Abi Hough

Following her highly rated session at last year’s e-Commerce Conference (9.2/10), Abi Hough returns to the stage by popular demand.

Abi is a UX researcher and optimisation strategist with 20+ years’ experience helping teams build products and brands people genuinely trust.

Her work combines UX research, behavioural insight, accessibility and evidence-led strategy to help organisations move beyond surface-level optimisation and address the deeper factors that shape customer understanding, confidence and choice.

Abi is a regular international speaker, known for challenging assumptions, cutting through complexity and making research practical, human and actionable.

Presentation title:
"Your Website Is Dead. Now What?"

For decades, businesses have treated their website as the centre of the customer journey — the place where trust is built, decisions are made, and growth is won.

That world no longer exists.

Today, customers arrive with opinions already formed and choices already narrowed… shaped by marketplaces, reviews, social platforms, and AI-driven search and chat agents long before they ever visit a homepage.

In many cases, the decision has already been made before the first click happens.

In this keynote, Abi Hough delivers a sharp, honest wake-up call for brands still optimising for a journey that has quietly moved upstream.

Rather than focusing on clicks, funnels, and cosmetic optimisation, this talk explores what actually drives trust in today’s landscape; clarity, consistency, and coherence across the entire ecosystem where customers and algorithms form understanding.

Abi challenges some of the most comfortable assumptions in ecommerce and optimisation, and reframes the website not as the start of the journey, but as one signal among many. She shows where brands really win (and lose) trust, and why this is the only sustainable way for local businesses to compete with global marketplaces without racing to the bottom on price.

Provocative but practical, this keynote equips leaders with a new mental model for growth; one that moves beyond clicks and metrics, and focuses instead on building brands people genuinely want to buy from.