How to Win in Agentic Shopping Before Checkout Even Exists
There’s a lot of noise right now around AI in ecommerce. Agentic commerce. AI checkouts. Bots buying on behalf of customers. It all sounds big. It all sounds important. And it all sounds like something you’ll deal with… later.
But here’s the problem with that thinking: The biggest shift in Agentic Shopping isn’t happening at checkout. It’s happening the moment your customer opens ChatGPT and asks, “What should I buy?”
That moment is already here. And the brands showing up in those answers aren’t the ones with the best ads or the cleanest UX. They’re the ones AI can actually understand.
Let’s dive in.
Agentic Shopping is just another channel
The easiest way to get your head around Agentic Shopping is to stop treating it like something completely new. James Johnson from Shopify frames it simply: this is just another channel.
We’ve had search. We’ve had social. We’ve had marketplaces. Now we have conversation.
Customers aren’t typing keywords anymore. They’re describing what they want. And instead of getting a list of links, they’re getting answers. That shift from search to conversation is what defines Agentic Shopping. Shopify is already building for this reality. Their focus isn’t on futuristic AI checkouts, it’s on making sure your product catalogue can be distributed into these AI environments so you can show up when those conversations happen.
If you think of Agentic Shopping as something to “prepare for later”, you miss the point. It’s already behaving like a channel. You’re either in it, or you’re not.
Your product data is your new storefront
Agentic Shopping doesn’t browse your website the way a customer does.
It doesn’t get influenced by your homepage. It doesn’t care about your branding. It doesn’t admire your design. It reads your product data. That’s it.
HealthPost is one of the best examples of this, even though they never set out to optimise for Agentic Shopping. Abel Butler built a catalogue that demanded depth from suppliers. Ingredients, sourcing, ethics, production methods. Everything had to be clear before a product could be listed.
That decision had nothing to do with AI at the time. It was about being transparent with customers. But it turns out that’s exactly what Agentic Shopping systems need as well. When a customer now asks, “Is this product ethically sourced?” or “What’s in this?”, AI doesn’t guess. It pulls from structured, detailed data.
If your catalogue doesn’t have that level of clarity, you don’t get recommended. The shift here is uncomfortable because it strips things back.
All the effort put into brand, design and merchandising still matters for conversion. But for discovery in Agentic Shopping, it’s your product data doing the heavy lifting.
Optimising for Agentic Shopping reveals what your customers actually want
Heather Earl didn’t wait around for Agentic Shopping to become a major traffic source.
She started adjusting how Nutrition Warehouse structured its pages to better match how AI interprets queries. That meant reworking content, refining how information was presented, and making intent clearer. What came out of that process wasn’t just improved visibility: it was insight.
By aligning content with how customers ask questions in Agentic Shopping environments, new patterns started to emerge. Different languages. Different priorities. Different ways of framing problems. Things that didn’t always show up in traditional analytics. That’s the hidden upside here.
Optimising for Agentic Shopping isn’t just about getting recommended. It’s about getting closer to how your customers actually think.
Agentic Shopping is already influencing your sales
The biggest trap right now is looking at attribution and assuming Agentic Shopping doesn’t matter yet.
Harry Sanders has been pretty clear on this. When you look at reported AI traffic, the numbers are tiny. Fractions of a percent. It’s easy to dismiss. But that’s not how customers behave.
A customer asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. They get a brand name. They open a new tab, search for it, and buy. From your analytics point of view, that shows up as direct or organic traffic. Agentic Shopping played a role in the decision, but it disappears from the data. Which means most brands are underestimating how much influence Agentic Shopping already has.
It’s not that the channel is small. It’s that it’s invisible. And that’s what makes it dangerous to ignore.
It’s easy to get caught up in what Agentic Shopping might become. Agents completing transactions. Fully automated buying journeys. Entirely new checkout experiences. That’s where a lot of the conversation is heading.
But the real shift is already happening earlier: Discovery has changed. Consideration has changed. Recommendation has changed. Customers are asking questions differently, and Agentic Shopping systems are deciding which brands get surfaced in those answers.
The brands that win from here won’t be the ones waiting for new integrations or new platforms. They’ll be the ones who understand how they show up in those conversations today, and start improving from there.
In this Playbook:
- Why AI is becoming a new discovery channel
- How product data determines whether you get recommended
- Why AI is already influencing your revenue (without attribution)
- What leading operators are doing differently
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