EcomExpo 2026: 700+ attendees, 16 countries and the first EcomExpo Awards

One day in Vilnius, by the numbers

EcomExpo has run in Vilnius since 2013. This year it moved to a new home, the Samsung Conference Center at Tech Zity, a tech hub that opened in September 2026, and the room filled from the first keynote to the awards ceremony.

• 700+ attendees on site, with the main programme also streamed for online ticket holders.
• 40+ speakers, panellists and hosts based in 16 countries, including Lithuania, Germany, the United Kingdom, Romania, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Singapore, India, Australia and the United States.
• 3 stages (Deep Dive, Experience and the Site.pro Stage) plus hands-on workshops, with most sessions in English.
• 10 award categories and 8 winners at the first EcomExpo Awards.
• 1,069 photos from the day, now in a public gallery.

That mix is deliberate. The Baltic markets are small, so the region's online stores grow by selling across borders, and the people who build those businesses want to learn from operators who have already done it in larger markets. EcomExpo puts both in the same room.

What the stages talked about

AI was the thread through most of the day, though less as a tool for automating tasks and more as a change in how shoppers find products, compare brands and decide to buy.

Filip Borcov, founder of Site.pro, walked through the ten AI implementation mistakes that cost his team the most. Fernando Angulo of Semrush (an Adobe company) showed how brands become visible, or invisible, in AI search and AI shopping journeys. Amanda King of FLOQ separated the places where AI already creates business value from the ones where expectations still run ahead of reality. Former Googler Kaspar Szymanski of SearchBrothers covered what actually helps online stores sell more through organic search, and Swedbank's chief economist Nerijus Mačiulis looked at how AI is changing the way businesses make decisions.

Cross-border selling had its own track. eBay's Vidmay Naini, General Manager for Global Emerging Markets, gave the "Go Global with eBay" keynote and led a panel with colleagues from eBay and Orange Connex, while Andreas Häntsch brought a German view of live commerce. Asendia's Laetitia Arfi spoke about the next last mile in global e-commerce. Other sessions covered paid media efficiency, rising customer acquisition costs, AI agents, payments and logistics.

"Scale or Fail" isn't about growth at any cost. It's about working out what actually works for your business, adapting to change, and growing where there is real business value.

"This year's programme showed very clearly that e-commerce growth is no longer just a question of buying more ads or driving more traffic," says Aurimas Paulius Girčys, organiser of EcomExpo and CEO of the digital marketing agency APG Media. "How people discover products and choose between brands is changing, and new technologies and sales channels keep appearing. That's why, for us, Scale or Fail isn't about growth at any cost."

The first EcomExpo Awards

The EcomExpo Awards were open to e-commerce teams and their agency partners across Europe. An expert jury assessed the entries in ten categories, from growth, SEO and paid media to AI implementation, logistics, cross-border expansion and conversion rate optimisation.

Only eight of the ten categories produced a winner. The jury chose not to award Best Startup and Leader of the Year this year, because no entry met the criteria set for them. We would rather keep the bar high from the first edition than hand out a trophy to fill a slot.

Furniture1 was the only double winner, taking both Best Logistics and Best Cross-Border. In the past year the company expanded into seven new markets, and it now runs its own last-mile delivery network in 13 countries. Scale of the Year went to the German cosmetics brand Yepoda for the e-commerce project it delivered with DigitalSuits.

The 2026 winners

• Scale of the Year: Yepoda (project partner: DigitalSuits)
• Best SEO: Dokobit (project partner: Evolvery)
• Best Paid Media: Gintarinė vaistinė (project partner: BPN LT)
• Best AI Implementation: Kesko Senukai (project partner: LupaSearch)
• Best Logistics: Furniture1
• Best Cross-Border: Furniture1
• Best CRO: Pegasas (project partner: Evolvery)
• Best Multichannel: KALVE (project partner: scandiweb)

The Best CRO category was presented by the agency Unconditional. Every visitor costs an online store money, so more and more of the growth comes from turning the people who already arrive into buyers.

"Most online stores make decisions on gut feeling. CRO turns that gut feeling into a hypothesis you can test," says Radvilas Šeputis, co-founder of Unconditional. "By backing the Best CRO category, we wanted to recognise the teams that prove their growth with experiments."

Congratulations to every winner and every shortlisted team, and thank you to the jury for the hours they spent on the entries.

The EcomExpo Awards will be back in 2027, with a new category for AI visibility. More and more shoppers now start with ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity rather than a search box, and we want to recognise the brands that get recommended there. Several talks this year, from Semrush's Fernando Angulo among others, showed how much this already matters. Categories and entry details for 2027 will be announced on the Awards page.

The day in photos

Photographer Gediminas Gražys covered the whole day: the full hall, the stages, the booths and the Awards. More than 1,000 photos are now in the EcomExpo 2026 photo gallery. Look for yourself and your team, and share your favourites with #EcomExpo2026.

Our feeds filled up too. Award winners, speakers, partners, first-time visitors and our volunteers all posted about the day, and you can read many of those posts under #EcomExpo2026 on LinkedIn. Thank you to everyone who wrote about it.

A conference like this takes a year of work for one day. Thank you to our speakers, to Title Partner Site.pro and all our partners, to the volunteers, and to every attendee who came to Vilnius or watched online.