As the global e-commerce industry continues to grow, in 2026, all-surface shoppability is stealing the spotlight as one of the hottest retail media market trends.
If there’s one word increasingly used in keynotes and panel discussions at DMEXCO 2025 and other conferences last year, it’s “shoppability.” From developing new, interactive and yes, shoppable advertising formats across the top-performing environments, like CTV, to partnering with DOOH publishers to boost offsite engagement with brands through highly-personalized messaging, it looks like in 2026, any surface available to a viewer (read: a potential consumer), it’s likely to become shoppable, if it isn’t already.
This major shift, on the one hand, is fueled by the growing popularity of experiential retail and shoppertainment, and on the other hand, by the increasingly tangible limitations of available onsite advertising placements (online & offline). As a result, businesses are seeking more ways to minimize the gap between a particular product discovery and its actual purchase, enabling consumers to buy this product instantly, on whatever platform, whenever they’re ready.
Every Social Media Channel Goes Shoppable
While live shopping features on TikTok and Instagram have been around for quite a while, in 2026, this trend seems to be getting another push, with more social media companies partnering directly with large retailers to take the instant shopping experience to the next level.
Namely, the integration of instant shoppable options for recipes through Walmart directly on Pinterest is just one of these “offsite-to-cart” features, and quite predictably, this trend is expected to expand across more verticals in 2026, with a likely focus on cosmetics, apparel, sports & wellness, and more.
Instant Shoppability Enters Generative AI Tools
Honestly, it was really just a matter of time, given the accelerating traffic shift from digital publishers to GAI-powered assistants, like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. And well, it happened pretty quickly – the new GAI-driven shoppable era is officially here.
In this respect, the announced collaboration between OpenAI and Target became, perhaps, one of the major newsmakers closer to the end of 2025, marking an important milestone in what can be seen as the next big trend in global e-commerce.
Now that the story has already unfolded, what we might expect in 2026 is the introduction of shoppable formats in other GAI assistants, like Gemini, which may leverage Google’s existing shopping infrastructure to integrate new options into their AI products smoother.
Closed Loop Attribution: A Persistent Pain Point
As more platforms, surfaces, and media environments become shoppable, and increasingly more offsite placements become transactional, key pain spots, like a lack of cohesive sales-based measurement and, more importantly, efficient “closed loop attribution” solutions, have yet to be resolved.
In this respect, the introduction of new ad standard initiatives by IAB Tech Lab in terms of CTV, for instance, should help improve the measurement of shoppable ads in this environment.
Unfortunately, though, connecting all the dots within one technical attribution infrastructure, hence efficiently measuring the impact of each customer interaction with a retailer or the brand onsite & offsite (including AI, social media, DOOH, and more), is likely to remain an unsolved challenge in 2026.
On the bright side, however, given the optimistic forecasts on what retail media ad spending will be in 2026 (from 58,79B USD in 2025 to 69,33B USD in 2026, according to eMarketer, to be exact), this won’t become a barrier to growth, at least for big market players.