“Ask an Professional” is an occasional sequence the place we pose inquiries to seasoned ecommerce professionals. For this installment, we’ve turned to Scot Wingo, a serial ecommerce entrepreneur most not too long ago of ReFiBuy, a generative engine optimization platform, and earlier than that, ChannelAdvisor, {the marketplace} administration agency.
He addresses ways for managing genAI bots.
Sensible Ecommerce: Ought to ecommerce retailers monitor and even block AI brokers that crawl their websites?
Scot Wingo: It’s a nuanced and strategic resolution important to each service provider.
Scot Wingo
The 4 agentic commerce experiences — ChatGPT (On the spot Checkout, Agentic Commerce Protocol), Google Gemini (Common Commerce Protocol), Microsoft Copilot (Copilot Checkout, ACP), and Perplexity (PayPal, On the spot Purchase) — have almost 1 billion mixed month-to-month energetic customers. With Google transitioning from conventional search to AI Mode, that quantity will dramatically improve.
For retailers, the chance is as huge or larger than Amazon or every other market.
Retailers ought to embrace AI brokers and guarantee entry to the whole product catalog.
However genAI fashions want greater than entry. Agentic commerce thrives not simply on intensive attributes but in addition on the merchandise’ purposes and use circumstances. Retailers ought to increase attributes past what’s proven on product element pages and supply important context by way of a deep and extensive question-and-answer part that features frequent shopper queries. It permits the fashions to match shopper prompts with related suggestions, driving gross sales to these retailers.
The time for motion is now. Gemini’s shift to AI Mode means zero-click searches will improve, probably producing 20-30% fewer clicks (and income) in 2026.
