CX Shortlisted twice at the UK eCommerce Awards 2026

Author: AJ Rajeswaran, Founder & CEO, CX Data

The email arrived while I was mid-call, walking a client through a cohort retention report. I read it properly about an hour later.

Shortlisted at the UK eCommerce Awards 2026, in two categories: Best eCommerce Boutique Agency and Most Innovative Use of AI in eCommerce.

Who we are

Most eCommerce teams find out something broke three or four days too late. After the ad spend is gone. After conversion has tanked. After someone has burned two days stitching Shopify, GA4 and three spreadsheets together to work out what happened.

I’ve spent over ten years fixing that. First leading data and analytics teams at Unilever and Deloitte, unifying customer data across web, digital channels and store systems. Now I build the thing I wish had existed.

CX Data is the data team you wish you had in-house, for £10m+ eCommerce brands. There are nine of us. We unify your sources into one trusted view, monitor every step from first visit to repeat order, and tell you the moment something changes, with the why attached. When your team has a question, they ask our Claude connector and get an answer from their own data in seconds.

The questions we answer daily for brands like Murad, Bella & Duke and Free Soul:

• Where exactly are visitors dropping off, and why did it change this week?
• What’s my CAC payback by cohort, and which cohorts are getting worse?
• Is checkout conversion declining, and is it new customers, returning, or both?

Data engineering, modelling, dashboards and the AI layer come as one engagement, running on a Snowflake data layer the client owns. That part matters to me. The platform belongs to them, not to us. If they want to take it in-house one day, they can, and everything works the next morning.

Clients tend to describe us as an extended data team rather than an agency. That’s the version I’d use too.

The work we entered

Two builds carried the Boutique Agency entry. Both for category-leading UK pet brands, which we didn’t plan, but it did make the entry easier to write.

Bella & Duke is one of the UK’s leading D2C raw pet nutrition subscription brands. They came to us with a reporting stack that had become a bottleneck on a fast-scaling business. Reports took weeks to build and weeks to change. The senior team was leading with the questions instead of the data leading with the answers.

In four weeks we:

• Stood up a fully managed Snowflake data layer covering customers, pets, subscriptions and orders
• Replaced 50+ reports across Looker and Sigma with a purpose-built D2C reporting suite covering trading, cohort retention, acquisition, conversion and LTV
• Cut pipeline refreshes from around six hours to under 45 minutes
• Got to 25+ daily active users from day one, which is the number I care about most

The platform was delivered in just four weeks. We can cut the data in ways we couldn’t before, and the team has the visibility to make decisions in the moment rather than waiting on a report cycle. Beyond the platform, what we’ve really gained is an extended data team.

James Sturrock, CEO, Bella & Duke

PetShop.co.uk was a different problem. Adam and his team had spent four years looking for an analytics solution that fitted a bootstrapped business competing directly with Amazon and Pets at Home. He had concluded the only route left was to hire a full-time analyst and build it in-house. We were the first off-the-shelf option that proved otherwise. They now run daily commercial decisions on it. The true ROI of voucher codes, real SKU profitability, GA4 sitting alongside ERP and order data in one place.

CX Data has been such a catalytic step forward for PetShop.co.uk. We can’t imagine not having CX Data as part of our tech stack. They lead. They are the data experts, and that shows in every interaction.

Adam Taylor, CEO & Founder, PetShop.co.uk

The AI entry is a different thing. Last year our AI Analyst was a chat interface. You came to our app, asked a question, got an answer in seconds instead of days. Useful, but it still expected the user to come to the tool.

Modern marketing teams don’t. They live in Slack, Claude and ChatGPT.

So we rebuilt it as an MCP server. The AI Analyst now plugs straight into whichever assistant the team already uses. Same governed Snowflake layer underneath, same eCommerce domain knowledge on top. Cohort LTV, attribution windows, subscription churn, Meta Advantage+ behaviour. No new dashboard to learn. Every answer cites the figures, the time period and the SQL behind it, which is the only reason finance teams will sign off on the same numbers marketing is acting on.

Alongside it sits AI Signals. Daily briefings and anomaly detection pushed into Slack and Teams, so problems get flagged to the team rather than the team going looking for them. Clarity, not clutter.

At Spotminders, a D2C connected-accessories brand, we pointed the same approach at customer conversations. Every ticket, call, chat and review is read and classified daily, then pushed out as five department-specific briefings for Creative, Marketing, Product, Support and the company view. One fix alone, separating pre-purchase signals from post-purchase support noise, cut their pricing feed from 264 noisy tickets to 16 clean ones.

Every conversation is read, classified and synthesised every day, and the platform pushes the right signal to the right team. Just as importantly, it tells us why issues are happening, not just what is happening.

Ana, Customer Experience Lead, Spotminders

What the shortlist means to us

Two things about entering awards.

The first is that the entry process is useful on its own, separately from the result. Writing 1,000 words about what changed for a client forces you to answer the question we put to clients all the time. Did this move anything? Not “we shipped a dashboard”, but did the work make them more profitable. Some of our entry drafts got cut because the answer was “not yet”. Worth being forced through that once a year.

The second is what it does for a nine-person team. We won Gold in the Boutique Agency category in 2025. Being back on the shortlist in 2026, and in the AI category alongside vendors many times our size, says something to the team that I can’t say myself.

Most of our work happens in the background. Schemas, pipelines, reporting logic that clients feel but never really see. Seeing it recognised outside the business means more to the team than anything I can say in a Monday meeting.

AJ Rajeswaran, Founder & CEO, CX Data

Congratulations to everyone else on the shortlist. See you at the ceremony.