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For most merchants, the digital storefront has been easy to define. It’s the website. Maybe the app. In some cases, a marketplace listing layered on top. However customers arrived, they eventually landed somewhere the merchant controlled.
That assumption is starting to break.
More customers are beginning their shopping journeys inside AI-powered chat experiences. They ask questions, narrow choices, and receive recommendations without ever visiting a merchant’s site. Those recommendations are now starting to lead directly to purchase without leaving the chat. AI interfaces are no longer limited to research. They are becoming a primary point of discovery and decision-making, storefronts in their own right.
According to Morgan Stanley Research, agentic shopping could drive an estimated $190B–$385B in U.S. e-commerce sales by 2030.1 For merchants, this is not a fad. It is a seismic shift in how and where consumers shop, with implications for your brand’s visibility, conversion, and control.
This change is not happening overnight, and it will not happen all at once. Websites and apps will continue to matter. But they are no longer guaranteed to be the first or the only stop. It’s an expansion of where intent forms.
Search traffic is fragmenting. Comparison shopping is moving upstream. Customers are increasingly comfortable asking AI to do the work they used to do themselves, finding options, weighing tradeoffs, and pointing them toward a decision.
As Jonathan Cordeau, Vice President of Enterprise Product Growth at PayPal explains, agentic systems behave fundamentally differently from human shoppers. “They ingest vast amounts of information, translate consumer intent into actionable criteria, continuously optimize those criteria, and move directly to execution.
That difference matters. When decisions happen before a customer reaches your site, the site itself becomes less central to discovery. It’s still important, but it’s no longer the first door customers walk through.
The question is straightforward: what signals is your business sending when an AI system decides where a customer should buy?
Unlike traditional storefronts, which focus on location or digital experience, agentic AI storefronts introduce a fundamentally different set of priorities. That means the foundations matter more than ever.
Brick-and-mortar priorities center on physical experience and location economics, whereas online storefronts shift the priority toward getting the digital infrastructure and demand-generation engine right. Agentic storefronts, however, require focus on:
The pressure is on the systems that power your business. Pricing, inventory, checkout, payments, and fulfillment need to work quickly and reliably when transactions are initiated outside your owned channels.
The ability to seamlessly orchestrate your order management, payment processing, fraud protection, identity checks, and order fulfillment is critical.
It starts with visibility. If AI agents cannot clearly find, understand, and purchase your products, policies, or availability, they do not recommend them. When discovery and checkout happen outside owned channels, your control over the customer experience shifts.
Trust sits at the center of those questions. No longer just a brand attribute, trust becomes an input into decision-making, influencing which merchants are recommended.
As transactions become faster and more automated, liability follows close behind. What happens when an AI system places an incorrect order? Who handles disputes, fraud, or chargebacks when there is no human click?
Merchants worked through similar hurdles as commerce moved online and then to mobile. The difference now is that decisions are happening earlier and sometimes autonomously.
"If 1.0 was moving online and 2.0 is moving to mobile, 3.0 is moving to agentic," noted Cordeau.
As AI storefronts become more common, they rely on trusted commerce infrastructure to function at scale.
Payments, identity, and protection are no longer add-ons but core signals. Merchants that can plug into that foundation are easier for AI systems to recommend, and more reliable for customers to transact with.
PayPal sits at that intersection, connecting consumers, merchants, and emerging AI experiences with a two-sided network rooted in trust and reliability. Cordeau explains, “Trust is crucial. Consumers and merchants alike demand trust.”
According to Cordeau, this shift is not hypothetical. “At PayPal, we are not just watching this evolution happen, we are enabling it."
That work includes building AI-ready commerce capabilities that allow you to participate in new storefronts without rearchitecting their entire business. "Just as PayPal helped power the move to online and mobile payments, this shift to agentic commerce is reliant on that same level of trust."
Some enterprise merchants are already testing what this looks like in practice.
Ashley Furniture is one example. The company participated in a pilot with PayPal and Perplexity to enable purchases across AI-driven shopping experiences. Opting in, not because the path was perfectly clear, but because waiting carried its own risk.
“We partnered with PayPal to enable the selling of our Ashley products across various LLM agents,” said David Sink, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Ashley Global Retail. “What we wanted to do was to join as early in the journey as possible so that we don’t fall behind.”
Despite the novelty of the space, Sink emphasized that the work itself was manageable. “PayPal has done the heavy lifting here,” he said. “It was really as simple as creating a cart and placing an order.”
For Ashley, the value was not just in launching. It was in learning how customers behave when AI plays a more active role in discovery and checkout, and what that means for the business over time. “We want to remain relevant to the consumer wherever they’re going to be.”
“This is the right thing to do,” Sink said. “This is your path to moving forward in an agentic future.”
AI storefronts are not replacing websites overnight, and they will not change enterprise commerce all at once. But the direction is clear.
More intent is forming earlier. More decisions are happening outside owned channels. Merchants that prepare now will have more options and more control as this shift accelerates.
The goal isn’t to chase every new AI chat interface. It’s to make sure your business can show up, transact reliably, and manage risk wherever customers choose to start.
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