AI Shopping Agents Are Coming. Is Your Brand Ready? | EP. #239

Andrew Maff 00:03
There's a lot of conversation around what do we do, right? There's countless agencies that are selling bullshit.

Narrator 00:11
Welcome to the E-comm Show podcast. I am your host Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetuskr. From groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!

Andrew Maff 00:26
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Ecomm Show. And as usual, I'm your host Andrew Maff, and today I wanted to take the time to do another solo episode because I wanted to talk about these AI shopping agents. It's been a very consistent conversation we've been having with a lot of different brands, and it's a very interesting time, right? If you're in e-commerce, this whole this whole year has been wild. The past two years, I would say, have been crazy.

Andrew Maff 00:57
AI had came out of the box swinging. We've had issues with tariffs. We've had Amazon increase in fees left and right. It's really causing a lot of these smaller brands to really struggle to get out there, and the bigger brands are kind of just crunching their margins as much as they can because it seems like things are just getting more and more expensive left and right, not only for the consumer but also for businesses, and so the reason I wanted to talk about these AI shopping agents is because of a few different things.

Andrew Maff 01:29
One, Prime Day this past year, was in what June. Amazon had announced that they saw like some ridiculous number more people using their AI. Now, I take that with a grain of salt because you're comparing it to the year before, where it was barely existing. So of course, it's going to be more technically two is twice as much as one. So like it's not that impressive, but it is still showing that a lot of people adopted it more so than usual, and we're probably going to continue to see that growth for years to come, right?

Andrew Maff 02:06
The other thing is more and more brands are seeing traffic and revenue coming in from not only things like ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude, but they're also seeing it from directly throughout of Gemini for people that are using it either directly through Gemini or through just the search functionality within Google that is now mostly AI stuff. So the reason I found this to be a very interesting topic, especially now, right? It's as of the airing of this, it's early August. You're pretty much a month away from Q4, right? I know technically it's two months, but it's like as soon as the summer's over, we're in Q4. So September kind of gets like a little Q4 nod. So there's a lot of prep that happens to the Q4 side, and the interesting thing is with Q4, it really matters for almost every business, even for brands that typically don't have a product line that really do much during Q4, A almost every brand, no matter what you sell, tends to see improved conversion rates during that time. Or what ends up happening is a lot of those brands have a big focus on when is their season, which means it's probably q1, q2. So even in q4, there's a lot of planning and different things going on.

Andrew Maff 03:26
With these AI agents, the thing that's going to be very, very interesting this year is how much the consumers actually take this in, right? How much are they leveraged? If it was leveraged pretty heavily on Amazon during Prime Day, it's going to be even more during Q4. If they got used to using something like that, then you're going to see a lot more of it through other LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, etc. Obviously, a lot of these platforms are getting better with having shopping options, but this kind of personalized shopper concept is becoming very very interesting. So in the e-commerce marketing world, there's a lot of conversation around what do we do, right? There's countless agencies that are selling bullshit. It is doing any type of like other stuff to get listed on LLMs. Most of it, not all of it, but most of it is BS, right? If you're doing standard, like true, true actual SEO strategies, they are way more beneficial for LLMs than really anything else.

Andrew Maff 04:33
There's a handful of things that you can do differently to make sure that you're also focusing on the LLMs, but really true SEO is going to be what's the actual game changer, but the problem is, is that there's something that you can't control through your traditional SEO and really through like oh let me add you know some people are doing LLMs text files now and things like that. There's something that you really can't control, and it's. Something that really just comes from quality. To be honest with you, the best products with the best customer service are 100% going to be the things that really start to win.

Andrew Maff 05:14
LLMs, all of them are taking in several different things, mostly brand mentions. Right, so traditional SEO, you're creating content, you're you know making sure the site is indexed and all that fun stuff, all the backend things, and then you're doing what you can from like a backlinking perspective, which basically means like, hey, here's a bunch of other sites that are referencing our site, which means we know we're talking about right?

Andrew Maff 05:37
The problem is with the LLMs, while they do take that into account. They also take into account brand mentions, and this literally just means who are people talking about the most. They don't have to link to you. They don't have to be positive stuff. They don't have to be well. I mean, you'd like them to be positive stuff, but they don't be positive stuff or negative stuff. It's the more that people are using your brand name, the more you're going to show up. Which, by the way, also means when you have a brand name that is extremely generic, it makes it really difficult for these LLMs to understand kind of the differences and to start to reference you more. We have actually found that brands with really generic brand names show up way less often than something with a completely like crazy name because the LLMs are just able to index it a lot more clear, but I digress.

Andrew Maff 06:24
So the more brand mentions that you have, the more that these LLMs are going to reference you. So to give you an example, I got the golf bug, so I've been golfing a lot, and I decided I wanted to get like a little practice putter thing for at home, and so I gave it all the stuff that I was looking for. I told it how much room I had. I told it some of the specifics I wanted. I gave it insight that I have dogs, so I either want to be able to put it away, or I need it to be like super durable, so those little monsters don't ruin it. So, like, I gave it all these things, right? And it pointed me to this one product, and I was like, okay, cool. Like, I liked it. I am a huge believer of cheap is expensive, so it wasn't the most expensive product out there. And when I looked at others that I found that I thought were really a good fit, they were a little bit more expensive, and so I had asked it like, "Well, what about these? They tend to cost more. My gut is that they're more durable or something like that. And so it starts to give a lot of feedback on the overall reviews, and so now it's taking into account a few different things.

Andrew Maff 07:44
One, the company it had proposed had not only great reviews on the product, it had great reviews on customer service. So if there were any issues and it wasn't standing up to the standard that they had put into play, the customer service reps were getting heavily involved. The other one, while it had way more reviews, and it even had some higher rated reviews, it was all around the product, but the customer service was a problem. And so, as it started to look into other things, it also started scraping other places on the internet that were basically who was talking about what product more frequently. And so, the one it had originally suggested is the one that I ended up going with because it had more positive brand mentions. That is not SEO. That is not really even PR. That is word of mouth.

Andrew Maff 08:34
That is what are people talking about and what is it? How are you getting it out there? So the thing you have to think about from a marketing perspective to start to really cater to these shopping agents is not only ensuring that people are talking positively about you, but you need to stir up conversation as much as you can. So yes, getting reviews is fantastic. Getting people to post about you is obviously fantastic, even on blogs or something like that. But the other thing to do that you've got to think about is the education side.

Narrator 09:10
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Andrew Maff 09:43
For example, if you are starting to use, like, if you, especially if you use LLMs yourself to shop, what ends up happening is either A you know exactly what you want. So I can give you another example. I was looking at there's a supplement company that I use that I pretty much always used. They have something out that I was kind of exploring. Like, do I need this? I didn't ask it about, you know, is this a good product? And if not, what are their competitors doing? Or is there something out there that should work for me for this? Blah blah. I specifically asked it about this one brand and this one product and whether it would be good for me or not. If not, that was it. That was all I asked for. So I was already sold on the brand.

Andrew Maff 10:24
So what ends up happening is the more that you can educate people, the more that they show interest in looking into your specific product line and not the competition. The thing that's going to be very very interesting for e-commerce in the coming years, I would I would definitely say the next three to five years are going to be wild. It's going to be consumers are going to start to leverage AI more frequently, and the AIs are going to get stronger, and it's going to learn the consumers even more, and it's going to suggest them exactly what they want. Which means running a Google ad to get in front of them may not do as well for younger audiences that are used to leveraging AI, and so what's going to happen is you're going to have to educate them before they even get to the AI platform to look things up, so that when they are looking things up, even if they mention the competition, they at least bring you up as well.

Andrew Maff 11:19
So once again, here we are again-a whole new generation of leaning into most likely social media. There's going to be a very, very big push towards what can you do to educate the market ahead of time before they start to look things up in AI. Now, the other thing is going to be as much content creation as you can, potentially even outside of social media. Now, you obviously you still call YouTube a social media platform. That's going to be another big area. But even getting your name listed in other places, so elements of PR can be very beneficial just because it'll get you more brand mentions.

Andrew Maff 11:59
Elements of doing like you could be doing shared blog posts and things like that now, and not have to like hammer away 500 backlinks. You could literally, as long as it mentions your name a few times, you're in a good spot. So, starting to get your brand name out there as a thought leader in the space, but then also making sure that there's just a ton of other people that are talking about you, that's what's going to get these LLMs to improve over time.

Andrew Maff 12:25
You can't like the more content that you create, the more things that you do to improve your SEO are absolutely going to be helpful for traditional SEO. That's not going to go away anytime soon, and it's going to give these LLMs more to work with, but if you write a billion articles on several different keywords on what you want to show for, yeah, you kind of want to hope that these LLMs start to reference you. But in terms of a direct revenue perspective, where you're starting to see revenue coming in from these LLMs, that's going to stem a lot more from brand mentions and awareness. So obviously, the big thing is the amount of information that you have to put on your product page. But to make it clean and concise, there's going to be a very nice, delicate balance that you have to find, right? Because all you have to make sure that any any question that someone could possibly ask that would help them understand their your product is a good fit for them your product page needs to answer that because that's what these LLMs are going to pick up, and they're going to say, you know, so and so company references this specific thing about the product, which is exactly what you're looking for, and then of course the reviews say this or reviews say that, etc.

Andrew Maff 13:39
But on your actual PDP, you've got to be a little careful because if you overload it with a ton of copy, it becomes daunting for any regular consumer, and so they end up not reading it all. They think there's way too much information here, and it seems like you're trying to hide something. So you're actually you end up hurting your conversion rate, and it goes in the other direction.

Andrew Maff 13:58
So usually the best thing to do there, like I'm a big fan of accordions. You know, if you've got heat map scroll tracking stuff set up, you can kind of see which stuff people are answering, looking for more, et cetera, and start to move them around. But that way, you can hide information that's not entirely necessary that you need to put front and center. But then, if they're looking for specific answers, they can hunt for it. So FAQs obviously can do great.

Andrew Maff 14:20
So the thing that's very interesting that has been driving me crazy lately is the people that think they can manipulate the LLMs into you know constantly referencing them more and more. And and like I said, don't get me wrong, it doesn't mean that you can't feed it. You can feed it, but it's a extremely smart platform. Like it's it's going to personalize its responses to certain people for certain things. So not only do you have to talk about your product line and talk about the you know all the pros and cons of it and blah blah, but you need to become the basically the person the brand in the space so that other brands are referencing you so that these LLMs really start to take it in.

Andrew Maff 15:04
The thing that's going to be really interesting going into q4 this year is I think it's going to cause so many more brands to really look at what they can do to start to get referenced in all these LLMs even more, because I think what's going to end up happening is when you look at your analytics at the end of this year, I'll bet that similar to like Amazon did when they announced their numbers from Prime Day, you're going to see several 100% if not maybe even 1000s of percent more sales on ChatGPT than you did last year. Well, duh, because barely anyone used it for shopping last year, so it's going to look really impressive.

Andrew Maff 15:46
What's going to be interesting is how much you may or may not have lost from other organic search initiatives. So, did you lose organic search as much? So, did obviously you're not going to grow at that percentage rate. So, when you add the revenue together from traditional search and LLMs, is it really that big of a difference? Now, a couple other things to think about too with that, especially as you get into Q4 here, is going to be what can you do to get people thinking about you before they even search at the LLMs. The biggest thing that we've seen across every single brand that we work with, even for ourselves, for us it's obviously it's leads, but for other brands we work with, like actual conversion, like the conversion rate of people coming out of LLMs is wildly higher than almost any, really any other sales channel, you got to think these personalized AI shopping agents. They are, they're like your own sales rep, right? Like they're the ones selling the product for you. However, they're on the consumer's side, so you have to make sure that it has all the information that it needs, because once the consumer comes to you, the chances of them going elsewhere are usually pretty slim. So the more that you can educate people ahead of time, so that they put your name into the AI, is what's going to be a lot more beneficial, because then the AI will automatically start giving them more information. Right? They may push away from you. Don't get me wrong.

Andrew Maff 17:23
I've asked AI about certain products before, and it's like, yeah, you don't want that. So there, you do have to kind of factor those things in. But the the trick is going to be yes. How can I get my brand mentioned as many times as possible so that I get referenced on AI more frequently, but then it's going to also be how can I get the consumer to ask AI about me, because that's going to be the part where the education side comes in. So of course, if you end up with you know 1000s of pieces of creative through your Meta and TikTok advertising, you've got hundreds of influencers talking about you and people posting about you all the time, and you've just got a huge community of people talking about your product. LLMs are going to naturally start to talk to you more and talk about you more and more as well. So it's not so much all of the content that you're creating as much as it is how much people are talking about you.

Andrew Maff 18:17
So the interesting thing that's going to change in probably the coming years is the amount of content that needs to get created just for keyword purposes may not be as heavy as it needs to be for really just overall brand awareness on other channels. Now the other thing too is being on other marketplaces, being on multiple sales channels. Almost every product that I talked about, of course, it's like when it was comparing and contrasting different price points. What it also did was once it narrowed down the product that I wanted, it also looked at all right. Here's all the distributors that sell this product. Here's their cost on Amazon. Here's their cost on Walmart. Blah blah. So it basically did price matching for me as well, so not only that, but in all these other places, because that product is sold on so many different marketplaces and its own website and other distributors' websites and all these different areas, I'm already getting all that additional brand mentioned. So now having this kind of diversified method and this omni-channel approach of all these different sales channels is giving me that many more brand mentions, which is now allowing me to show up in these LLMs more frequently.

Andrew Maff 19:27
So this is going to be very interesting because you know, as marketers, our job is to game the system. Like Amazon, when that thing came out, holy shit! It was how can we, obviously, you have your traditional SEO? You have what can we do to improve listing images and A plus content and blah blah. And then there was a bunch of weird gray hat and some black hat stuff that started to get done, and so marketers tend to ruin it. And then Amazon put a bunch of new guardrails in place. You couldn't do stuff anymore. It's happened. It's the same thing with Google. It's been happening for years with SEO. Someone figures out how to gain the system, and then they start to do more of that, and then eventually Google figures it out and they put a stop to it. That's basically what it is, right?

Andrew Maff 20:08
The very interesting thing about LLMs: there's really not a way to gain that system. It's bringing in data from all over the place. You could create 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of pieces of content, and it still may never reference you because you're the one talking about yourself? It needs to see other people talking about you. That's going to be very interesting as we get into Q4, and it's something that I think brands need to keep a real eye on, where they really start to invest a ton of their money into these agencies that claim to be GEO experts, which is hilarious because it's barely really doing anything solid for the past several years, and that means that really what's going to improve your GEO listing on LLMs, you've got to be everywhere, and that's really all it is. It's nothing really crazy. They know there's no magic button that they have. There's no magic approach to it. There's a few things that you can do to make sure that they're referenced more frequently, and then outside of that, it's a very standard marketing approach for the most part and trust me, if you don't believe me, ask your LLM.

Andrew Maff 21:14
Like literally, if you use Claude, use ChatGPT. Like literally, just ask it. Like, what do these GEO agencies do differently to get brands mentioned on LLMs more so than a traditional SEO agency. There's a handful of things, but there's really nothing major. It's nothing groundbreaking. Anyway, I digress. Obviously, a little bit frustrated.

Andrew Maff 21:36
But going into this year, I think what's going to be very interesting, especially going into Q4, big push on brand awareness would be my suggestion because I think that you're going to see a lot of people that are going to start to use these AI shopping agents a lot more frequently, and if you can get them to ask about you before they ask about anyone else, it's going to lean into pushing you to be the sale. But I thought it was a very interesting thing to talk about today because they, based off the data that Amazon came out with at Prime Day, I'm definitely betting Q4 is going to be even bigger, which really tells me 2027 is going to be the first real big year of these shopping agents, especially as brands start to lean into them more and more.

Andrew Maff 22:18
But I digress. Thank you all. I appreciate you coming as usual. Please do the normal thing: rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining. I will see you all next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 22:38
Thank you for tuning in to the E-comm show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the Bluetuskr YouTube channel. The E-comm Show is brought to you by Bluetuskr a full-service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetusker.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E-comm Show.