The news: Retailers are taking various approaches to agentic shopping as they weigh how best to incorporate the channel into their selling strategies.

The examples: Some companies are fully embracing agents. For example, QVC and HSN allow agents to complete purchases on shoppers’ behalf and send product catalogs to OpenAI and Google to boost visibility, David Thompson, senior vice president of product and technology strategy at parent company QVC Group, told The Wall Street Journal. Others, like Walmart and Instacart, are moving quickly to ink deals with ChatGPT, Muse, and other third-party AI platforms.

But most are taking a more cautious approach.

• While Tapestry recently made Coach and Kate Spade products purchasable through Google Search, including AI Mode, and the Gemini app, it does not allow agents to complete purchases on its brands’ sites due to concerns about fraud and inventory hoarding.
• Gap is working on a case-by-case basis to determine which third-party agents can browse and which can make purchases on shoppers’ behalf.

Still others are closing themselves off completely. Kohl’s does not allow agents to make purchases, a spokeswoman told The Journal, while eBay earlier this year updated its user agreement to ban unauthorized AI agents from shopping on users’ behalf. Amazon has gone further, blocking agents from Meta, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity from accessing its website.

Implications for retail: How brands approach agentic commerce will largely depend on the needs of their business. For a retailer like Amazon, the risk of eroding retail media revenues and weaker customer relationships isn’t worth opening up its platform to third-party agents, especially given how few customers actually use agents to shop. But for a company like QVC, which is facing declining revenues and relevance, increasing the number of ways shoppers can make a purchase could drive incremental sales as agentic adoption rises.

Whether a company is all in on agentic commerce or not, it is important to remain visible on AI platforms as more discovery shifts to those channels. That could mean following QVC’s lead by ensuring Gemini, ChatGPT, and other AI channels have access to accurate, comprehensive brand and product information. Brands and retailers should also identify categories where they can build authority, which could help not only surface their products more often but also improve their placement in AI recommendations.

Go further: Read our latest AI Visibility report on Apparel and Fashion Insights Q3 2026.

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