Retailers this quarter are reporting where artificial intelligence has actually changed how consumers shop, and where it has not.<\/p>\n
Etsy<\/a> CEO Kruti Patel Goyal<\/a> told analysts during a second-quarter earnings<\/a> call Thursday (Aug. 6) that traffic from AI agent platforms remained under 1% of Etsy\u2019s total, although it converts at a higher rate and larger average order size.<\/p>\n DoorDash<\/a> CEO Tony Xu<\/a> said on the company\u2019s second-quarter earnings<\/a> call Wednesday (Aug. 5) that agentic order volume from AI partners remains low across the board.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Ulta Beauty<\/a> Senior Vice President of Digital and eCommerce Josh Friedman<\/a> told Reuters that the company is incorporating shopping carts<\/a> and its loyalty program into Google<\/a>\u2019s Gemini<\/a> because customers are finding its products there, but the initiative is still in its early days.<\/p>\n Independent market data backs up what executives described. AI-referred traffic to retail sites in the United States grew 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, according to Adobe<\/a>, whose insights are based on direct transactions online, covering more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites.<\/p>\n Revenue<\/a> per visit from AI referrals ran 37% higher than non-AI traffic as of March. Shoppers arriving from AI assistants also spent 48% more time on the page and browsed 13% more pages per visit than traffic from other channels.<\/p>\n Shopify<\/a>\u2019s own numbers pointed in the same direction. AI-referred traffic to Shopify stores tripled year over year in the second quarter, and orders through those AI channels tripled right along with it. New buyer orders from AI channels are arriving at nearly twice the rate of other channels, President Harley Finkelstein<\/a> said on an earnings<\/a> call Wednesday.<\/p>\n Etsy Uses AI to Fix Its Discovery Problem<\/p>\n Patel Goyal broke Etsy\u2019s AI strategy into three buckets. AI is making Etsy more personal, more discoverable, and learning how the next generation of shopping will work through native conversational tools.<\/p>\n Search and personalization show Etsy\u2019s clearest AI wins. The company has built richer buyer profiles covering more than 65 million shoppers, feeding real-time personalization into search results, home feed content and marketing outreach, Patel Goyal said. The system creates a compounding effect, as the more a buyer engages, the more relevant each subsequent visit becomes.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, DoorDash\u2019s Xu attributed the company\u2019s gap to most AI platforms prioritizing enterprise customers and coding tools over physical fulfillment. Every AI shopping assistant eventually must hand off to a person to check what\u2019s actually in stock, route an order to the right merchant and load a bag correctly. That handoff remains unsolved industry-wide.<\/p>\n DoorDash\u2019s own AI tools are producing results without agentic partners. An ordering agent called DoorDash Ask can build a grocery cart in less than two minutes, and the company has automated catalog-building for new merchants joining the platform.<\/p>\n Consumer survey data explains why the gap exists. The PYMNTS Intelligence<\/a> report \u201cThe Agentic Commerce Deep Dive: Payment Infrastructure and the Path to Trust for Merchants<\/a>\u201d found that 48% of online shoppers used AI to research their most recent purchase.<\/p>\n Separately, PYMNTS Intelligence found in the report \u201cFrom Assistive to Agentic AI: Consumers Wade Into Autonomous Commerce<\/a>\u201d that 70% of consumers are interested in using AI agents<\/a> for travel planning, and 71% for health and wellness. But only 49% would let an AI agent actually complete a purchase, and trust in AI platforms to handle that transaction drops to just 3% among consumers who don\u2019t already use AI regularly.<\/p>\n Consumers will let AI find the product. Fewer will let it click the buy button. That is the same boundary Etsy and DoorDash described from the merchant side.<\/p>\n