Traditional search engine results are becoming less of an option for the consumer. Rather than browsing numerous pages of search results, they can now interact with and ask questions of AI-powered chatbots.
They are using predictive algorithms from the AI chatbots to prepare their selection of options for them to review before landing on a brand's domain.
Keywords will no longer search for products; semantic reasoning will take over the search experience.
Generative AI is more than just a chatbot; it is being used as the primary interface between the online product catalog and the consumer's bank account. The evidence is clear: 58% of consumers are now using AI to research products, and 17% of consumers are willing to make their purchase directly from AI.
This is agentic commerce.
The evolution of agentic commerce means the merchandising teams must now completely rethink how they create the structure of product data. If your product catalog relies on unstructured, flat-text descriptions, AI agents are not going to recommend any of your products or SKU codes.
The algorithms used to power these agents require very dense and highly structured types of product data to have enough confidence to recommend a product. Therefore, brands need to start incorporating schema markup for products that include defining the product's material composition, defining compatibility metrics with other products, and explicitly defining a use-case condition for a product directly in the product's code.
The age of merchandising to people is over; the age of merchandising to large language models has begun.
Catalog Governance & Feed Syndication
Your feed is your most important marketing tool.
As discovery continues to fragment across social media, AI-based search interfaces, and niche marketplaces, having complete uniformity across all inventory data is a prerequisite to your operation. The implementation of a solid inventory feed management system, such as Feedonomics, and API-driven inventory management tools will ultimately determine whether or not you make a sale at the edge of your network.
Any inconsistency in pricing, out-of-date stock levels, or the absence of variants for any products on any channel will significantly undermine consumer trust in your brand.
If a shopper sees a product displayed in an Instagram post with an "in-stock" status, and when they click through they see a "backorder," that session is over.
Centralized Product Information Alignment (PIM) and Aggressive Data Hygiene Requirements at Every Distribution Point
To maximize execution at this tier, organizations will need to centralize their product information and impose strict data hygiene across every distribution point. They must ensure that the data scraped by platforms for zero-click queries is from an authoritative source and reflects real-time information.
Trust as a Core Conversion Metric
Trust is no longer just a soft attribute of a brand. Trust has become an algorithmic, measurable requirement for conversion.
Consumers are hyper-selective, service-comparison-driven, and sensitive to all signs of operational incompetence.
Marketplace Comparison Instinct
There is no longer such a thing as brand loyalty if a marketplace can provide an easier way to shop.
Today, 37% of all product searches begin directly on a marketplace and not on a search engine, while 53% of all consumers will compare one product on multiple platforms to confirm that the price is equal and the seller is reputable. Therefore, this creates a great deal of pressure on direct-to-consumer brands for pricing and presenting products.
If your core website has poorer shipping policies or higher base prices than your Amazon storefront, you are effectively eroding your own margin while encouraging your customers to leave the direct channel.
All brands should have stringent MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) policies in place and provide additional value-added incentives on their own websites, such as bundle products or extended warranties, to combat the marketplace comparison instinct.
Your goal should be to strategically differentiate the direct channel from the marketplace—not to compete against it.
Frictionless Delivery Transparency
When a consumer cannot identify the location of an unavailable item in your supply chain, it is unlikely they will ever complete a purchase in the first place.
Today’s consumer expects total transparency when it comes to fulfillment. Research shows that 91% of consumers say free shipping strongly influences their buying decisions, while a similar percentage prefers to receive specific delivery timeframes rather than vague estimates of “3-5 business days.”
Logistics companies like DHL and PostNord have raised consumer expectations for delivery tracking to be detailed, real-time, and proactive. To meet these expectations, fulfillment organizations must calculate shipping promises based on the user’s IP address and the real-time state of warehouse inventory prior to shopping cart creation.
In contrast, if a consumer must wait until the checkout page to see shipping rates and delivery dates, this indicates a serious flaw in funnel design. Moreover, the return policy should be prominently displayed on the product detail page as an important trust factor rather than being buried in the footer.
The Journey of Authentic Proof
Authenticity is impossible to fake, and today’s savvy consumers can easily spot manipulated reviews.
Research shows that 60% of consumers will abandon a purchase if they cannot verify the authenticity of products from genuine reviews, and nearly all rely on star ratings and verified purchase badges to identify legitimate products.
While integrating advanced review aggregator services such as Yotpo into the product detail template is commonplace, executing this integration effectively creates challenges for brands. Brands must index negative reviews to provide 100% transparency.
A brand that hides its one-star reviews will immediately arouse distrust.
Additionally, posting reviews on Google Shopping feeds and marketplace listings will ensure that your trust signals travel with your product data during the vital evaluation process—regardless of where your customers encounter your brand.
What Do You Mean By Checkout Friction Reduction?
Checkout friction occurs when there is friction on the checkout pages of a store's website.
This can happen if there are too many steps in the checkout process (often called "checkout flow"), if there are too many required fields, or if the checkout process takes longer than expected (for example, due to server delay).
When we think about checkout friction, we can summarize it to say that there should be absolutely zero checkout friction in your e-commerce store. If you have done so, then you have created the most efficient checkout process possible, and your customer will simply pay.
Digital Wallets and One-Click Checkout Design
After your customers have had an order shipped, your customers expect to find an easy way to pay for that order. This is where digital wallets and one-click checkout design come into play.
Digital wallets are becoming the primary payment option, along with mobile and social channels being the primary source of commerce today.
Requiring your mobile users to enter their sixteen-digit credit card numbers while they are on the go is a design flaw.
Express checkout integrations like Google Pay, Apple Pay, or PayPal's Fastlane should be included as a basic requirement for enabling impulse shopping for mobile users. Both the digital wallets used in the checkout process and the express checkout buttons should be available as soon as possible along the entire checkout process.
Express checkout buttons should be located within the product detail pages and cart slide-ups, or in the product details section of the store's website.
By enabling a checkout to use the customer's digital wallet to send the shipping and billing information through to the back-end of the store, a checkout process that could take three minutes to be completed could now be completed in three seconds, with the user's fingerprint as verification of the transaction.
The Impact of "Buy Now, Pay Later"
As e-commerce continues to expand, so too does the number of new payment options becoming available to customers, such as "Buy Now, Pay Later" (BNPL) payment options.
At present, it has been shown by current research that 10% of shoppers will abandon their cart immediately if they are not offered their preferred method of payment.
The decision-making mechanisms of how customers purchase products can be dramatically changed by integrating service providers such as Affirm, Sezzle, and Klarna into a merchant's offerings, allowing customers to change how they view their capital expenditure on a product from being a high-friction purchase to one controlled by a monthly or periodic cash flow.
The merchant will still pay a fee to obtain the highest possible dollar amount of average order value (AOV), as well as to improve their conversion rates.
A merchant needs to understand that the "buy now, pay later" pricing (i.e., "4 interest-free payments of $25"), where the monthly payment plan details are communicated dynamically alongside the primary product price on the product page, holds greater potential for delivering customers with a compelling reason to complete a purchase than presenting them with this information at the end of the checkout process.
Modular Architecture & Technical Agility
A merchant's ability to quickly respond to shifts in customer behavior is determined by the technology that is being used to support the merchant's online business.
There are many aspects of monolithic e-commerce solutions, where the back-end database is tightly integrated with the customer-facing website, that will continue to hinder e-commerce growth. Merchants are migrating away from monolithic systems towards modular infrastructure to achieve the site speed and flexibility demanded by today’s consumer.
Breaking Free of the Monolith: Headless Commerce
Headless commerce represents the decoupling of the customer-facing user experience from the back-end commerce operation using an API-first approach to the development of any commerce solution.
By leveraging frameworks such as Next.js, Remix, React, and Tailwind, engineering teams can now create extremely localized and fast digital storefronts without jeopardizing the integrity of the back-end database supporting the checkout and inventory management systems.
While difficult, this transition to a headless commerce model is essential for the future growth and profitability of your business. For example, SportsShoes recently made this transition and has seen their checkout conversions increase nearly 100%.
Replacing a search vendor, upgrading a CMS like Makeswift, or testing a new personalization engine without going through a multi-month site rebuild allows operators to have an enormous competitive advantage. It enables operators to treat their technology stack as an adaptable toolset instead of being constrained by rigid requirements.
Server Response Time as a Conversion Lever
The speed of a consumer's patience is measured in milliseconds.
If your online store relies too heavily on client-side rendering and unoptimized image loads, you are likely to experience rapidly increasing bounce rates before the analytics tag fires.
As an example of this, consider the operational experience of Music Direct. This company achieved a 43% increase in conversions because they were able to achieve a 73% reduction in server response time. Technical SEO and site speed have a direct correlation with a website's ability to improve conversion rates.
Brands must implement aggressive media compression and take advantage of edge caching using global CDNs, as well as perform rigorous load testing. Every millisecond saved can be directly linked to retained revenue; this is particularly true for cellular networks, where the majority of social commerce discovery will take place.
Mastering the Impulse Conversion Engine
The traditional, sustained pathway to purchase is being augmented aggressively by spontaneous, entertainment-driven purchasing behavior.
Retail is converging with media; transactional elements are being embedded into the content stream.
Livestream Maturation and Short-Form Conversion
Social commerce is now beyond the experimental phase.
In the USA, the sales of e-commerce via livestreaming reached $50 billion in 2023, representing a documented growth trajectory of $68 billion by 2026. The conversion rates from livestreams are staggering, with conversion rates over 30% compared to traditional e-commerce channels, which typically only convert at rates of 2% to 3%.
There is now a shift in how brands produce content to create live-selling opportunities. No longer can brands rely on creating static images and highly produced branded videos.
To reach these millions of new customer prospects, brands must build live-selling capabilities, including live inventory feeds and connecting to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram in real-time. The operational challenge these brands face is the need to connect their backend inventory with the cart API of the social media platform in real-time to avoid overselling at the time of a high-velocity viral event.
Failure to maintain parity of inventory during a livestream can lead to catastrophic customer service backlogs and algorithmic penalties from the social media platforms.
Hyper-Personalization and Trust Threshold
Only 10% of shoppers believe their most loved brands truly understand them, and 60% of shoppers see their digital experiences as "moderately personal."
Balancing the thin line between relevant curation and creepy surveillance to build trust is key. Hyper-personalization works for users, but only when they can eliminate friction within the experience.
Using predictive analytics and AI-powered segmentation of users, brands must create dynamically generated content based on deterministic data and consumer behavior. For example, UntilGone achieved a revenue increase of 200% by adding AI-driven product recommendations into their transactional email streams.
The critical component of personalization is using what is called zero-party data—information that the customer voluntarily provides to you rather than the non-transparent third-party data that is generated by behavioral tracking.
Customers respond positively and with loyalty to the company's approach to personalization as a concierge service that helps them with their purchasing.
The Untold Story Behind B2B eCommerce Transformation
B2C e-commerce trends will continue to dominate thought leadership discussions and thought leadership's cycle, but the most financially lucrative and aggressive change in consumer behavior is occurring in B2B purchasing environments.
The B2B buyer is a "consumer first" and is extending their no-friction, zero-expectation purchasing expectations into wholesale and procurement.
The Consumerization of B2B Wholesale Purchasing
Gone are the times of using printed catalogs, manually entering purchase orders, and taking several days to reach a final price on a product or service.
Today's B2B operators want to access their own self-service portals, have localized pricing, and have the same digital flexibility as their B2C counterparts. There are at least three things that support this transition to B2B self-service wholesale models.
BigCommerce's B2B Edition is one of those supports. By updating their wholesale interface, B2B operators experience a verified 391% ROI over a three-year period, simply by providing an upgraded user experience for their wholesale customers.
Execution Demonstrated in Action
Movora experienced over 100% year-over-year growth two months after launching a modernized US portal due in large part to the B2B portal, with 34% of their total orders being placed through their online channel.
In addition, Norsland Lefse experienced a 62% improvement in mobile conversions and a 40% increase in annual revenue due to improvements made to their underlying e-commerce architecture.
To be successful in today's B2B marketplace, all B2B operators must have the ability to provide account-specific catalog content, have tiered volume pricing algorithms, and role-based purchasing approval processes integrated directly into their user interface.
If the procurement manager cannot reorder a 500-unit pallet from his mobile device in less than one minute, then you are losing market share to a competitor who can.
Final Words
Instead of focusing on what others have done and auditing their trend data, businesses should focus on what they have done and audit their friction logs.
If your B2B company's development team spends more time managing the limitations of a single point-of-setup server than they do deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI)-structured product feeds and streamlined no-click checkout options, the roadmap to your future is hurting your revenues.