Browse, Abandon, Repeat: Why FMCG Brands Are Losing Revenue at Every Digital Touchpoint and How to Fix It

Every campaign you run sends paid and organic traffic into your digital funnel. Every euro of that investment is partially wasted if the funnel excludes up to 20% of potential customers before they convert.

You optimize campaigns and track attribution. You A/B test every element of the digital shelf. And yet there's a segment of your customer base that your funnel analytics will never show because they never made it to checkout.

They encountered a barrier, left, and bought from someone else.

Digital inaccessibility is one of the most underreported sources of revenue loss in FMCG e-commerce, and it's about to become one of the most legally exposed.

The Retail Accessibility Problem Is Severe and Sector-Specific

The numbers are uncomfortable. Retail is the worst-performing sector for digital accessibility across 29 industries tested in the WebAIM Million Report (2025), averaging 71.2 accessibility errors per page. Six in ten retail shopping apps are rated "Poor" or "Failing" (ArcTouch SOMAA, 2025).

But here's the part that should land differently for marketing and e-commerce leaders: the problem isn't just the homepage. That's where most accessibility conversations start and end. The real exclusion happens deeper in the funnel:

PDFs — product information, promotional materials, ingredient lists, terms
Campaign landing pages — microsites and activations built quickly and never audited
Retailer PDP content — product detail pages hosted on third-party platforms
Mobile apps — where FMCG brands increasingly invest but rarely test for accessibility
Digital promotion platforms — loyalty schemes, subscription services, digital vouchers
Checkout and form flows — the final step, and often the most problematic

Every one of these touchpoints is a potential point of exclusion. And every excluded user represents wasted customer acquisition spend.

According to Accessiway's consumer research (6,599 respondents across Germany, Austria, France, Italy and the UK, August–November 2025), 68% of European shoppers abandon a website when they encounter an accessibility barrier. They don't complain; they simply go elsewhere. This behaviour is especially pronounced among under-35s: the digitally-native, high-frequency-purchase demographic that FMCG brands invest most heavily in reaching.

The economics are stark. The Global Economics of Disability Report (2024) estimates that people with disabilities globally have a combined disposable income of $2.6 trillion. In Europe alone, the blocked transaction value from accessibility barriers is estimated at over €50 billion. That is not money leaving the category. It's money going to more accessible competitors.

The legal context: the EAA is no longer optional

The European Accessibility Act (EAA), EU Directive 2019/882, became enforceable from 28 June 2025 across all EU member states. For FMCG brands with European e-commerce operations, the scope is explicit: websites, online shops, mobile apps, checkout processes and the digital content that supports them must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA (EN 301 549).

This applies to private businesses. Not just public institutions. Not just large enterprises. Any company offering digital products or services in the EU is in scope.

Penalties apply per market and per infringement. National implementations vary, but fines can reach €907,000. FMCG brands operating across Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and beyond face compound risk: every market where you operate is a market where you must comply.

Beyond regulatory fines, there is an increasingly significant ESG dimension. Digital inclusion is appearing in ESG reporting frameworks and investor due diligence criteria. Non-compliance doesn't just risk fines — it creates a gap in your responsible business narrative that activist shareholders and CSR-focused procurement teams will notice.

The marketing performance case

Here is where digital accessibility stops being a compliance conversation and starts being a performance conversation.

The SEO connection is direct and measurable. Accessibility and SEO best practices are, in large part, the same: proper heading structures, descriptive alt text for images, clean semantic HTML, meaningful link text, fast page loads, and mobile optimisation. A 2025 Semrush study of over 800 websites found that better accessibility consistently correlates with +23% organic traffic and +27% keyword visibility. For FMCG brands investing heavily in digital shelf visibility and content marketing, this is a channel efficiency gain hiding in plain sight.

AI-powered search amplifies this effect. As Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity increasingly serve as intermediaries between consumers and your brand content, brands whose content is clearly structured, semantically coherent, and technically clean will be surfaced more often. Those are, by design, the same attributes that make content accessible.

The conversion upside is real. Accessible design means more intuitive navigation, better colour contrast, clearer forms, and more readable copy. These improvements don't just help users with disabilities; they help everyone. A better-designed PDP converts better. A more intuitive checkout loses fewer customers at every stage.

The shift in mindset required is not large: from treating digital accessibility as a one-time compliance project to treating it as a continuous performance lever, embedded in how your marketing and e-commerce teams work.

Moving from compliance checkbox to performance KPI

The most effective FMCG brands are already making this transition:

From one-time audit to ongoing monitoring across the full digital estate
From automated scanning (which identifies only a fraction of real-world issues) to AI-assisted auditing, expert manual testing, and real-user testing with people with disabilities
From website only to full digital estate, including campaign assets, apps and retailer content
From compliance checkbox to performance KPI tracked alongside conversion rate and traffic

Accessibility is infrastructure. It degrades as you add content, launch campaigns, and update your stack. Maintaining it requires the same ongoing attention as any other piece of digital infrastructure.

How we can help FMCG brands

Accessiway is Europe's leading digital accessibility provider, with 2,000+ clients and 550+ B2B partners across 4 European offices.

Accessibility Platform provides continuous, automated auditing of your digital estate, with AI-assisted remediation guidance, a live compliance dashboard, and prioritised remediation backlogs that your dev teams can action immediately. It covers websites, apps, PDFs and campaign assets, representing the full scope of where FMCG exclusion actually happens.

Our IAAP-certified audit teams conduct deep manual testing that automated tools cannot replicate. Automated scans identify a portion of issues, but a significant share are only uncovered through experienced human testing across operating systems and browsers. We deliver detailed issue logs with solution guidance, and work directly with your teams on remediation.

User testing with real users with disabilities brings the consumer perspective that no tool can replicate. We run structured sessions with participants who rely on assistive technologies every day, uncovering usability gaps that only lived experience reveals, and validating that your remediation has genuinely improved the end-to-end purchase experience.

Campaign and asset reviews mean accessibility is checked before launch and not retrofitted after a complaint. For marketing teams running multiple activations per quarter across multiple markets, this workflow integration is where the real efficiency gains come.

Accessibility-Service-as-a-Product embeds our team alongside yours, working with Marketing, E-Commerce, Digital, Legal and IT, so that compliance is maintained as your digital estate evolves, not chased reactively.

The bottom line

The EAA makes remediation legally mandatory from June 2025. But the competitive and commercial case is already compelling: better SEO, more conversions, more customers, less regulatory risk, stronger ESG positioning.

The question isn't whether to make your digital presence accessible. It's whether you'll do it before or after your competitors do.

Sources: WebAIM Million Report (2025); ArcTouch SOMAA (2025); Accessiway consumer survey, n=6,599, DE/AT/FR/IT/UK, Aug–Nov 2025; Global Economics of Disability Report (2024); Semrush (2025); European Accessibility Act, EU Directive 2019/882.