Most ecommerce brands are still optimising checkout like it's 2018.

• More payment options
• Faster load speeds
• Endless A/B tests

Meanwhile, acquisition costs have risen by more than 60% over the past five years. Cart abandonment remains close to 70%. Payment failures quietly erode 5 - 10% of potential revenue. And across most categories, margin compression is accelerating.

From where we sit at SHIFT, the conclusion is clear:‍

Incremental optimisation is exhausted. It is now delivering marginal gains and less Return on Investment than before.

The next performance leap won’t come from marginal UX improvements.

It will come from Agentic Commerce.

What We Mean By Agentic Commerce

We define Agentic Commerce as autonomous, goal-driven systems engineered to optimise commercial outcomes - not just conversion metrics.

It is not AI layered onto checkout.

It is commercially governed autonomy.

Most brands still ask:

“How do we increase checkout completion?”

We ask:

“How do we increase profitable checkout completion - without inflating CAC, diluting contribution margin, or increasing return risk?”

That framing changes the architecture.

When we partnered with Swap Commerce to help build its Agentic Commerce platform - including its Virtual Try-On (VTO) storefront - our mandate was not experimentation.

It was system design.

Virtual Try-On: Personalized Confidence at Scale

Virtual Try-On (VTO) is more than a visual gimmick. In our work with Swap Commerce, we treated VTO as a real-time, interactive personal shopping experience embedded directly into the customer journey.

Customers can see how products look on themselves, experiment with multiple items in combination, and style full outfits - all before committing to a purchase. It gives them the confidence they would normally seek from an in-store personal shopper.

Every interaction is purposeful: selecting sizes, trying multiple styles, comparing products, and exploring fit all generates structured behavioural signals. These signals inform downstream decision agents in the checkout system, ensuring that the customer’s experience is personalised, frictionless, and optimised for purchase intent.

By embedding VTO into the journey in this way, we aren’t just improving engagement metrics - we are turning high-intent browsing into profitable, data-driven decision-making.

Results: Why this Drives Measurable Growth

The business impact of a properly integrated VTO is significant. We saw that combining VTO behavioural intelligence with agentic checkout logic can deliver

• Up to 2.5x higher checkout conversion rate among high-intent customers, driven by increased product confidence.
  
  
• 15 - 25% higher add-to-cart rates as customers experiment with combinations and create outfits in-store.
  
  
• Up to 20% reduction in abandoned carts, thanks to real-time guidance and product validation.
  
  
• 20% higher average order value, as customers are more likely to purchase multiple items when styling outfits virtually.
  
  
• 35% reduced returns, as customers make more informed choices about size and fit, improving contribution margins.
  
  
• 40% lower cognitive load on support teams, since customers resolve fit and style questions independently.
  
  

By linking VTO directly to Agentic Commerce decision agents, we turned what is often treated as a “feature” into an economic lever - a system that both delights the customer and drives measurable, structural growth for the brand.

Our Position

Agentic Commerce represents the evolution from reactive optimisation to commercially governed infrastructure.

Reactive optimisation is ending.

Intelligent infrastructure is replacing it.

Our work with Swap Commerce reflects how SHIFT approaches growth:

We don’t bolt on AI.

We architect decision systems.

We embed commercial logic into autonomy.

We validate for scale.

The next generation of category leaders will not be those running more experiments.

They will be those operating commercially governed Agentic Commerce architectures built for profitable scale.

That’s where performance is heading.

And we’re already building it.