One Day, One Campus, Four Stages: My Recap of the E-Commerce Best Practice Day 2026
On September 10, I headed to Brugg-Windisch at FHNW for the E-Commerce Best Practice Day 2026. One of the largest practice-focused conferences for Swiss online retail, this year once again closely intertwined with the academic ISPC 2026. 37 talks, four parallel tracks, a campus hall full of people all wrestling with the same question in one way or another: how is digital commerce changing right now — and what does that mean for all of us?
The Elephant in the Room: Agentic Commerce
From the opening session, it was clear which theme would define the day. FHNW released its 2026 Online Retailer Survey alongside the conference, and the numbers are unambiguous: one in ten Swiss online retailers already describes AI-agent shopping as a revenue-relevant channel today. A third of respondents expect AI agents to make purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers in the future. At the same time, 81% of companies report time savings from AI use, and 78% report productivity gains. Yet roughly three-quarters still have no real AI or agentic-commerce strategy.
That gap between “we already feel the shift” and “we don’t have a plan for it yet” ran through nearly every talk I heard.
Pure Practice: From Brack to QoQa
The main track, moderated by Prof. Dr. Darius Zumstein, was packed with names familiar from Swiss online retail. What stuck with me most was Fabian Büchler’s talk for Brack.Alltron: last year was about the rebrand and a new AI campaign. This year was about the next step. How to scale the look and feel of a genuinely photographed flagship campaign across the entire shop using AI. A great example that AI in e-commerce is no longer just a buzzword but operational reality.
Ubaldo Piccone of QoQa also offered a perspective that stayed with me: automation wherever precision and speed matter. Humans wherever real customer contact is at stake. His key message on “community values in an AI era” was, at its core, a reminder. The more we automate, the more deliberately we need to decide where humans stay in the loop.
A different kind of highlight came from Martin Stucki of LOEB, who together with Swisscom presented “EMILIA”. A hologram-based shopping assistant for brick-and-mortar retail. His conclusion was refreshingly honest: hologram assistants do have a future, if used correctly. But the use cases need to be clearly defined from the start. No hype for hype’s sake.
The Academic Lens: Between Education and Bots
In the Scientific Track (ISPC 2026), moderated by Adele Dörner, things got more academic — but no less engaging. Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer (THWS Würzburg) had the room laughing while also making them think with his talk on “the end of the web as we know it”. A rare combination when tackling such a big, genuinely uncomfortable topic.
Prof. Richard Geibel (IU) spoke about AI-powered learning companions in higher education and drew an analogy that immediately landed with the audience. The shift from a fragmented customer journey to the single moment of purchase. Exactly what we know from social commerce on TikTok Shop or Instagram — applied to students’ learning journeys. Education and e-commerce may seem far apart in content, but structurally, both fields are currently solving a very similar problem. How do you create, within a fragmented, individualized system, that one decisive moment where someone moves forward instead of giving up?
I myself had the chance to present our first findings from the CIP project in the same track that afternoon . More on that, perhaps, in a separate post.
My Takeaway from the E-Commerce Best Practice Day 2026
What made this day stand out for me wasn’t any single AI application, but the pattern that ran through nearly every talk. Whether Brack, QoQa, LOEB, or the research presentations in the Scientific Track — it all came back to the same question. Not “can we build this technically?” but “where exactly should automation start, and where do we deliberately keep the human in the loop?”
And given that 75% of companies still have no agentic-commerce strategy. That’s a question a lot more Swiss online retailers will likely have to answer over the next twelve months, whether they want to or not.
The E-Commerce Best Practice Day 2026 took place on September 10 at FHNW in Brugg-Windisch, organized by Prof. Dr. Darius Zumstein, Adele Dörner, Anouk Hodel, and Aldo Gnocchi.