No one will visit your online store

One day no one will visit your store

One day no one will visit your e-commerce site. But sales will keep going just the same. E-commerce is a topic I have loved talking about for years. To explain what it should look like in the age of AI, we first need to go back to 1890.

The undertaker and the switchboard

In 1890 there was an undertaker in Kansas City named Almon Strowger. He had a rival, and Strowger was obsessed with him. His own business was falling while his rival’s kept growing.

He found his own explanation for it: his rival’s wife worked at the telephone exchange. Back then you picked up the phone, called the operator and said “connect me to an undertaker.” She decided where you were connected.

Strowger invented something and got the patent in 1891: the automatic telephone exchange. A system that removed the need to call the operator at all. We have never called an operator, maybe not even our parents, so it is hard to picture.

Part of the story is an urban legend and part of it is documented. But the nice part is this: he automated the system because he did not trust the person in the middle. Automation was born out of distrust of the human in between.

I met these operators in 2015

In 2015 my wife and I started selling online. We had a site and an Instagram page called Rengalux, and we made and sold jewelry accessories. The hard part was never making the jewelry.

The hard part was the dashboards. The sales dashboard, the shipping dashboard, orders coming from marketplaces, returns, customer requests. You end up spending more time in dashboards than on the work you actually do.

The clients I build e-commerce systems for today have the same problem. To find out their profit on a marketplace, they export their data, upload it to another tool and enter their own margins. If you ask me, this system should run almost entirely on connectors. I should just be able to ask an AI agent “how much profit did product X make this week?” and it should go, do all the work and bring back the answer. There is a huge gap between what should be and what is, and we accept it as normal.

Customers are tired too

According to a study in the US, an average checkout page has 23 form elements to fill in or choose, and 17% of shoppers abandon their order because the process is too long. Address details, agreements to accept, custom product forms. It just keeps going.

In another study, 51% of software buyers start their research in an AI chat. They open ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, describe their problem, and end up where they want to buy at the end of the conversation. 69% of them chose a company they had never heard of.

Shopping in chat: launched, then pulled back

OpenAI launched buying inside ChatGPT in September 2025 and stopped it in March 2026. More precisely, it did not remove it completely, now you have to go and open it yourself. Google also published payment protocols to make shopping easier for AI agents.

These are early experiments. Only 12 stores managed to get onto OpenAI’s checkout, because so much has to work in the background. It may have become easier for an AI to make a purchase. But shipping, returns, stock and price tracking all still have to be done correctly and quickly by your own systems.

This is now a fact: before your customers do, an AI agent scans your site, and it is the agent that recommends you to the customer.

What should your store do?

Three things come to mind:

• Complete product data. Description, color, size, photos, all clear, organized and complete. This matters for people, but it matters a lot for the machine. The machine will infer from what you give it. It will not say “the color looks like this, so it must be this.”
• Flawless operations. Shipping, returns, stock and pricing should run on automation, not by hand.
• Visible trust. Show very clearly how a return works and how to reach you. People need to know there is support and a human behind it, someone to talk to when something goes wrong, and you need to be able to show that.

You say it, we do the rest

This is what we do at Digisapiens. Like Kodak’s slogan: you press the button, we do the rest. We build AI coworkers you can work alongside. You just say what needs to be done and look at the results.

Work does not disappear, it moves to a different layer. And AI becomes our biggest supporter here. Screens are getting fewer every day.

The real question is: which side will you be on?

Sources: Strowger patent US 447,918 (March 10, 1891), Baymard Institute checkout and cart abandonment statistics, G2 2026 AI Search Insight Report, OpenAI Instant Checkout announcement (September 29, 2025), Google Universal Commerce Protocol (January 2026).