--- type: verticale slug: customer-experience-retail title: "Customer Experience & Retail" canonical_url: "https://eventsindex.org/customer-experience-retail.html" description: "The 2026 EMEA circuit for retail and customer experience: pan-European trade shows, invitation-only buyer meetings, a co-located UK cluster on one shared ticket, and national fairs in Spain and Poland, for retail technology buyers, e-commerce teams and CX leaders." hero_tagline: "Ten events, three formats: one pan-European trade show, an invitation-only meetings format, and two shared-ticket clusters at the same London venue." events: - slug: nrf-retail-s-big-show-europe - slug: ecommerce-expo - slug: one-to-one-biarritz - slug: e-show-madrid - slug: ecommerce-packaging-labelling-expo-uk - slug: smart-retail-tech-uk - slug: retail-supply-chain-logistics-expo-uk - slug: contact-centre-expo - slug: c-ux-customer-user-experience - slug: retail-show-poland in_menu: false last_verified: "2026-10-10" language: "en" schema_version: "v6.0" --- # Customer Experience & Retail EMEA: the 2026 circuit *Last updated: 10 October 2026. Next review: 10 November 2026. Sources are linked in the text and listed at the end of the page.* Ten events on the Events Index now carry `customer-experience-retail` as their primary sector tag, and they do not share one format. NRF Retail's Big Show Europe in Paris is a pan-European trade show built around a closed CEO keynote track. One to One Biarritz is the opposite: no show floor at all, only pre-scheduled one-to-one meetings between invited buyers and solution providers. Three shows at ExCeL London, all organised by Fortem International, run on a single shared free ticket, and a separate pair at the same venue, Contact Centre Expo and C+UX, does the same under its own combined ticket. eShow Madrid and RetailShow in Warsaw are single-country trade fairs with no cross-border pretension. What holds the ten together is not format but buyer: the same retail, e-commerce and customer-experience decision maker who evaluates a CRM roadmap in Paris in September may be the one filling out a shuttle-bus form for a scheduled meeting in Biarritz five weeks later. This is one of the densest clusters on the Events Index by event count, and the youngest: the vertical opened in September 2026, built from a single event, One to One Biarritz, that had no sector tag at all until a reader asked whether it belonged to one. ## The circuit at a glance | Event | City | Month | What is at stake | |---|---|---|---| | NRF Retail's Big Show Europe | Paris | September 2026 | Comexposium's Paris trade show, run under the NRF brand since 2025; 525 exhibitors, 12,000-plus attendees projected (organiser figures), a closed CEOs Only keynote track | | eCommerce Expo | London | September 2026 | UK e-commerce technology trade show at ExCeL, one of several international editions of the same brand name | | One to One Biarritz | Biarritz | October 2026 | Comexposium's invitation-only, pre-scheduled meetings format for CX, marketing and retail decision makers; no open show floor | | eShow Madrid | Madrid | November 2026 | Spanish e-commerce and digital marketing trade show and conference | | E-commerce, Packaging & Labelling Expo UK, Smart Retail Tech UK, Retail Supply Chain & Logistics Expo UK | London | November 2026 | Three Fortem International shows at ExCeL, one shared free ticket, covering packaging, in-store technology and fulfilment logistics | | Contact Centre Expo and C+UX | London | November 2026 | A second ExCeL pair, shared ticket, marketed jointly as Contact Centre & CX Expo; contact centre technology and customer and user experience | | RetailShow | Warsaw | November 2026 | ECP Polska's 15th annual retail equipment and technology fair at EXPO XXI Warsaw, with its own Retail Congress conference day | Dates are the most recently confirmed edition of each event as verified on the organiser's site or in trade coverage; each linked fiche carries the exact days, venue and the date it was last checked. ## Who is in the room **Retail, marketing and customer-experience decision makers** are the buyer population every event in this cluster is built to reach, but the access model varies sharply. NRF Retail's Big Show Europe puts them in named case-study sessions (H&M, Primark, Lego Group, Decathlon and MediaMarktSaturn are among the 2026 speakers) behind a closed CEOs Only track. One to One Biarritz screens them through an application process before granting roughly 450 buyer places (organiser figure) against 116 solution-provider companies, a room built for scheduled one-to-one conversation rather than a show floor. eShow Madrid and RetailShow run open trade-fair registration instead. **E-commerce and retail technology vendors** are the exhibitor population at the trade-show end of the cluster: eCommerce Expo, eShow Madrid, and the Fortem International cluster at ExCeL (packaging, in-store technology, supply chain) all sell stand space to this group, with the shared four-show ExCeL ticket in November built explicitly to put one vendor in front of buyers there for three adjacent but distinct categories at once. **Contact centre and CX technology buyers and vendors** have their own pair at ExCeL: Contact Centre Expo, for cloud contact centre platforms, omnichannel tools and workforce management, and C+UX, for customer and user experience technology in retail, hospitality, travel and finance, run jointly as Contact Centre & CX Expo on one ticket, with a reported 150-plus exhibitors and over 3,500 attendees across the combined floor (organiser-linked figures, not independently audited). **Retail equipment and store-fitting suppliers** are a population specific to RetailShow: point-of-sale and cash-register systems, shop fitting and store furniture, retail IT and chain-management software, aimed at Polish and regional retail chains, a category none of the other nine events in this cluster covers directly. ## What people come to find out **Which event is worth the trip if I want scale?** NRF Retail's Big Show Europe, on stated exhibitor count (525) the largest single trade show in this cluster, ahead of RetailShow's 200-plus and the individual Fortem shows. **Is there a format for senior buyers who do not want a show floor?** One to One Biarritz. It has no exhibition floor at all: the entire format is pre-scheduled one-to-one meetings, screened by application on the buyer side. **Can I see retail technology, packaging and logistics vendors in one visit?** Yes, at ExCeL London in November: one free ticket covers Smart Retail Tech UK, E-commerce, Packaging & Labelling Expo UK, and Retail Supply Chain & Logistics Expo UK (plus the separately run White & Private Label Expo). **Where do contact centre and CX buyers overlap?** At the second ExCeL pair, a week after the first: Contact Centre Expo and C+UX, run under the shared name Contact Centre & CX Expo, again on one free ticket. **Is there a national market entry point rather than a pan-European show?** Two: eShow Madrid for Spain, and RetailShow in Warsaw for Poland, now in its 15th year and organised locally by ECP Polska rather than an international group. **How reliable are the attendance figures these events publish?** Unevenly. NRF's 12,000-plus and RetailShow's exhibitor count come with named sources and dates; the Fortem cluster's attendance estimates range from about 3,500 to over 6,000 depending on the source and were not independently audited by any of them; Contact Centre Expo and C+UX report a combined cluster figure that this index could not split between the two shows. ## How the room actually works Four distinct formats sit inside this one sector tag, and none substitutes for another. **The pan-European trade show** is NRF Retail's Big Show Europe alone in this cluster: a paid conference programme layered on a large exhibition floor, grouped around data and AI, e-commerce and payments, supply chain, and in-store technology, with a closed CEOs Only keynote track that explicitly excludes vendor pitches. **The invitation-only meetings format** is One to One Biarritz. There is no walk-in registration and no stand to browse: Comexposium screens buyer applications and pre-schedules meetings between them and a fixed roster of solution providers over three days at the Palais des Congres. **The shared-ticket cluster** appears twice, both at ExCeL London, a week apart in November. Fortem International runs three of its own shows (packaging, in-store technology, fulfilment logistics) plus a fourth run by a related company, Business Show Media, which bought the White Label World Expo brand from Fortem in a November 2024 deal; all four sit on one free ticket. A different organiser or organisers, not confirmed by a source this index could open directly, runs the second pair, Contact Centre Expo and C+UX, on their own shared ticket. **The national trade fair** covers eShow Madrid and RetailShow: open registration, a domestic or regional exhibitor base, and no cross-border marketing to speak of. RetailShow is the oldest event in the cluster by a wide margin, dating to 2010, and the only one with its own named conference day, the Retail Congress, built into the fair rather than run as a separate ticketed event. ## The seasonal structure The circuit is back-loaded into September through November, with nothing tracked here before September and nothing after RetailShow's 18 to 19 November dates. September opens it: NRF Retail's Big Show Europe in Paris (15 to 17 September) and eCommerce Expo in London (23 to 24 September) run eight days apart. October carries only One to One Biarritz (6 to 8 October). November is the densest month by far: eShow Madrid opens it (4 to 5 November), the first ExCeL cluster follows exactly a week later (11 to 12 November), the second ExCeL pair a week after that (18 to 19 November), and RetailShow in Warsaw closes the cluster on the same 18 to 19 November dates, an overlap that means a buyer cannot attend both the London CX pair and the Warsaw fair in the same trip. Read this as an observation about ten specific events, not a claim about retail and CX events generally: several major EMEA shows adjacent to this cluster, among them EuroCIS in Dusseldorf (February) and Shoptalk Europe in Barcelona (June), fall outside the September-to-November window this index has verified so far and are tracked separately. ## The business behind the circuit The market behind this cluster is retail spend on customer-facing technology and the underlying growth of European e-commerce itself. The European E-commerce Report 2026, published on 22 September 2026 and covering 38 European countries, puts European B2C e-commerce turnover at EUR 911 billion in 2025, up 7 percent from EUR 842 billion, with EU-27 turnover at EUR 715.8 billion, also up 7 percent, and a forecast of EUR 961 billion for Europe in 2026 ([European E-commerce Report 2026, via Handelsverband Swiss](https://handelsverband.swiss/?p=62881)). Western Europe is the largest region at EUR 523.1 billion, about 57 percent of the total, while Southern and Eastern Europe grow fastest (11 and 14 percent), a geography that fits a cluster built around Paris, London, Madrid and Warsaw. Layered on top is customer experience management software, a market sized between USD 15.78 billion and USD 26.11 billion for 2026 depending on the research firm (MarketsandMarkets and Fortune Business Insights respectively, both checked September 2026), a spread wide enough that no single figure should be treated as settled; what the estimates agree on is compound growth in the mid-teens percent, driven by omnichannel engagement, AI-driven personalisation and stricter data-privacy rules that push CX spend toward compliant, cloud-based platforms. The organiser side of the trade-show floor has consolidated in the same window this cluster covers. NRF Retail's Big Show Europe is itself a rebrand: Comexposium ran the same Paris show for about ten years as Paris Retail Week, formed from an earlier merger of the E-commerce Paris and Equipmag fairs, before NRF and Comexposium announced the NRF-branded relaunch in September 2024, with the first NRF-branded edition in September 2025. On the ExCeL side, Fortem International, a Bristol-headquartered organiser running more than 35 events globally, sold its White Label World Expo brand to Business Show Media in a deal announced 21 November 2024; the buyer rebranded it White & Private Label Expo and kept it co-located with Fortem's three remaining shows under one ticket, evidence that even a shared-ticket cluster is not necessarily a single company's asset. ## What is on the agenda in 2026 **Agentic AI reaches the store and the case study, not just the vendor keynote.** NRF Retail's Big Show Europe, held in Paris on 15-17 September 2026 with 12,000 attendees from 63 countries expected according to the organiser's pre-show figures, ran a CEOs Only track that included a session on agentic AI and customer service from Snipes' Joe Shoemaker, and Smart Retail Tech UK's 2026 marketing names AI-driven personalisation and loyalty tools among its core themes; both point to AI moving from a platform-vendor pitch to a line item retailers themselves are asked to speak about on stage. **The shared-ticket cluster model is holding, but its ownership is not static.** The November 2024 sale of White Label World Expo from Fortem to Business Show Media, then its 2026 rebrand to White & Private Label Expo, happened without breaking the shared ticket with Fortem's three remaining ExCeL shows: a buyer walking that floor in November 2026 sees one cluster, run by two separate companies. **Attendance figures across this cluster remain organiser-reported and frequently uncorroborated.** Five of the ten fiches in this vertical flag conflicting or unaudited attendance numbers, from NRF's 12,000-plus (unresolved country-count disagreement between organiser-linked sources) to the Fortem cluster's 3,500-to-6,000 spread to the still-unsplit combined figure for Contact Centre Expo and C+UX. This is a pattern across the cluster, not a flaw in any one event, and it is why each fiche marks organiser figures as such rather than repeating them as audited counts. ## Trends 2027 Coverage in 2027 for this cluster is thinner than for 2026, and this index reads that as a gap in what has been verified so far, not as a claim that these events pause. NRF Retail's Big Show Europe has no 2027 Paris date confirmed in this pass, though NRF's own wider Retail's Big Show family already has its January 2027 New York flagship dated (10 to 12 January 2027). None of the other nine events in this cluster has a confirmed 2027 date yet in EventsIndex's research. Two adjacent EMEA shows, not yet tracked in this vertical because their next dates fall outside the September-to-November window verified here, are worth watching as the cluster's likely next additions: EuroCIS in Dusseldorf, Europe's dedicated retail-technology and payments trade fair, and Shoptalk Europe in Barcelona, a large-scale pan-European retail and e-commerce conference. Both were identified during the scouting work that opened this vertical and remain candidates for a future wave of fiches once their editions fall inside a verifiable window. ## Choosing between these events **To see the largest pan-European trade show floor:** NRF Retail's Big Show Europe, Paris, 15 to 17 September, 525 exhibitors and a closed CEOs Only keynote track (organiser figures). **To get senior buyers and solution providers into pre-scheduled conversations, not a show floor:** One to One Biarritz, 6 to 8 October, invitation-only. **To scan UK in-store technology, packaging and fulfilment logistics vendors in one free visit:** the Fortem International cluster at ExCeL London, 11 to 12 November: Smart Retail Tech UK, E-commerce, Packaging & Labelling Expo UK, and Retail Supply Chain & Logistics Expo UK. **To cover contact centre technology and customer or user experience together:** Contact Centre Expo and C+UX, ExCeL London, 18 to 19 November, shared ticket. **To enter the Spanish or Polish market specifically:** eShow Madrid (4 to 5 November) or RetailShow in Warsaw (18 to 19 November, its 15th edition, with its own Retail Congress conference day). **To reach UK e-commerce technology buyers outside the November ExCeL cluster:** eCommerce Expo, London, 23 to 24 September. These are descriptions of what each format serves, not rankings; the index does not rate comparable events against each other. ## Related hubs By city, see [London](/london.html) and [Paris](/paris.html), which between them host seven of the ten events tracked here. By month, see [September 2026](/september-2026-major-events.html), [October 2026](/october-2026-major-events.html) and [November 2026](/november-2026-major-events.html). Adjacent vertical: [Sales Stack](/sales-stack.html), for the CRM and revenue-technology side of the customer relationship that this cluster's CX and contact-centre shows sit next to but do not duplicate. ## Methodology and data standards Each event record is built from primary source verification: the organiser's own site, ticketing pages, and independent trade coverage where the organiser's own pages could not be fetched directly. Attendance, exhibitor and revenue figures come from named sources and are flagged as organiser figures, or as unverifiable when two sources disagree and neither could be independently corroborated. This page groups events tagged `customer-experience-retail` as a controlled sector value in the database, and the list in this page's frontmatter is the authority for the vertical: a build check refuses any mismatch between that list and the tagged fiches. Inclusion does not imply a ranking between events, and the index does not compare comparable events against each other. Each linked fiche carries its own last-verified date; treat the ten-event scope on this page as accurate as of 2026-09-21. Market-size statements on this page are checked against the report publisher cited in the text; attendance figures are organiser claims, and several are pre-show projections. This page reflects information available on 10 October 2026. ## Sources Accessed on 10 October 2026. 1. Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce, European E-commerce Report 2026, as published by [Handelsverband Swiss](https://handelsverband.swiss/?p=62881) on 22 September 2026. 2. Other market-size and acquisition statements carry the publisher and date in the text.