Just wrapped up a whirlwind of meetings at Groceryshop and Retail Club. In speaking to several large brands and retailers, its clear they see Agentic Commerce as a large opportunity ahead but also are unclear about what to invest in and how to ensure their products are discovered, chosen and bought by LLMs.
Key takeaways:
- Retailer traffic from AI platforms appears tiny (2-4 % in an informal survey of several retail and DTC brands in a session at Retail Club), but many stats show over 50M shopping inquires a week just in the US. What’s happening to all those shoppers? The reality may be that after research on LLMs consumers are going to Google to find the retailer site to shop – that attribution goes to search, not LLMs so the 2-4% most likely is significantly understating impact of AI shoppers. The discovery on LLM and handoff to retail is awkward and likely holding back shoppers
- I spoke to a few measurement vendors who said their logs are showing 40-50% of traffic to retailers is coming from Bots – they were unsure if these are personal consumer bots (Meta’s Muse is likely to grow this number significantly) or LLM bots crawling sites for data. Most sites are unprepared for this and many are looking at the 2-4% number and thinking AI originated traffic is too small to worry too much about
- Discoverability is still very poor and also misstated – current measurement tools mostly measure brand visibility, not product visibility and don’t report on what percent of citations are coming from the brand or retailer (vs social media mentions) which is what truly drives agentic commerce. The LLM pulling some information from Reddit may be somewhat useful to the consumer but does not lead to a path to purchase
At DaVinci Commerce we are doubling down on providing a platform to enable brands and retailers to be discovered, chosen and bought. Stay tuned for a big announcement of a new product later this week!
