With e-commerce still hovering at under 15% of total retail and growth showing signs of fatigue, it’s clear the industry has fallen short of its grand aspirations. Rather than thriving on the foundational pillars of product, price, and service, the online marketplace has devolved into a capital-driven arms race—massive marketing budgets to gain shoppers, ever more complex and addictive websites for retaining them. This expensive contest forces genuinely innovative but smaller merchants into the shadows, while the dominant platforms siphon off an oversized share of the value, ultimately hurting consumers with inflated prices.
We believe that A-commerce (Agent Commerce) can break this cycle by restoring the fundamentals of fair competition, better pricing, and enhanced service—ultimately driving online above 50% retail market share. Armed with complete web intelligence, rational and “intelligent” shopping agents can rapidly compare thousands of product scenarios to secure the best value for each shopper, then complete transactions seamlessly.
Yet for A-commerce to fulfill its potential, these agents must operate with exceptional efficiency—achieving high task success rates, pinpoint accuracy, and lightning-fast execution times. While ongoing tech advancements will keep boosting agent capabilities, merchants also need to adapt their platforms for efficient agent interactions. Today’s e-commerce sites are built for humans: vehiculating emotions and offering maximum information to make users understand all the options and functions the website offers. Yet shopping agents require content structured for action-oriented processing, where the consequences of each possible interaction are instantly clear. We believe new infrastructures and new communication protocols will emerge for shopping agents to extract information and complete tasks on merchant platforms almost instantaneously. We envision a world where merchants will have their own internal agents that will “communicate” directly with shopping agents.
A-commerce won’t supersede e-commerce; they’ll coexist. Some shoppers will pass every purchase to agents, while others may only outsource repetitive tasks or low-value transactions. This synergy between e-commerce and a-commerce will only expand the share of online retail. Forward-thinking merchants that embrace an agent-driven future today will gain a decisive competitive edge, capturing a larger slice of the rapidly emerging A-commerce market.
At SurfacingAI, we’re building cutting-edge infrastructure to improve shopping agent efficiency on merchant platforms. Our solutions already increase shopping agent efficiency by over 200%, empowering merchants to adapt quickly and thrive in this transformative landscape. Partner with us to usher in a fairer, more profitable online retail era—one that genuinely puts the customer first.
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