Commerce Without Clicks
The dawn of agents in shopping.
The analog storefront
When you open any product page on the internet, you’ll see an image carousel designed for human eyes, a star rating designed to trigger social proof, and an original price crossed out next to a discounted one, designed to create urgency through the perception of a deal.
Now imagine you’ve deployed an AI agent to be the buyer on your behalf. It can’t see images. It doesn’t feel urgency. It doesn’t have a browser session or cookies. Every single element of e-commerce was designed for a human, and every single one breaks when the buyer is software.
What’s more is that the revenue model breaks when the shopper is an agent. Today, cart abandonment rates hover at 70% due to unexpected fees, confusing product options, and overplayed psychological games on the part of merchants. But in the future, when consumers adopt agentic shopping experiences, there will be increased pressure on merchants to change their own tactics. Nearly 60% of 18–34 year old shoppers say they trust an agent shopping on their behalf and, last year, 1 in 6 Black Friday purchases, $70 billion in GMV, were AI-assisted.
As agents become the primary shopper, the entire commerce stack needs to be rearchitected to fit their needs. The existing infrastructure that powers nearly $1.5 trillion in annual e-commerce sales in the US was built on a fundamental assumption that may become obsolete: that the buyer is a person.
Continue reading more at The Commerce Journal here…