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When Your Brand Becomes a Habit
The new ecommerce is engagement-first, not conversions-first
Pietro Saccomani
February 12, 2026
What does “winning” in ecommerce look like 5 years from now?
It’s not just about the best products or solid unit economics. It’s about building habits.
I read an article the other day about the standalone AI content apps that OpenAI and Meta are pushing.
To be fair, OpenAI’s Sora app and Meta’s Vibes app haven’t exactly received a great reception. And it’s unclear whether anyone actually wants a TikTok/Reels competitors that’s filter to exclusively show AI slop.
But the point isn’t whether these apps are good or not. It’s the direction these massive companies are taking.
They’re thinking, we need people checking this the way they check Instagram or TikTok; more of a reflex action than a deliberate decision.
Big picture, this aligns with a major shift in ecommerce too.
There’s a common thread behind the biggest trends I’m seeing:
Habitual engagement.
Ecommerce isn’t just about selling things anymore.
It’s not just about listing products on your storefront and running ads and fulfilling orders.
It’s about being part of your customers’ day to day lives - and understanding that the sales will naturally follow.
The Engagement Playbook Isn't New
This isn't some breakthrough insight.
Shein and Temu figured this out years ago. Their apps feel more like gaming apps or social apps than shopping apps.
Their whole aim is to get you opening the app out of habit - on the train, in the elevator, in class, at home on the sofa watching but not really watching Netflix.
Every feature is designed to make you open the app every day:
Limited-time deals that expire in hours
Daily bonuses for opening the app
Spin-to-win games
Points systems
Infinitely scrolling product feeds
10 push notifications and 7 emails per day
They understand that there’s more than one way to win in ecommerce.
You can win on product - sell the nicest jeans, the most effective creatine, the dining set that makes you feel complete.
Or you can win on experience.
People come for the dopamine, and buy something just because it’s there.
This is evident in other platforms and trends that blew up in 2025.
Whatnot - the fastest-growing ecommerce app in 2025 - is a livestream marketplace. TikTok Shop is the hottest new DTC channel.
Shopping livestreams are enormous business in Asian markets like China and Vietnam… and are starting to make their way to the West now as well.
These are attention platforms that happen to sell things.
Engagement first, commerce second.
Engagement Is the Real Ownership
We talk a lot about "owned channels" today. Email list. SMS subscribers. App installs.
These are certainly important.
But at the same time, having someone’s email doesn’t really mean you own anything. They could ignore your emails or your texts. They could have your app off their homescreen, never opened.
Real ownership is when your brand occupies space in someone's daily life.
It’s when they open your app out of habit.
When they check your content because it's genuinely interesting to them.
When interacting with your brand gives them a little hit of dopamine which keeps them coming back.
In this sense, you can argue there’s more ownership in an Instagram page or TikTok channel that someone loves and engages with than a traditional “owned” asset.
When something becomes a habitual part of your life, that’s so damn powerful. It’s hard to break.
Of course, there’s still risk with social media, that the algorithm could flip and stop showing your content, even to people who subscribe to you or follow you.
The real power is when the engagement comes on your own channel, too.
Crazy Ideas Aren’t So Crazy Anymore
A year or two ago, you would have gotten the advice to keep it simple, to just focus on profitable ads and conversion optimization.
To ignore all the flashy ideas as just noise, to see engagement as a buzzword, not a real thing.
Not so sure this is the case anymore.
What if your website or app felt less like a catalog and more like a feed?
User-generated content. Community features. Content mixed in with products.
Somewhere your customers go for the experience itself, for dopamine, for enjoyment or boredom-busting - not just because they need a new pair of shoes or a tub of whey protein.
Content creators on staff
Organic social (especially brand socials) have been written off as worthless for a while now.
But I think there’s huge potential in this right now.
People are symbiotically linked to their phones and their social feeds. Imagine if your brand can put out the kind of content people actually like seeing on their feeds. That’s the kind of visibility and awareness that brands would pay six figures per month for - you could realistically do it for four figures with one full-time content creator.
Fashion content, beauty content, pets, parenting, home & kitchen, automotive, sports, F&B - there are so many verticals where this works.
I’m surprised this isn’t a priority for more brands.
Gamification
Build fun things on your website/app. Real engagement mechanics.
Daily streaks. Challenges. Exclusive drops for active users.
The kind of stuff that makes people want to check in.
Shein and Temu are running behavioral loops. And they work - despite pretty poor products (and questionable ethics behind the scenes).
That’s how powerful fun is.
Attention as your north star metric
Make this mindset shift.
Stop asking "how do I get this conversion?" and start asking "how do I get my customers to interact with my brand every day?"
Conversions are a downstream effect of attention.
If you have attention - real, daily, habitual attention - conversions tend to follow. The repeat purchases follow. The referrals follow.
It doesn’t work the other way around.
You can’t optimize your way into habit.
What This Actually Means
It’s not that every DTC brand needs to become the next Shein, or send a hundred emails in one week like Temu. That's not realistic and it's not the point.
The point is that the brands who figure out daily engagement, in a form that makes sense for their category and audience, are going to have an enormous advantage over the next five years.
Because the advantage only grows when people are buying directly from ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity conversations, and these AI platforms are deciding for customers what the best product is for their needs.
You can pay $60 CPMs to show up in Google.
Or you can be the brand that people seek out and consciously spend time with.
When you become part of your customers' daily lives, you’re playing a different game entirely.
It's worth spending some real time thinking about what that looks like for your brand.
Brought to You by MobiLoud
We've been talking about engagement. About becoming part of your customer's daily life.
Here's a practical starting point: a mobile app.
An app puts you on the one device people check 100+ times a day. Push notifications reach them on their lock screen. You’re always one tap away. It's the closest thing to a direct line into your customer's daily routine.
MobiLoud turns your existing site into a native app without rebuilding anything. Same experience your customers already love, now on their home screen.
See if it’s the right move for your brand:
Quick Hits
Meta is going all-in on AI agents that shop for you. Zuckerberg called 2026 the year of "personal super intelligence" - meaning AI that knows your preferences and makes purchase decisions on your behalf. If that doesn't make you think about how your brand shows up when a robot is doing the buying, it should.
Amazon just committed $200 billion in capex this year - $50 billion more than Wall Street expected. Google's at $175-185 billion. Meta and Microsoft raised theirs too. Whatever you think about the AI bubble debate, the money flowing into this infrastructure is real and it's going to reshape how people discover, evaluate, and buy products. The downstream effects on ecommerce will be massive - and probably faster than most brands are planning for.
Shopify's Harley Finkelstein predicts agentic commerce will create "merit-based shopping", where AI agents choose products on quality and value, not brand recognition.
His take: "You won't be able to lean on your balance sheet anymore. You actually have to compete on merit of your product." Ulta is already responding with exclusive brand partnerships to stay differentiated. The theory is that brands that win in an AI-mediated world will be the ones with genuinely better products, not just bigger ad budgets.
Bryan Porter of Simple Modern shares how they did what felt impossible - expanding from an Amazon-native brand to DTC. The biggest takeaway? Pivoting their strategy. They didn’t try to compete on price with Amazon and Target, instead building a unique strategy that only worked for DTC.
When customers don’t come back, it’s not because the product sucks. It’s because there’s uncertainty. Retention comes down to overcoming this uncertainty on five levels.
That’s all for now.
We’ll be back next week with a new podcast episode I’m excited about, as well as another deep dive into what’s happening in ecommerce right now, and how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.
If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.
Until next time,
Pietro and The Retention Edge Team
PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.
See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.