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For the last 20 years, we’ve been told to optimise everything.
Your product detail page. Your checkout flow. Your UX.
But what if none of that matters anymore?
What if the person buying from you… isn’t a person at all?
That’s the shift now quietly underway in commerce. AI agents are beginning to take over the entire buying journey—especially for repeat purchases and commoditised goods. They don’t get distracted by carousels or “10% off” popups. They don’t browse. They don’t hesitate.
They evaluate data, make a decision in milliseconds, and execute.
This is what people are starting to call agentic commerce. And it changes everything.
The new buyer doesn’t browse
Think about how most eCommerce journeys still work today: a human searches for something, finds your site, clicks around, adds to cart, goes through checkout.
But now? That same human might just ask ChatGPT.
Or Siri. Or whatever embedded assistant sits inside their browser or operating system in a year’s time.
The request might be simple:
“Find me the best waterproof running shoes under £120 that can be delivered by Friday.”
That AI agent might handle everything: research, selection, even payment.
As Stefan Hamann, CEO of Shopware, put it during our conversation:
“The moment of differentiation shrinks from minutes to milliseconds.”
That’s the real shift. And it’s already happening.
Your storefront might not even load
If the agent’s doing the buying, your beautifully designed homepage may never be seen.
They won’t be impressed by your lifestyle imagery. They won’t scroll.
They’ll be parsing:
Availability
Price
Delivery reliability
Trust signals
Metadata quality
It’s not that your storefront doesn’t matter—it’s just that it matters to fewer people. For many transactions, the interface becomes a machine-to-machine exchange.
And for merchants, that means the signals you’re sending to those machines are now your storefront.
What still matters—and what doesn’t
A lot of traditional eCommerce optimisation will still matter, but not in the same way.
Your brand experience? Still vital—but it needs to be structured in a way agents can understand. That might mean new data formats, standardised trust scores, or loyalty metrics embedded into your feed.
Your UX? Important—but less so for the half of commerce that’s increasingly automated.
Your PDP copy? Still useful—but only if the agent can extract key decision-making variables from it at speed.
Platforms like Shopware are already working on these problems. They’re building agent-aware product infrastructure—front and back. That includes everything from self-healing product data to storefronts that adapt to user preferences in real time. Not future talk—this is already in prototype.
B2B isn’t immune—if anything, it’s next
We often think of B2B as lagging behind B2C. But in this case, it might be the first to go fully agentic.
Why? Because so much of B2B purchasing is already rules-based:
Find supplier
Check inventory
Validate PO
Place order
The problem is: it’s still painfully manual.
Agents are perfectly suited to speed this up. But they’ll need structure, and they’ll need payments they can actually trigger. And that’s where the next round of innovation will come from—tying automation to payment authorisation in a secure, compliant way.
The moment that happens? Entire workflows go from days to seconds.
Where this leaves you
If you’re a merchant, platform, or integrator, now’s the time to look in the mirror.
Ask yourself:
Can an agent understand why someone should choose me?
Is my data clean, structured, and accessible in the right way?
Am I investing in true differentiation—or just dressing up a slow, brittle stack?
If the answer to most of those is no, you’re not alone. But the window is narrowing.
As Stefan said in our chat, this isn’t just about surviving the shift. It’s about doing the kind of creative, valuable work that AI can’t do for you—yet.
The merchants who lean into this will still win. Because yes, agents may be doing more of the work.
But at the end of every transaction, there’s still a human.
And they’re the one wearing the trainers.
