AI is not a future shopping channel for your customers. It is a current one. Nearly half of Australians — 48% — have already used AI to help them shop, and among Gen Z that climbs to 62%. There is a name for where this is heading: agentic commerce, where AI browses, compares and increasingly buys on a shopper’s behalf. The PayPal 2026 eCommerce Index maps how far it has already come. For a Melbourne business, the finding that matters is not whether AI will shop for your customers — it already is — but whether it will find you when it does.
Your customers are already shopping with AI
AI shopping has moved from novelty to habit faster than most retailers noticed. Nearly half of Australians (48%) have used AI to help them shop, according to PayPal’s research — 62% of Gen Z, 54% of Millennials, 45% of Gen X and even 32% of Boomers. This is not a young-person’s trend confined to the fringes. It runs across every generation.
Look at what they actually use it for and the pattern is practical, not experimental. The top tasks are price comparisons (57%), product comparisons (51%), visual search (46%) and summarising reviews (45%). These are exactly the moments where a buyer chooses between you and a competitor — and increasingly a machine is doing that comparing.
The tools doing the work are the ones you would expect. ChatGPT leads at 41%, rising to 68% among Gen Z, with Google’s Gemini close behind at 39%.
The takeaway for anyone selling online is simple. An AI layer already sits between your store and a growing share of buying decisions. Whether you have planned for it or not, AI in eCommerce is now part of how your customers reach you.
Trust is the bottleneck, not adoption
Here is the tension in the numbers. Adoption has raced ahead, but trust has not kept pace. A striking 93% of shoppers hold at least one concern about using AI to shop. The big ones are fraud and data security (80%), the worry that AI is steering them towards products that suit the seller rather than the buyer (78%), and the fear of overspending (59%).
That hesitation shows up at the point that matters most. Only 44% of Australians say they trust AI product recommendations — 51% of Gen Z, but just 27% of Boomers. In other words, more than half of shoppers are using AI to help them buy while still holding it at arm’s length.
For a business, this gap is an opportunity, not a warning. Three in four shoppers (75%) want AI features clearly labelled as AI. Being open about where and how you use it is not a compliance chore — it is a conversion lever. The stores that are transparent are the ones that will earn permission to help.
What “agentic commerce” is — and why it’s a risk for small players
So far we have talked about customers using AI as a research assistant. Agentic commerce is the next step: AI agents that browse, compare and complete a purchase on a customer’s behalf, with far less human oversight at each stage. Instead of a shopper reading your product page, a shopping agent reads it — and decides whether to put you on the shortlist.
Australian businesses can see it coming. PayPal’s research found 29% are already evaluating or preparing systems for AI shopping agents, led by large companies (45%) but with 31% of small and medium businesses and 12% of micro businesses in motion too.
The more revealing number is the worry underneath it. 35% of businesses fear that AI agents will favour bigger or competitor brands over them. That instinct is well founded, and it points at the real risk. The threat of agentic commerce to a smaller retailer is not the technology itself — it is invisibility. If an agent becomes the gatekeeper to discovery, a store it cannot read or understand is filtered out before a human ever sees it.
This is why AI agents and automation is becoming a discoverability question, not just an efficiency one.
Getting found in an AI-first world
If invisibility is the risk, discoverability is the answer — and it is more within reach than it sounds. AI does not surface stores by magic. It reads structured, well-organised product data and it leans on genuine search authority to decide what to recommend. The clearer and more complete your information, the easier you are to find, understand and put forward.
The encouraging part is how few businesses are doing this yet. Among those preparing for AI agents, the priorities include restructuring product data for AI discovery (17%) and AI SEO (16%) — and only 14% of SMBs are currently optimising for AI searchability at all. Most of your competitors have not started. That is a first-mover edge sitting in plain sight.
The practical levers are not exotic:
- Structure your product data so it is clean, consistent and machine-readable — clear titles, complete specifications and proper schema markup.
- Fill in the detail. Vague or half-finished product information gives an agent nothing to work with.
- Make review and trust signals visible, since AI weighs them much the way a careful shopper would.
- Build real search authority so AI has a reason to surface you rather than a louder competitor.
The first two are largely a matter of how your site is built, which is where solid website design earns its keep. The last two are the day-to-day work of SEO — and in an AI-first world, AI search and AI SEO are simply SEO done with the next reader in mind.
The businesses already using AI have a head start
There is a quiet advantage for businesses that already use AI themselves. More than half (52%) do — 74% of large companies, 54% of SMBs and 46% of micro businesses. The benefits they report are concrete: efficiency (71%), better customer experience (59%) and business growth (51%).
The point is not that you need to automate everything tomorrow. It is that working with AI internally builds the instinct for how it reads, ranks and recommends — the same instinct you need to be found by it externally. Getting comfortable with AI for eCommerce on your own terms is good preparation for the day agents start shopping on your customers’ behalf.
What to do now
None of this requires a leap of faith. For a Melbourne SMB, the sensible response to agentic commerce is a short, practical list:
- Structure your product data so both search engines and AI agents can read and recommend it.
- Invest in SEO and AI searchability. Only 14% of SMBs are, so this is a genuine first-mover edge rather than a cost of keeping up.
- Be transparent about AI. With just 44% of shoppers trusting AI recommendations and 75% wanting AI clearly labelled, openness is how you close the trust gap.
- Start before the agents arrive. With 29% of businesses already preparing, waiting is the one option that quietly costs you ground.
Most of this is not a rebuild. It is tightening what you already have — the way your product data is structured, the completeness of your content, and the search authority behind it. If you would like a hand turning these shifts into a plan, the team at webintelligenz works with Melbourne businesses on digital marketing strategy, SEO and AI agents. Get in touch for a straight conversation about where the quickest wins are.
Continue the series
This is the second post in our three-part read of the PayPal 2026 eCommerce Index. Start with post one, Australian eCommerce Trends 2026: 7 Findings That Defy What Businesses Assume, for the full set of counter-intuitive findings. Then read post three, Why your checkout is losing sales, on the friction points quietly costing you conversions at the final step.
Source: PayPal 2026 eCommerce Index (Australia edition, April 2026) — research by Fifth Quadrant for PayPal Australia; n=1,012 consumers and n=410 business decision-makers.
