Good morning. As AI shopping agents become more sophisticated and widely adopted, the retail landscape is poised for dramatic change.
Del Rey spoke with Scot Wingo, an expert in e-commerce disruption and founder of ReFiBuy (short for research, find, buy). Wingo’s company is developing software to help consumer brands and retailers adapt to an emerging online landscape. “Wingo is perhaps more bullish than many about how soon and severely new AI shopping tools may disrupt existing e-commerce giants and legacy retailers alike,” Del Rey writes.
Wingo said large language model companies such as ChatGPT and Perplexity are gaining significant consumer attention and, as a result, broad distribution. “When you get that consumer distribution, you have to figure out how to monetize it,” he explained. “It’s become pretty apparent to me—especially when Perplexity launched their first shopping feature—that this was going to be the next big wave of e-commerce.”
Wingo said Amazon’s new AI features, like its Rufus AI shopping assistant, are good efforts, but he believes ChatGPT will ultimately prove better. “For Rufus to improve dramatically, it would almost have to replace the existing search experience on Amazon,” he told Del Rey. “And that’s a chasm Amazon’s not going to cross because that would kill $60 billion of advertising revenue that’s essentially pure profit margin.”
“We’re now allowing customers to shop with us in the way they want,” Rainey said. “If you’ve got more eyeballs coming to our websites, you’re going to have more marketplace sellers wanting to sell there, more advertisers wanting to pitch their products there.” He added, “I feel like this is all working together within the broader omni ecosystem that we have, and I don’t see this stopping. I think we’ll continue to have the progress that we’ve seen here.”
The future of e-commerce is arriving fast—and retailers may soon find that some of their most loyal customers are AI agents.
