For much of e-commerce’s history, brands treated checkout as an endpoint. A necessary handoff. The place where a customer surrendered their credit card number and a brand surrendered its product. The experience was functional by design, stripped of anything that might complicate or distract from the transaction. Somewhere along the way, however, that thinking became a liability.
The brands outperforming today are not the ones with the fastest delivery or the most aggressive acquisition spend. They are the ones that figured out the checkout window is not the end of a customer journey but its highest point, and that what happens in those moments between adding an item to a cart and reaching the confirmation page has enormous consequences for revenue, loyalty, and long-term customer value.
No company has invested more in making that argument, or in building the technology to prove it, than Rokt. The New York-based e-commerce technology company’s recent analysis, Real-Time Relevance: Why the Checkout Moment Matters More Than Ever, lays out both the consumer psychology and the performance data behind a thesis the company has been building toward for more than a decade: that the transaction moment is the single most valuable and underutilized space in digital commerce.
Shopping Still Brings Joy. The Data Confirms It.
The instinct among many marketers during periods of economic uncertainty is to assume that consumers have emotionally retreated from the shopping experience entirely, that purchasing has become purely functional, purely price-driven, stripped of any positive association. The research suggests otherwise.
A major study Rokt commissioned through The Harris Poll, surveying more than 7,000 adults across the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan, found that nearly 70% of consumers still enjoy online shopping. That number rises to 80% among millennials and 79% among Gen Z, two cohorts often characterized as the most economically anxious. The study, which Rokt and The Harris Poll titled “The Joy of Checking Out,” found that consumers ranked shopping as the activity delivering the most joy when spending time online, placing it ahead of streaming content and social media interaction.
Perhaps more striking: 73% of shoppers said they experience joy specifically at checkout, and 52% identified the confirmation page as their favorite part of the entire purchase journey. According to the study’s press release, consumers are not retreating from commerce. They are becoming more selective about where and when they engage, which makes the moments when they do choose to transact more consequential for brands, not less.
John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, described the phenomenon as “JoCo,” shorthand for the joy of checking out, a real emotional payoff that occurs when the experience feels well-designed and personally relevant. The implication for brands is significant: the checkout moment is not neutral ground. It carries emotional weight. How a brand shows up there either reinforces or undermines the entire relationship it has built to that point.
The Relevance Gap Is Costing Brands Real Money
The same research that documented the joy of checking out also revealed its fragility. Brands that approach checkout as an opportunity to aggressively cross-promote, surface generic ads, or carpet-bomb customers with offers are actively destroying the experience they spent considerable marketing dollars to create.
Chain Store Age’s analysis of the Harris Poll findings highlighted that 74% of consumers would rather receive no offer at all than one that is irrelevant to them. More than a quarter of shoppers (29%) cite being shown too many ads as one of their primary reasons for abandoning their cart. Among Gen Z, 28% say they feel overwhelmed when presented with content that doesn’t feel personal or timely. In the United States, 70% of shoppers say they will spend more money with businesses that demonstrate an understanding of their preferences, and nearly half (47%) said they want to shop again with a brand that delivers a relevant experience.
The numbers at a retail industry level are consistent with this. Retail Technology Innovation Hub reported on the Harris Poll findings with particular attention to what the data signals about ad saturation: consumers are drawing clearer lines between shopping that feels curated and shopping that feels exploitative, and they are making loyalty decisions accordingly.
At the Foot Locker session at the Women in Retail Leadership Summit, Lora Loesch articulated a version of this principle with unusual directness: “We don’t think of checkout as just a place to enter your credit card. We treat it as an extension of our brand.” Foot Locker subsequently relaunched its FLX loyalty program with a relevance-first philosophy and saw a 300% increase in new members within a single quarter, a data point that illustrates the commercial stakes of getting the checkout experience right.
Why Timing and Context Beat Volume Every Time
Rokt’s framework for the checkout moment centers on a simple but counterintuitive idea: the most valuable thing a brand can do at the point of purchase is often to show less, not more. Quality of signal, rather than quantity of offers, is what drives outcomes when a customer is in a high-intent state.
This is the reasoning behind Rokt’s measurement-first approach to what it calls the transaction moment, defined as the critical window spanning from product selection through cart, payment, post-purchase, and purchase confirmation. The company’s AI engine, Rokt Brain, analyzes more than 1.95 trillion data points annually to determine the right offer, the right moment, and the right context for each individual shopper. Critically, when its quality thresholds cannot be met, the system shows nothing at all rather than surface a low-relevance recommendation.
Claire Southey, Rokt’s Chief AI Officer, elaborated on this philosophy in February 2026, describing the same checkout placement that can drive meaningful incremental revenue as one that can also introduce risk if it distracts customers or pushes them away from completing their purchase. Rokt’s approach supports what it calls distributed commerce, meaning third-party cross-sells that keep customers inside the purchase experience rather than redirecting them offsite. The principle is that a relevant offer extends the value of the transaction; an irrelevant one threatens to end it.
The Performance Case: Numbers That Move CFOs
What makes the real-time relevance argument particularly durable is that it does not depend on consumer sentiment data alone. The business case is being validated in performance metrics across Rokt’s network of more than 33,000 client companies, which includes more than half of the leading e-commerce brands globally.
A November 2025 analysis of Rokt’s checkout technology documented concrete performance benchmarks from the company’s product suite. Rokt’s Pay+ product, which operates on the payment page, is projected to process more than 180 million transactions in 2025, generating up to $400,000 in incremental profit per million transactions. Rokt Thanks, which activates the confirmation page, generates up to $500,000 in incremental profit per million transactions. These figures represent pure incremental revenue, value created from the same traffic without any increase in acquisition costs.
The same analysis noted that Rokt’s AI-driven approach consistently delivers higher performance than standard checkout optimization tools, which typically achieve 10% to 20% conversion lifts. Personalized product recommendations powered by real-time machine learning can increase average order value by 11% while boosting conversion rates by 26%, and companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities compared to their peers, according to McKinsey research cited in the analysis.
McKinsey has repeatedly documented the revenue premium that well-executed personalization commands. In its broader research on the topic, the firm found that 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions and 76% report frustration when those expectations go unmet, a frustration that carries direct commercial consequences at every stage of the journey, but especially at checkout.
Rokt’s Network Advantage: Scale as a Learning Engine
The performance outcomes Rokt describes are not possible without a specific kind of infrastructure. Dynamic relevance at checkout requires a system that learns continuously and applies that learning across a large enough base of transactions to generate genuinely predictive signals. This is the core competitive logic behind Rokt Brain and the Rokt Network, and it is why the company’s scale functions as both a product and a moat.
Rokt’s platform powered more than 7.5 billion transactions in 2025 across its global network. Each transaction feeds the AI model with additional data, improving its ability to predict intent, surface relevant offers, and suppress irrelevant ones. The network effect means that every new partner joining the ecosystem benefits immediately from the accumulated learning of every transaction that came before it, a compounding advantage that isolated checkout tools or internal personalization teams cannot replicate.
This is part of what drew Fanatics back to the Rokt Network in December 2025 after previously exploring alternative solutions. The sports merchandise giant, which generates more than $8 billion in annual revenue, selected Rokt specifically to power AI-driven relevance across its global e-commerce experience. Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics, framed the decision in terms of customer experience rather than technology specs, saying the company is focused on making shopping more seamless and relevant for fans. The choice of platform was a means to that end, not an end in itself.
The Emotional and the Algorithmic, Unified
What makes Rokt’s position in the market genuinely distinctive is that it bridges two conversations that typically happen in separate rooms. The consumer psychology conversation, rooted in research like the Harris Poll’s findings about joy, emotional receptivity, and the conditions under which shoppers feel seen rather than targeted, and the performance technology conversation, about AI engines, data point volumes, conversion benchmarks, and incremental revenue per thousand transactions, are usually treated as separate domains. Marketing owns the former; finance and product own the latter.
Rokt’s argument, supported by both its proprietary research and its operational data, is that these two conversations are actually one conversation. The emotional experience of checkout directly produces or destroys the performance outcomes brands are optimizing for. Relevance is not a qualitative virtue. It is a quantitative driver. The 79% of shoppers who say they feel excited by a well-timed promotion are the same people generating the conversion lifts and incremental order value reflected in Rokt’s performance benchmarks. They are the same people making the brand loyalty decisions that determine whether a company needs to spend heavily to reacquire a customer who just purchased, or whether that customer simply comes back.
This unified view of the checkout moment, emotional and algorithmic, immediate and long-term, is what Rokt’s real-time relevance framework represents. And it is increasingly how the most sophisticated e-commerce operators are choosing to approach the window between cart and confirmation.
What Brands That Get It Right Are Doing Differently
Across the brands in Rokt’s network and in the broader industry, the checkout experiences that drive the strongest performance outcomes share several characteristics. They are native rather than disruptive, meaning offers feel like a natural part of the purchase experience rather than an advertising insertion. They are contextual, drawing on timely and dynamic signals about what the customer just selected, their browsing history, and their stated preferences rather than on broad demographic segments. And they enforce quality thresholds, recognizing that a poorly matched offer at the moment of highest intent can undermine the entire transaction.
At an industry level, the trend is visible in how enterprise retailers are restructuring their technology stacks and organizational priorities. Brands are collapsing the silos between checkout technology, loyalty programs, and commerce media, recognizing that each of these functions operates more effectively when it has visibility into the others. The checkout confirmation page that drives a loyalty sign-up is performing a function traditionally owned by CRM. The payment page offer that generates incremental revenue is performing a function traditionally owned by commerce media. The AI engine that determines which offer to show, or whether to show any at all, bridges the two.
This convergence is what Rokt has been building toward, and the company’s recent acquisitions of mParticle, Aftersell, and Canal represent deliberate steps toward making that convergence technically seamless for its partners. The data infrastructure, the product suite, and the AI decisioning layer are all now part of the same platform, optimizing the same window in the customer journey from the same set of signals.
The Stakes of Getting It Wrong
The argument for real-time relevance at checkout is ultimately an argument about what e-commerce brands stand to lose when they mismanage the moment. Customer acquisition costs have increased by more than 220% over the past decade. The economics of reacquiring a customer who had a bad checkout experience are brutal, and the Harris Poll data makes clear that those bad experiences are happening at scale, driven by overloaded checkout flows, irrelevant offer stacking, and a fundamental misreading of what the moment is actually for.
The checkout window is not an advertising inventory slot. It is the single highest-intent moment in the customer relationship, the point where all of the trust, consideration, and preference-building that a brand has invested in throughout the acquisition journey reaches its peak. Brands that treat it as inventory are diluting something that took significant investment to build. Brands that treat it as a relationship moment, one that deserves the same rigor and quality standards applied to every other brand touchpoint, are compounding that investment.
That is the case Rokt has been making, and the data, from the Harris Poll’s consumer sentiment research to the company’s own performance benchmarks across billions of annual transactions, is increasingly hard to argue with.
