The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & NewsRetailers Say Under 5% by 2027. Shopware’s Co-Founder Says 30% by 2030
Shopware co-founder Stefan Hamann thinks about 30% of buying will be in the hands of agents by 2030, and probably more in B2B than B2C. Rick opens with a state of the union drawn from six months on the road, including an NRF combined councils meeting of CIOs and chief digital officers. Today agentic commerce mostly means discovery: whether an agent finds your product in the first place. Rick sorts retailers into four buckets (watchers, foundation fixers, pilots and deployed) and explains why about three in four of the NRF council members won’t let AI generate creative for brand-critical imagery. Stefan Hamann, now Shopware’s Chief Agentic Officer, explains why he started the Agentic Commerce Alliance and how its free readiness scanner works. He also suggests an exercise every merchant should run: ask your own staff for every reason a customer should not buy a product. An agent usually shows a shopper about three options, so it needs to know what your product is bad at. He thinks an agent that buys on your behalf is months away, not years. Then four agency and merchant pairs show what the work looks like: Keith Pires of Boldest and Lori Lash Valencia of The Mall Street on a New York premium marketplace with no sponsored placements, no private label, and brands that get their customer data. Chris Hedge of Altus Nova and Zach Frost of Peak Capital on moving PartsTree off a 25-year-old custom platform. That meant 450,000 models, more than 4 million parts and 150-plus OEM data feeds, with AI used to check every migrated record. Darin Lynch of Irish Titan and Sean White of ElleVet Sciences on running two audiences across three sites, launching wholesale for vets first, and moving pet supplement subscriptions to a new platform with no customer re-entering a card. Jonathan Tenpenny of AmericanEagle.com and Eric Nettleton of SANY America on dealer-branded catalogs for heavy equipment. Most of these projects are foundation work, and Rick argues that’s the right order. Sponsored by Shopware Agentic Commerce Alliance: https://www.agentic-commerce.org/ Agentic Readiness Scanner: https://agenticcommerce.shop Agentic Commerce Maturity Index: https://acmi.agentic-commerce.org/
