Online retailer survey 2025

• The online retailer survey conducted for the eighth time by the FHNW School of Business highlights the rapid advance of artificial intelligence (AI) in Swiss and European e-commerce.
• From text creation and image generation to SEO and marketing optimization, retailers are increasingly using AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
• At the same time, the high speed at which the tools are developing poses challenges for everyone involved – from a lack of know-how to questions about data security.

Thanks to AI, many retailers achieve time and cost savings, increase process and marketing efficiency and improve their Google ranking. With 85% relevance, ChatGPT (OpenAI) is the most important large language model (LLM) in e-commerce. It is followed by Google Gemini (32%), Microsoft Copilot (28%) and Perplexity.ai (20%).

Almost all retailers surveyed use AI for text creation and translations.

• 83% of retailers use AI for text and translation creation, 65% for product texts and 44% for product images.
• The use of AI in programming, analytics and product search has increased sharply.
• AI chatbots for sales and customer service are becoming ever more relevant (sales chatbots +82%, service chatbots +44% compared with the previous year).

AI is increasingly used for marketing, product data maintenance, personalization and fraud prevention. The main benefits cited by online retailers are the large time savings, faster content creation, better product texts and higher productivity.

Nine out of ten retailers report difficulties integrating AI – above all due to a lack of time to deal with it, a lack of expertise, limited budget and an unclear choice of suitable tools.

Data security and data protection remain key issues (75% of respondents see medium to major challenges here). Other problem areas are high system costs and AI errors (so-called “hallucinations”).

In 2025, TWINT is, alongside credit cards, the most-used payment method in Swiss online retail for the first time.

Among payment service providers, Payrexx, Saferpay (Worldline), PostFinance Payment and Wallee lead. In “Buy Now, Pay Later”, TWINT (30 days), CembraPay, Klarna and the MF Group remain at the top.

By 2030, forecasts say 30% of transactions will be handled by AI agents. Agentic AI will also have a considerable impact on data management, IT architecture, marketing and sales. Major players such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon could become the leading players in agentic commerce.

The study clearly shows: AI technologies are changing online retail fundamentally and rapidly. They offer opportunities to increase efficiency, but also confront retailers with technical, organizational and legal hurdles. At the same time, customers’ payment behavior is shifting toward mobile, local solutions.