E-commerce operating system (OS) Swap has announced the launch of an agentic storefront for brands – a commerce website that lets customers discover and purchase products through a brand agent.
Swap Commerce is a platform for brands to manage their back-end operations, shipping and customer returns. Announced on Tuesday, Swap Storefront, lives on a .ai website as opposed to a .com website, and is trained on a brand’s products.
The platform will let brands implement an agentic storefront including an AI shopping agent that can converse with customers, suggest products, and guide them through their shopping journey.
Through the storefront, customers are guided from product discovery to a final transaction within the parameters of a conversation with an AI agent that understands their needs and can tap into a brand’s product inventory. Customers can also experience a virtual try-on of products through the tool.
Swap Storefront claims the new offering converts customers twice as much as the traditional shopping experience.
Seeing Ads in LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming a channel where customers discover products.
OpenAI recently made a series of announcements in preparation for its long anticipated ads roll-out in ChatGPT. This included the news it would be launching a self-serve ads tool, new cost-per-click bidding capabilities and new ads measurement tools.
The company will also be partnering with Adobe, programmatic ads platform StackAdapt, performance advertising platform Criteo, creative advertising platform Kargo, and retail media management company Pacvue.
Ads are currently only seen on ChatGPT in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the AI giant has said it will expand to the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea by mid-2026.
ChatGPT initially rolled out its ‘Instant Checkout’ feature that would let consumers purchase directly in its chat interface, however rolled this back after tests indicated the platform was being used more for product discovery, and consumers felt less confident about inputting the likes of credit card information into the platform.
Owning The Customer Experience
Despite the rise of product discoverability in LLMS like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, and Anthropic’s Claude, brands don’t own this customer journey, or the data collected from this journey.
Not owning that experience is one of the main driving factors behind a brand having their own brand agent, especially as LLMs are likely to prioritise keeping customers on their platform over letting them navigate to an external website.
“Consumers are using LLMs more every day and increasingly want that same interactive, guided experience when they shop, rather than static browsing,” said Sam Atkinson, Co-Founder and CEO of Swap. “Swap Storefront puts that power directly in the hands of brands, helping them meet that demand while strengthening direct customer relationships and capturing valuable insights.”
