AI is reshaping the e-commerce landscape just in time for the holiday season. As shoppers turn to generative tools for support, navigation, recommendations and more, retailers and payment providers are adapting to these new patterns to provide the ultimate customer experience. These advances are accelerating a broader transformation in digital commerce, blending automation, personalization and security at scale. The roundup below explores the latest developments driving AI’s growing role in holiday shopping.
With two months to Christmas, here’s what retail leaders expect for holiday shopping – CNBC
Most retailers won’t report third-quarter results or updated holiday expectations until just before Thanksgiving, largely considered the sector’s most important week of the year. By then, many shoppers will have already started checking off holiday shopping lists.
Amazon’s October Prime Day sales event and competitors’ ever-earlier Black Friday deals grab some portion of the holiday wallet share. The unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season comes as executives point to a bifurcation in consumer spending, with lower-income consumers feeling the strain on their budgets, and as a government shutdown and tariff costs threaten purchasing power.
Amazon’s new AI shopping tool tells you why you should buy a recommended product – TechCrunch
Amazon has been stuffing AI features into its shopping experience for the past few years now. Today, the company unveiled a new feature called “Help me decide,” which takes into account your searches, browsing, and shopping history on Amazon to suggest products and describe why a particular product is right for you.
Amazon said it is using large language models along with AWS’ generative AI app service, Bedrock, search service OpenSearch, and recommendation service SageMaker for the tool.
Over the past year, the e-commerce company has implemented multiple shopping tools to drive more purchases. Last year, it introduced its AI assistant Rufus, which sought to help answer user questions about products. Then in October 2024, it added AI-powered shopping guides for over 100 categories, and this year, it started providing audio product and review summaries.
ChatGPT Should Make Retailers Nervous – WSJ
A lot of retailers’ web traffic comes from external places such as Google search already, but shoppers typically need to click through to the retailers’ websites to complete the transaction. ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature allows shoppers to go from asking something like “find me the lightest strollers under $300,” browse, and proceed to checkout without leaving the chat. OpenAI has said that merchants pay it a small fee on completed purchases. The product results that come out of ChatGPT inquiries will be “organic and unsponsored,” OpenAI says.
The retailers’ reasoning is pretty straightforward: If people are going to chatbots for shopping recommendations, it only makes sense to be there and get the first-mover advantage. “You want to be closest to the place of discovery,” notes Oliver Chen, analyst at TD Cowen. The share of retailers’ web traffic from GenAI tools such as ChatGPT is still small but quickly rising, according to Similarweb.
ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot by far, capturing about three-fourths of total AI chatbot traffic, according to Similarweb. And about 2% of conversations on ChatGPT are related to shopping, according to a working paper published last month by OpenAI’s economic research team. Roughly 38% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Adobe earlier this year said they have used generative AI for online shopping—ranging from product recommendations to seeking out deals.
One-third of consumers plan to use AI for holiday shopping – Retail Dive
Despite concerns about AI, consumers perceive them as useful tools that will inevitably change their shopping habits in the future, the research found.
The survey found that 81% of Gen Z consumers, 70% of Millennials and 56% of Gen Xers believe AI will change how they shop over the next three years. More than half of the respondents also said using AI “reduces stress and fatigue during holiday shopping.”
Other reports suggest that consumers are integrating AI into their shopping journey. A Coveo survey found that 7 in 10 respondents are open to using generative AI to guide their holiday shopping decisions. And research from Klaviyo found that more than half of holiday shoppers will use AI to compare prices, receive personalized recommendations and find products over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend.
Exclusive: Visa preps for AI holiday shoppers, agentic commerce – Axios
Visa is prepping for AI holiday shoppers with a new “Trusted Agent Protocol” that helps retailers distinguish legitimate AI shopping agents from malicious bots, the payments giant exclusively told Axios.
AI-fueled shopping is rising fast and Visa’s move could lay the groundwork for “agentic commerce” — when your digital assistant can safely browse, compare and buy on your behalf.
Visa developed the open protocol with Cloudflare and support from partners including Microsoft, Shopify and Adyen.
It’s meant to help merchants manage a surge in AI-driven shopping activity — up 4,700% year-over-year, according to Visa — without blocking legitimate agents or requiring major checkout changes.
Why Stores Could Benefit from AI’s Reshaping of Ecommerce — Retail Touchpoints
To help us all cut through the noise, we sat down with Nikki Baird, VP of Strategy and Product at retail technology provider Aptos, whose job it is to have her finger on the pulse of retail. Baird not only shares her take on where holiday spending is headed but also offers insight into why the rise of AI answer engines could end up making in-store shopping more rewarding and appealing than ever
I see the store being the bigger beneficiary of AI. The big challenge has always been getting that information into the store associate’s hands so that they can use it — whether that’s customer information or inventory information or product information. Online is killing [the store experience] because you always have that power disparity between the store associate and the consumer. But now associates can at least approximate that level of expertise with the information that we can pull together and deliver to them, in the moment. A skilled store associate will know how to leverage that information naturally as part of the conversation with the customer.
The flip side of the conversation is that if things continue on the path they’re on right now, with people coming from an LLM rather than the retailer’s website, ecommerce will actually lose; your website becomes irrelevant. The only thing that’s important is your product detail page and your cart; everything else that you might try to do on your website, forget it, that’s all going to be absorbed and taken over in interactions that will be governed by the chat interface of the LLM.
All you’re going to get is the direct referral traffic to a product that a consumer selected without you participating in that process at all. [Because of that] I actually see stores winning in the AI race here.
AI Shopping Is About To Upend E-Commerce. What It Means for Amazon, Walmart, Meta, Google – Investors Business Daily
Retail’s two biggest names have made big AI shopping moves of their own. Amazon unveiled Rufus, a shopping assistant that can help users narrow down choices and answer questions about individual products. Walmart introduced Sparky, an AI assistant with similar capabilities.
Both companies are eyeing broader agentic capabilities. In April, Amazon started testing a “Buy For Me” button with “agents” that allow customers to purchase products from other websites without leaving the Amazon site or app.
Meanwhile, Google launched a series of shopping tools for its Gemini chatbot in July, including virtual try-ons and price tracking. Meta is pitching its Meta AI app as a place for recommendations and its AI-powered Ray-Ban smartglasses as a tool for identifying products.
Back in May, around five percent of consumers polled said that they were starting their journey in an AI search; by the end of August, that number was up to seven percent. The absolute percentages here may still be low, but the amount of traffic referred to an e-commerce site by third-party LLMs is growing. Schwartz says:
“I don’t want to exaggerate this. It is still a very small portion of overall traffic, but we are seeing some very interesting trends in the data about these shoppers. We saw a 119% increase in the rate of traffic in the first half of the year coming from these channels. What was most interesting is just how intentional these shoppers are. These shoppers who come from a third party LLM convert 700% better than social media referred traffic, and 200% better than any other form of traffic that we see. That includes direct, it includes traditional search, it includes email, etc.”
What Schwartz finds most compelling in Salesforce’s research findings is that it’s not just that consumers are using AI tools, but it’s where they’re using these tools:
“Fifty-seven percent of AI users say that they are using these tools while they are in brick-and-mortar stores. So they’re talking with their ChatGPT, their AI assistant, they’re taking pictures of product shelves, they’re asking for recommendations, they’re comparing prices. Especially our younger audiences, they’re more likely to engage with a ChatGPT in store than with a store associate.”
How will AI continue to fold into different industries with consumers embracing the generative tools?
As AI continues to transform how we shop as technologies transform how attention and loyalty is captured during the holiday season. At FischTank PR, our PR and media relations strategies help to secure media coverage for innovative AI technology solutions, ensuring you reach the right audiences.
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***News roundup guest post from FischTank PR interns Abby Collins and Nana Duah***
