PayPal reveals merchants aren't ready for AI shopping agents reshaping commerce

PayPal says AI shopping agents are creating an invisible storefront economy

AI agents have already started buying on behalf of customers. Yet most merchants still lack the infrastructure to serve them. That disconnect sits at the center of PayPal's first U.S. Agentic Commerce Pulse Survey, based on responses from 498 decision-makers across small businesses, mid-market firms, and large enterprises. Nearly 95% of merchants report that they can already track or observe traffic originating from AI agents, including web crawling from systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. But only about one in five have structured their product catalogs in machine-readable formats that those same agents can actually interpret and act on in real time. Many also lack the foundational infrastructure required to participate fully in agentic commerce, including interoperable APIs and agent-compatible checkout systems. The result is a market where demand is evolving faster than the systems built to support it. "We're seeing the interface layer move first," Mike Edmonds, PayPal's VP of agentic commerce and commercial growth, tells Fast Company, noting that where brands once competed for visibility through Google Ads and SEO, agentic commerce is shifting that pressure toward structured product catalogs and how goods appear across LLMs and digital marketplaces. As search becomes more "intent-driven rather than keyword-driven," Edmonds says, consumers are moving away from basic queries like "running shoes" and instead asking AI systems for highly specific recommendations tailored to their needs.

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The new integration, announced Wednesday (April 29), is designed to let BigCommerce merchants connect their product catalogs, inventory and order management to "AI surfaces." "AI is fundamentally changing how people discover and buy products. Merchants need to meet shoppers in those moments and make it easy to move from discovery to purchase or risk being left out of the journey," said Sharon Gee, senior vice president of product for AI at Commerce, Big Commerce's parent company. "With PayPal Store Sync, merchants can instantly connect their catalog to AI-powered shopping experiences and the PayPal consumer network, ensuring they're not just present, but positioned to convert in the environments where commerce is evolving." PayPal Store Sync is a catalog and order management solution that is designed to link merchant storefronts with emerging artificial intelligence (AI) shopping channels. An integration enabled by PayPal makes product data like pricing, images, descriptions, reviews and inventory instantly accessible to AI platforms, "where consumers increasingly begin their shopping journeys," Commerce added in a news release. The release adds that the integration makes Commerce merchants "discoverable and purchasable" on an expanding network of AI-powered shopping surfaces, such as Microsoft Copilot, Meta and Perplexity. As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in a column earlier this year, the behavioral shift Commerce describes -- with consumers beginning their shopping journeys via AI platforms -- has gone mainstream. Research by PYMNTS Intelligence earlier this year found that 41% of consumers have already used dedicated AI platforms to discover new products. "More striking is that a third say they have fully replaced their prior methods. They are not layering AI on top of old habits," the column said. The experience fueling this shift is "genuinely different from traditional search," Webster added. Rather than through pages of links and sponsored listings, consumers get a structured answer that details the trade-offs between rival products. That answer can be refined through conversation until it aligns with the actual buying decision, something keyword searches could never provide with any level of precision. "But then the consumer leaves the conversation and goes somewhere else to complete the purchase," Webster wrote. "The question that matters now is not whether agentic commerce will eventually close that gap. It is who becomes a casualty on the agentic highway, and who benefits. And how."