E-Commerce Times

Shopify launched its AI-powered semantic search functionality in early 2024, giving Shopify Plus merchants more accurate and relevant search results. Shopify's semantic search reflects the growing use of AI in product discovery across e-commerce platforms. Shopify’s native semantic search API is built directly into the GraphQL Storefront API via the search and predictive-search queries.

Small and midsize e-commerce brands face growing challenges as AI-driven discovery, social commerce, and conversational search change how shoppers find products. Traditional search is giving way to AI-driven recommendations, social-first browsing, and increasingly visual, conversational product discovery. AI and social commerce are rewriting the rules of e-commerce, affecting visibility, rankings, and ultimately revenue.

Google made one of its biggest moves yet in agentic commerce in May when it introduced Universal Cart, a persistent shopping cart that spans Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail. The deep integration allows shoppers to discover, compare, and buy across merchants through Google’s ecosystem. For consumers, the pitch is convenience. For retailers and brands, the risk is much bigger, as Google moves closer to owning the shopping decision before the consumer ever reaches a retailer’s site.

The customer data platform (CDP) industry is entering a new phase as standalone CDPs give way to broader enterprise marketing suites. New platform enhancements from SAS, an analytics and AI software firm, reflect the growing integration of customer data management with enterprise marketing platforms.

Consumers quickly forget advertising, making it harder for brands to win both human attention and AI-powered discovery, according to a report released Monday by Adobe. Based on a survey of some 1,000 U.S. consumers, Adobe found that only 17% of the respondents were confident they could recall the names of the last three ads they saw after just 24 hours.

Misconceptions about artificial intelligence (AI) are preventing small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) from realizing AI's full revenue potential. Business owners are rushing to adopt AI, but they are treating it primarily as a time-saving tool. AI adoption among SMBs continues to grow. This year, 66% of small businesses experienced revenue increases from AI, and 82% of SMBs are already using some AI tools.

Across retail, payments, and big tech, AI-enabled checkout, automated product comparison, and autonomous purchasing tools are becoming critical for e-commerce. The industry has moved beyond talking about AI to managing the transition to agentic commerce. The audit and assurance, consulting, and tax services firm PwC sees agentic commerce influencing what products get surfaced, compared, and chosen, often without humans in the loop.

Retail marketers are rethinking what constitutes the digital shelf. Rather than beginning on retailer product pages or search results, the customer journey often starts earlier through social media, streaming platforms, digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising, and other discovery channels.

You know the drill. You open Shopify in the morning. Switch to Amazon at lunch. Check Instagram’s backend in the afternoon. Sellers bounce around platforms like this every day. But you probably don’t stop to consider that every switch results in a loss of efficiency. This invisible platform-switching tax is the cost every multi-platform seller pays, yet nobody takes the time or trouble to calculate it.

Shoppers are showing less impulse and greater deliberation when making purchasing decisions these days, according to a report released Tuesday by a global provider of user-generated content platforms for brands and retailers. Today's shoppers are becoming more deliberate in their purchase decisions, prioritizing trust, validation, and value over convenience and speed, according to the 20th edition of the Shopper Experience Index published by Bazaarvoice.