Agentic shopping: the shops I no longer see

November 4, 2026 · 7 min read

Over the past few weeks I bought four things online with the help of Claude, my AI assistant, and hardly saw any of the shops.

The first was a pair of T-shirts from Labfresh. I was only doing research, but it went so smoothly that I bought them along the way. I sent Claude a screenshot of my previous order:

Claude found the new version of that T-shirt. I picked two other colours, and it sent me one link with both in the basket. I pressed it, signed in with Face ID to Shop, Shopify’s app for shoppers, and paid with iDEAL.

A few days later I needed new blades for my razor. I asked Claude for the best deal, and it came back with a link to a drugstore where I have no account, with the blades in the basket. I checked out as a guest on my iPhone, and its autofill filled in my email address and delivery address.

Since then, I have also bought diapers at bol.com and coffee beans at Peeze, a roaster I often buy from.

In my first post on agentic shopping, Claude only added one product to a basket. My trust in AI is growing faster than I expected.

All four purchases have something in common: they are things I buy again and again. I know the products, so for most of them the only question is where and for how much. For a handful of things I buy again, an agent makes the web shop almost invisible.

So my question is: if an agent does the searching for repeat purchases, what does a web shop still need to be good at?

How Claude shops for me

Behind that one chat, Claude takes three routes:

• The web. Claude searches it by itself, without signing in anywhere.
• The browser in Claude Desktop on my laptop, as in my last post. It visits the shops I trust, and at some of them it is signed in as me.
• A shop’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, through a connector.

MCP is a standard way for an AI agent to work with a system directly, through a fixed set of tools: actions the system offers, such as “search the catalog” or “create a basket”, that the agent can use.

The shirts came through that last route. Labfresh runs on Shopify, and on 13 October 2026 Shopify opened one MCP server for all the shops it runs: Shop MCP. Put together, it looked like this:

For other shops, Claude follows the instructions in my shopping project, including a short list of shops I trust.

What the shop no longer gets to show me

What comes back from Shop MCP is not a web page but plain information: the product, its price, whether it is in stock, the seller and a link. No banners, no offers of the week. When I open a shop’s app myself, those come first.

I understand why they are there, but they are not why I am there. The promotions only came back when I pressed the link and landed on Labfresh’s site: before I paid, it suggested socks and another shirt.

It reminds me of the sweets at the supermarket checkout. By the time you get there, you are tired from shopping, and with kids even more so. That is exactly when you, or your kid, fall for a chocolate bar. Online shops use the same moment. Claude is not tempted the way I am, at least for now: here the offers did not even reach it.

What shopping through Claude gives me

Three things stand out:

1. Searching and comparing in one place. No Google search first, and no list of shops to click through one by one.
2. No promotions I did not ask for. I skip the shop’s app and its offers, which takes less of my attention.
3. One interface, so life gets simpler. I share a photo or the name of a product, look once at the best options Claude finds, and say go.

Is it faster? Only when there is something to compare. For the diapers, I asked which shop had the best offer, Claude added the pack to my basket at bol.com, and within 30 seconds of opening the app I had paid.

For now, the checkout is the one moment I still see the shop. I do not think it will take long before I feel confident enough to let Claude pay as well, when I have a payment card specifically for agentic shopping. Then even the checkout no longer matters.

What I tell Claude also stays in one place. If I want to spend less for a while, I say so once and it counts for every shop, instead of sharing that budget with every shop separately.

This is moving fast

For now, I expect only a few people let an AI assistant shop for them. But there are many signs that this will change, and quickly. Cloudflare wrote this summer that, for the first time, more than half of internet traffic is no longer human, ordinary crawlers included. In September, Meta launched Muse in the United States, an AI agent that can also shop.

Shops are adapting too. Some rewrite their product descriptions so that AI agents find and recommend them, which is called generative engine optimisation (GEO).

What changes for a web shop

From the web shop’s side, the drugstore stands out most. Its user experience did not matter to me, and the site gave me no feeling about the brand. It was a transaction: the product was there, the price was right, and I could pay as a guest. It could just as well have been another drugstore: the name was just text on my screen.

The coffee beans showed the other side. Claude put 2 kilos of Amora beans in my basket at Peeze, where the browser on my laptop is signed in. It could not send me a link, since the basket was in my account, so I paid on Peeze’s website on my phone. Claude added nothing, and I can see why: only Peeze sells these beans, and I know exactly which ones I want. There was nothing to compare, unlike the diapers and the blades, which several shops sell.

So perhaps the product matters more than the shop. A product nobody else sells is a reason to go to that shop, with or without an agent. Supermarkets have known this for a long time: Albert Heijn puts a lot of work into its own brands, such as AH Terra and AH Excellent.

I worked at Albert Heijn online from 2017 to 2019, and I saw up close how much work goes into a shop’s website and app. If agents do more of the searching for repeat purchases, I wonder which of that work still pays off, and what becomes more important instead. From my purchases: a product nobody else sells, product information an agent can read, the price, for now a checkout that works without an account, and trust.

That raises a question I cannot answer yet: what does this mean for small shops, or for someone starting a web shop today? I trust the shops on my list because I already know them, and most of them are large, with good customer service. My own instructions make it harder for a shop I do not know: it has to be at least 10% or €5 cheaper, and pass a trust check, before Claude even suggests it. I am curious how people in retail see this.

Next: the weekly groceries

I expect groceries to be different. A weekly basket at Albert Heijn holds 30 to 50 products, and part of it changes all the time: I do not want the same dinner every week. Context could matter much more there too, such as friends with an allergy coming for dinner on Thursday.

To find out, I asked Claude to go through my last ten orders, with two hypotheses:

1. About 80% of what I buy, I buy again within three weeks.
2. Most of those repeat purchases are not specific to Albert Heijn: any supermarket sells them.

The first results are interesting. I am looking forward to continuing the research, and to sharing it here.

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