Artificial intelligence is already changing how consumers discover and compare products. The next shift is towards AI agents that can make purchases on their behalf.

For many retailers, the immediate priority is understanding how to make their products visible and accessible through AI-powered shopping experiences. However, as these capabilities evolve, another commercial challenge is emerging: ensuring that interest can translate into a completed purchase.

Retailers have spent years trying to understand why shoppers abandon their carts. Now they need to understand how checkout performs when an AI agent is making the purchase. Add different payment methods, duties, taxes and delivery requirements across markets, and there are more opportunities for a transaction to fail.

Getting Recommended is Only Part of the Challenge

There’s understandably a lot of attention on answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO). Retailers want to make sure their products appear when consumers ask AI assistants for recommendations.

But getting recommended is only the first step. Before an AI agent can complete an international purchase, it needs five reliable answers:

  1. What will the product cost, including delivery?
  2. Can it legally be sold and shipped to that market?
  3. What duties and taxes apply?
  4. When will it arrive?
  5. How can it be returned?

If that information isn’t accurate and accessible, the transaction may never be completed.

Retailers have spent years optimizing e-commerce for human shoppers. As AI agents begin making purchases, product information, pricing, payments and fulfilment need to work together in ways that allow those transactions to proceed. And retailers need to consider how they’re measuring success. Getting a product into an AI recommendation is valuable, but how much of that interest is actually converting into revenue?

The Customer Still Needs to Trust the Purchase

Our latest ESW Signals research, based on more than 23,000 consumer interviews across 18 markets, found that just 24 percent of U.S. consumers are comfortable with AI-powered payments. Shoppers are increasingly using AI to discover and compare products, but there’s still considerable hesitation about allowing the technology to complete purchases.

If an AI agent places an order and the delivery is delayed or unexpected charges appear, the customer isn’t going to blame the agent. They’ll hold the retailer responsible.

That’s especially important when selling internationally, where the final delivered price and customer experience can vary significantly between markets.

The Commercial Impact of Getting it Right

Take Dsquared2. Working with ESW, the Italian fashion brand introduced localized payments, dynamic pricing, and ship-from-store capabilities to better serve customers across international markets. Checkout conversion increased by 8 percent year-over-year, while ship-from-store increased GMV by 12 percent in its first four months.

The same requirements apply when an AI agent makes an international purchase. It needs accurate information on pricing, duties, availability, delivery and returns. If it can’t verify those details, the purchase may not go ahead.

Start With the Commercial Problem

My advice to retail leaders is to look at where they’re already losing sales before investing in another AI solution.

Preparing for agentic commerce isn’t simply a technology decision. Commercial, e-commerce, payments, fraud, logistics and customer experience teams need a shared understanding of where an agent-led purchase could fail, and who is responsible for resolving it.

Can your systems provide accurate pricing, duties and delivery information across markets? Can they support the payment and authentication requirements of an agent-initiated purchase? And do you have a way to identify where transactions are failing?

There’s a lot retailers can learn by testing how AI agents interact with their existing e-commerce operations. Understanding what’s preventing purchases from going through will help them make better investment decisions as these new shopping channels develop.

Tonia Luykx is chief revenue officer at ESW, a global e-commerce company that helps leading retail and consumer brands expand internationally by managing the complexities of cross-border payments, compliance, localization and logistics.