The agents are coming.
As AI chatbots and personal agents go mainstream, retailers large and small are rethinking how they present their products and prices in this shifting e-commerce landscape.
For streetwear retailer All Star Elite, which has about 60 US stores and a growing e-commerce operation, that means getting ahead of the bots. Digital sales represent about a quarter of the company’s revenue.
Over the last month, about 1% of the site’s traffic came from AI agents, Abhishek Bora, the company’s head of growth, told Business Insider.
“It’s not a lot, but I mean it was nowhere before,” he said.
Shortly after Meta launched its personal AI agent, Muse, in September, Bora said he started seeing a few purchases a week originating from the bot. He said the company has also been getting more sales from traffic driven by ChatGPT.
“I know it’s small, but we have been optimizing for it,” he said of Muse visits.
With the busy holiday shopping season a few weeks out, now is a key time for companies like All Star Elite to have their AI commerce strategies nailed down.
AI traffic to US retail sites is expected to double on Black Friday and Cyber Monday compared with last year, according to Adobe, and AI traffic is already converting to sales at higher rates than non-AI visits.
Because bots process information differently than humans, Bora said his team has been layering on machine-readable information to its product listings. The new metadata is meant to help a retailer’s product stand out with contextual details that go beyond a basic description and price.
That information, such as whether a sneaker is better for a marathon or a night out, can help a product appear more prominently when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation.
Bora also said his team now has to think differently about deals and discounts, which have typically been designed to capture a human’s attention.
This year, retailers will have to consider how a bot will respond to their holiday promotions, which several experts told Business Insider is shaping up to be a key priority shoppers have for their AI assistants.
Larger retailers are tackling these emerging challenges in different ways.
Walmart last month rolled out a new batch of tools that are intended to make it easier for third-party AI agents to navigate its site and complete transactions on behalf of customers. Amazon has taken the opposite approach, blocking external agents like Muse in favor of nudging shoppers to use its own agent, Alexa.
And even though personal AI agents are more widely accessible than ever, Bora said All Star Elite’s customers still largely prefer to use ChatGPT to discover items they can then purchase themselves.
“They’re not as open to having ChatGPT or an AI or an agent do a transaction for them. They want to verify it,” he said.
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