AI Is Bringing Retailers Their Best Customers but Not Closing the Sale

Retailers this quarter are reporting where artificial intelligence has actually changed how consumers shop, and where it has not.

Etsy CEO Kruti Patel Goyal told analysts during a second-quarter earnings call Thursday (Aug. 6) that traffic from AI agent platforms remained under 1% of Etsy’s total, although it converts at a higher rate and larger average order size.

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call Wednesday (Aug. 5) that agentic order volume from AI partners remains low across the board.

Meanwhile, Ulta Beauty Senior Vice President of Digital and eCommerce Josh Friedman told Reuters that the company is incorporating shopping carts and its loyalty program into Google’s Gemini because customers are finding its products there, but the initiative is still in its early days.

Independent market data backs up what executives described. AI-referred traffic to retail sites in the United States grew 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, according to Adobe, whose insights are based on direct transactions online, covering more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites.

Revenue per visit from AI referrals ran 37% higher than non-AI traffic as of March. Shoppers arriving from AI assistants also spent 48% more time on the page and browsed 13% more pages per visit than traffic from other channels.

Shopify’s own numbers pointed in the same direction. AI-referred traffic to Shopify stores tripled year over year in the second quarter, and orders through those AI channels tripled right along with it. New buyer orders from AI channels are arriving at nearly twice the rate of other channels, President Harley Finkelstein said on an earnings call Wednesday.

Etsy Uses AI to Fix Its Discovery Problem

Patel Goyal broke Etsy’s AI strategy into three buckets. AI is making Etsy more personal, more discoverable, and learning how the next generation of shopping will work through native conversational tools.

Search and personalization show Etsy’s clearest AI wins. The company has built richer buyer profiles covering more than 65 million shoppers, feeding real-time personalization into search results, home feed content and marketing outreach, Patel Goyal said. The system creates a compounding effect, as the more a buyer engages, the more relevant each subsequent visit becomes.

Meanwhile, DoorDash’s Xu attributed the company’s gap to most AI platforms prioritizing enterprise customers and coding tools over physical fulfillment. Every AI shopping assistant eventually must hand off to a person to check what’s actually in stock, route an order to the right merchant and load a bag correctly. That handoff remains unsolved industry-wide.

DoorDash’s own AI tools are producing results without agentic partners. An ordering agent called DoorDash Ask can build a grocery cart in less than two minutes, and the company has automated catalog-building for new merchants joining the platform.

Consumer survey data explains why the gap exists. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Agentic Commerce Deep Dive: Payment Infrastructure and the Path to Trust for Merchants” found that 48% of online shoppers used AI to research their most recent purchase.

Separately, PYMNTS Intelligence found in the report “From Assistive to Agentic AI: Consumers Wade Into Autonomous Commerce” that 70% of consumers are interested in using AI agents for travel planning, and 71% for health and wellness. But only 49% would let an AI agent actually complete a purchase, and trust in AI platforms to handle that transaction drops to just 3% among consumers who don’t already use AI regularly.

Consumers will let AI find the product. Fewer will let it click the buy button. That is the same boundary Etsy and DoorDash described from the merchant side.

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