Are Merchants Ready for the AI Shopping Shift? Maybe, Says WooCommerce – Digital Transactions

Online merchants have built their e-commerce sites for human interaction, but the expected increase in artificial-intelligence shopping agents will require a new focus on data, says an IDC report commissioned by WooCommerce.

Released Monday, the report forecasts that AI use will move $500 billion in digital spending to AI agents and platforms. As a reference, mobile adoption took six to eight years to reach 25% of consumer spending on retail goods, but only three to four years to reach 50%. Already, 70% of U.S. consumers use AI to help them shop, an LDWW report found, and 30% have used AI to complete a purchase.

For merchants, that means designing their e-commerce sites for two buyers, the consumer and his agent. “Every commerce journey is moving towards having a second buyer—AI agents that evaluate what they can read and verify are augmenting digital discovery. When selecting technologies to support agentic commerce, choose openness over convenience,” Heather Hershey, IDC senior research director of digital and agentic commerce strategies, says in a statement.

AI agents are already shopping for consumers, but merchants are not ready. By 2030, only 45% of organizations will have AI agents at scale, the report says. One challenge in scaling AI performance is that the current software-as-a-service model is rigid in the face of AI, the report says. Hershey, in the report, suggests the SaaS model may lock in a vendor, place data in compartments, have slow-release cycles and rigid pricing, limit how AI agents and others can plug into it, and not have AI services at its core.

The data aspect is foundational because that’s all that AI agents access. That means a new importance on getting discovered by the AI agent. Humans are inspired by content, the report says, and want to discover brands through story, imagery, and community. The visual brand is important and the shopper converts when emotional fit and trust line up. The agent buyer discovers content via structured catalogs and machine-readable metadata. It evaluates data quality, not design. It won’t recommend a brand it cannot verify. IDC says 80% of agentic AI use cases will require real-time, contextual, and ubiquitous access to data by 2027.

This leaves merchants with three takeaways, Hershey says. Choose openness over convenience, build for humans and AI agents in parallel, and view the commerce platform as the orchestration layer, not just one of many tools, the report says.