we’ve done along with a checklist for those.

But as mentioned throughout the call or throughout the webinar today, one of the most important things that you can do for your website is auditing those critical flows. Making sure that your website, all of the product searches, the cart checkout process is all tested for accessibility, whether that’s with the disability community, whether that’s with your returning customers and with your team to make sure that it is easy and simple to navigate your website.

And especially with those assistive technologies like a screen reader or if you’re using a keyboard navigation, we want to simplify the checkout, remove unnecessary fields or any blockers that would create additional friction for customers and provide real-time validation, labeling everything. This was a critical point when we got to the answer engine optimization and the AI readiness.

Making sure that all of your form fields, buttons, everything has a clear label, that your site structure is properly implemented, and that your product content is all very clear and conversational in a way that AI can pick up on it. Design for clarity. So, this also means making sure that your color contrast, your font size, the order that you’ve structured your website, the schema markup is all optimized. And finally, leveraging feedback.

And this is one that connects back to what I mentioned at the beginning of testing with the community. But there’s two different ways to look at feedback. One is if you’re doing the checkout process and you’re completing your information and you’re seeing error reports and you’re not sure where that’s coming from, offering that feedback in real time will help the user identify what they need to do to move on to the next step.

But then also thinking about feedback from the community, feedback from your users, feedback from those who are visiting your website to make sure that you’re continuously optimizing and making sure that your website is ready for those customers.

How accessiBe Supports E-Commerce Teams

Sapir: Those are a few points that we wanted to share with you today. As mentioned before, nearly eight out of 10 respondents had shared that litigation support is very important for them. And when we’re talking about e-commerce, which is the industry that receives the most amount of ADA web accessibility litigation, we want to make sure that they are aware of our solutions and how we can support them.

So, accessiBe does have a litigation support package along with a 15K pledge depending on the size of your package. You can review that with your sales representative or reach out to us on the website. Additionally, we do have manual testing by accessibility experts and custom remediations. So if you want to test specific user flows, you can either go the user testing route or have those specific custom remediations done with our team.

And of course we do have AI powered solutions. accessWidget is the one that you’re probably most familiar with, but next month we’re going to be doing another webinar about accessFlow, which is a very exciting new product about leveraging AI to enable accessibility at the code level on your website. And it has an Auto-Resolve capability and it’s just phenomenal. So, we’re really excited for that webinar next month. We do have some case studies on our website on top of the industry reports.

We definitely recommend learning a little bit more about them and how our different customers have either faced litigation and leveraged our litigation support package or what they have done to protect their clients from it.

And I just want to close out our session today with sharing that accessibility best practices may seem like small changes, but the work you are doing to make sure that your content is accessible, that the structure of your website makes sense, that it’s all keyboard navigable, so someone who’s not using a mouse will be able to click through it with their assistive technology. All of that will help make your website better for everyone. And we really appreciate you joining today.

Thank you so much, everyone, for joining.

Audience Q&A

Sapir: We’ll now move into questions and I have a few ready. So this one is for you Adrien and we talked about this a little bit but what do you think is going to happen through the rest of the year or going into next year? What are you recommending to your clients to prioritize?

Adrien: I’m going to go back to one of the things I said, which is generative engine optimization. We are barely seeing the beginning of it. If you’re paying close attention to your tracking in Google Analytics, you’re seeing some traffic coming from ChatGPT. This has happened because you got lucky or because you got the right articles out there or because you were doing a lot of SEO efforts, but this is just the beginning.

This should be really top of mind. You should educate yourself. You should track which prompt you’re ranking for and you should optimize your website to show up more and more in these engines. I think at the moment only ChatGPT is adding UTMs to the links sending traffic.

So that’s the primary source you can currently track. Most of them will follow. So I would say that’s the number one thing I would tell my clients to focus on to be ahead of the curve. This is going to be a tsunami of new free traffic like that.

Sapir: And Kelly, if a brand is nervous about the litigation and compliance space, but they want to get started, what is your recommendation? How can they get started on addressing all of these changes that are happening in the market? It sounds like a lot.

Kelly: Yeah. I mean, I think the first step is recognizing that it’s a priority that needs to be addressed. If it has not already been addressed, the right time to start is now. Being proactive means understanding both the risks that exist and the size of the market.

The disability community is ready to have that access. I do not know, Sapir, if you know offhand, but the portion of the worldwide web that is currently accessible is perhaps 3% or 4%

Sapir: I think it has gone up to around 4% now.

Kelly: Which means roughly 96% of the web is not accessible. That is a daunting number for people simply trying to do things like shop for groceries online or complete everyday tasks that others take for granted. And so, as a person from the disability community, I can say like having companies proactively identify and address these issues without you having to bring it up means a lot and they’re going to come back again and again.

But also, you know, understanding that with the trends, like people are tired of having to navigate in a totally inaccessible space. And what we see is like the disability community wants to make that change. And if lawsuits are required to drive that change, the trend suggests the community will pursue them. But there are many tools and ways to break the work down.

Again, I am a business owner, not a technology expert. So giving that to a company to take care of and manage for you it’s a very easy step and it’s going to make you focus on what really matters: running your business rather than constantly assessing risk.

Closing Remarks

Sapir: I’m really excited for this space and where we’re going with it and I really appreciate the answers that you just gave. For everyone who’s on the call today, we have plenty more data points and research ready for you on our website. It is all under the industry reports section of our website, which I’ll share now in our chat. And we invite you to take a look at those reports.

They cover the topics that we touched on today, which is litigation, AI search, and cart abandonment. But we also talk about hyperpersonalization, voice commerce and the compliance changes happening globally including the European Accessibility Act which Kelly had mentioned before. So with that, thank you so much everyone for joining today’s webinar and have a really good rest of your day. Thank you so much.

Thanks.