From search bars to AI agents
For the last 15-20 years, getting discovered online was a persuasion game. Brands provided algorithms with signals like keywords, links and contextual content. The hope was that paired with marketing spend, it was enough to attract customers, get them into your online shop and convert them.
Agentic commerce is changing this approach.
Looking ahead, agentic commerce could account for 15% of total online retail market share by 2030. Today, nearly 40% of consumers use AI agents to filter their initial shopping discovery.
Instead of searching, they’ll instruct the agent: “Find me red sneakers, size 38, that will arrive tomorrow and have free returns.”
The AI agent does the heavy lifting, and it doesn’t care which brand is the loudest. It cares about who can actually deliver on those exact requirements.
Marketing dollars aren’t enough to buy visibility if your operational backend can’t deliver on the customer’s expectations.
Why logistics is your ultimate ranking signal
AI agents filter out products for the exact same reasons shoppers abandon carts:
Opaque shipping
Slow delivery
Out-of-stock items
To make sure you’re not filtered out, this information needs to be verifiable by AI agents. If your operational data (real-time stock availability, precise delivery promises, and transparent returns) is invisible, your brand becomes invisible.
But you can’t optimise your way to a delivery date you can’t physically hit.
The trust loop and the double cost of failure
Data is just a claim; the promise behind it has to hold up. 86% of customers judge an online shop by its delivery and returns.
When you keep your promise, customers leave positive reviews. LLMs and AI agents analyse these reviews, with fulfilment and reliability as critical trust signals, leading to future recommendations. Break that promise, and the loop runs in reverse, leading to reduced visibility.
When fulfilment can’t support demand, brands lose twice:
Lower recommendations: the agent never surfaces your products
Weaker conversion: 81% of shoppers abandon carts if preferred delivery options are missing and 21% abandon if delivery is too slow.
Fulfilment isn’t just a logistics cost anymore; it determines whether customers even see your products.
The brands that win in agentic commerce won’t just be the loudest. They’ll be the most trustworthy to machines, and the most reliable for people.
Orchestration intelligence drives growth
The best way to keep your delivery promise? Stop managing inventory warehouse by warehouse and start orchestrating it as one unified stock pool across all channels and markets.
Smart orchestration enables:
Better availability
Faster, more accurate delivery promises
Fewer lost sales from fragmented stock
Zalando’s AI-driven supply chain optimisation improved delivery promise precision by 22%, translating directly into an uplift in Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The ZEOS advantage
Exposing machine-readable data is only half the battle. ZEOS provides the digital layer on top of the physical logistics network of Zalando to orchestrate stock intelligently. It predicts where inventory should sit, which fulfilment node is optimal and where return risks are highest. This helps ensure that your data is machine-readable, and you can meet the promise you make at checkout.
