Insights
Insights
More shoppers are buying online products using AI than ever before. Consumers are skipping search engines and heading straight to AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s SGE, where they are getting product recs, reviews, and delivery estimates. Tools like visual search (e.g., Google Lens, Pinterest Lens) and voice assistants are also reshaping how consumers find products without a homepage visit.
For brands, this changes how and where shoppers make decisions. If your product isn’t AI-ready, or if your delivery options can't compete, you lose visibility, and you might lose the sale.
To stay in the game, retailers need structured product data, reliable fulfillment, and APIs that make their catalogs usable in AI-driven environments. Brands that get their data and delivery ready now are the ones AI will surface to shoppers first.
Let’s say a shopper is looking for a birthday gift. They type into generative AI:
Instead of links, the shopper will get product cards—images, prices, reviews, delivery estimates. Increasingly, these tools are surfacing purchase-ready options, often with “Buy Now” buttons, reducing friction and shortening the path to checkout.
No homepage and no comparison shopping. Ask, see results, and buy.
This is how consumers are starting to shop. And for retailers, it creates a new kind of competition:
When shopping happens inside a chat, your feed becomes your storefront. If it’s broken, incomplete or slow, you’re not even on the shelf.
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So what should brands do to compete in this new landscape?
Many LLMs use structured feeds via APIs, but some tools also crawl websites or ingest content using plugins and browser tools.
When a shopper asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, it scans product data, looking for structured, up-to-date, and trustworthy information it can present instantly. If your catalog isn’t clean and complete, it’s less likely to be in the running.
These changes require a different playbook. Here’s how the old rules compare to what works now:
| Old rules | New rules |
|---|---|
| Optimize keywords for Google | Structure product data for AI |
| Design beautiful PDPs to convert browsers | Make your catalog usable via API |
| Guide shoppers through a branded funnel | Be ready for a zero-to-checkout decision in one conversation |
| Let reviews build trust with humans | Use reviews to build credibility with AI – LLMs can train on reviews or use them to assess sentiment |
Visibility in AI-driven commerce requires showing up in the moment with complete, trusted data. Customers no longer see a landing page explaining what makes your product great. The information in your feed has to do the work.
Retailers who invest in that foundation now are the ones AI will choose to recommend.
Getting recommended by AI starts with the basics:
Let’s say your product shows up in an AI chat and the shopper clicks “Buy Now.”
What happens next?
If your delivery window says 5–7 days and the same product is available with next-day shipping on a marketplace, that conversion disappears, and you’ve lost the sale.
This is the gap most retailers miss. AI may win you the click, but delivery wins (or loses) the sale.
Owning delivery gives you leverage:
Nash helps retailers deliver like the big players… without the overhead of building delivery infrastructure from scratch.
Nash connects you to a nationwide network of carriers, couriers, and specialized providers. Whether it’s a same-day local drop-off or a big and bulky regional shipment, Nash matches each order with the best-fit option based on speed, cost, your parameters, and customer promise.
And it’s fully automated.