Social Commerce: Yes. Agentic Commerce: Er, Maybe.

While Social Commerce is a must for retailers this year, they’re much more cautious about going down the Agentic Commerce, according to three very different retailers. As the nature of shopping is changing, shifting from bricks-and-mortar, websites and mobile, to social channels and Agentic Commerce, retailers need to re-vamp their operations to ensure they can attract new types of customers and support new revenue streams. For De’Longhi, the biggest costs associated with this shift are around the complexity of how shoppers shop, and how the business is structured. The home appliances provider began life as a B2B company and then added B2C in 2019, a change that is still in progress. Francesco Lorini, De’Longhi Marketplace & B2B Manager, explains: > We come from a B2B company, a B2B mentality, so the big cost is the change management in terms of changing the mindset, start looking at the customer journey rather than the single accounts or the single markets, and have a combined and global strategy and global approach, then that needs to be localized to the different markets. Similarly at Life360, which offers a family tracking app and Tile trackers, there’s been a focus on the change management aspect. Dominic Moore, Senior Director of Sales, Devices at Life360, quipped that due to his age, he remembers the days when putting an advert on TV resulted in selling thousands of units. He notes: > It's not like that anymore. Having the teams in place has been key,but actually, with the push into AI, some of that has been pretty scary for some people in the business. Consistent outputs To support staff during this time of change, the company has ensured a focus on systems and processes, creating repositories where people can document information and follow a structure. Moore explains: > We went full in,and everyone was making their own [AI] models and making their own presentations,and we quickly had to reign that in to say, here's a shared structure, this is what we need for the outputs to be consistent, rather than individual input.That training piece has been a slow journey, but a really useful one. Social Commerce is the area where the panelists recommend other retailers test out, if they’re not already doing so. Whispering Smith, a fashion wholesaler started in 1967, is about to go live with TikTok. Rohil Kumar, MD of Whispering Smith and the founder’s grandson, reveals social selling is a big part of the firm’s strategy this quarter. At De’Longhi, Social Commerce is currently the area where the business is learning the most. Lorini says: > This year is the first year where there is some data that proves that it's a big place where brands have to be, regardless of the category. It's a place where consumers go there to discover products, go there to engage, and go there even to buy the products. What is hard is that we need to engage both with the consumer,because we need to have always new content, people go there to get fresh content every day.But you need to engage as well with affiliates and influencers,because you need to give some reason why to push your product or your brand and not other products. While Social Commerce is well underway at retailers like Whispering Smith and De’Longhi, that isn’t the case for Agentic Commerce and agentic checkout. De’Longhi is working more at the discovery phase on agents, rather than the checkout. Lorini says: > When we see big trends coming up, what the company do usually is create a team with the members of the different departments, just discussing and analyzing the new trend, and do planning on how we can roll out the program,if it is successful or not. We are not yet in a phase where we are using agents for the final checkout, but I think it's something that definitely the company will test. Agentic mindset The topic of agentic keeps coming up at Life360, but the company first needs to work on developing the right mindset as a sales team. Moore explains: > How we make sure that we're structured to go into those places from reviews all the way through to the processes and data we have, is a key one for us,and it's definitely one that we are open to exploring now, because we want to sell more. > > > We're still a few shopping channels shy of where we want to be. Live commerce, we do a lot of advertising, but we don't have that flow through to shop at the moment. AI is a fast-moving area at Whispering Smith, which is trialing and testing various co-pilots. Kumar notes: > That's probably the most fun I've been having recently, which is seeing some of the stats on replenishments. We see two to three days of sales, we have a co-pilot that can figure out an algorithm on if and when we should replenish it, which market should we replenish it into,we can auto-deliver, so we're trialing stuff like that. The retailer is also looking at a pricing co-pilot, which has pricing across every single marketplace, and does live discounting with various rules that the firm can put into place. Kumar adds: > In terms of the general wider piece, in terms of our investment as well, there's a lot about generative engine optimization, people spending on various different LLMs (Large Language Models). We're not there yet, we're just keeping an eye on it, it's too early to say right now, but having a bit of awareness and at least having the back-end system communicating with the data and having everything ready for the day, is what we do right now. Data foundation One thing he panel do agree on it is that data is the foundation for any successful retailer. As an online-first company, data is a huge part of Life360’s operations, both in terms of its own customer data, and how that can be applied to different marketplaces.The biggest learning for the business this year has been around retail media – advertising on retailers’ own properties. Moore says: > The category that Tile is in has been constantly evolving, is 10 years old now. So what is right in that category, who the customer is, is very different to what it is in our pet product. How we can use our own learnings, but also the data from [Rithum] and the data from those marketplaces has been invaluable.And also the other marketplaces we're on and digital retailers, the retail media is a big part of that. The company hasn’t seen success by joining a marketplace without the ability to talk to people or find specific customers. Moore explains: > We're a considered purchase and we really look to feed into retailers that have the abilities.And we all know Amazon is very far ahead, but we've seen some real success on Bol, John Lewis, Argos as well. I know those guys in particular are really investing a lot in their retail capabilities as well. There’s a big data culture at De'Longhi, according to Lorini. This meant there was already a structure for analyzing data, and the business is currently developing an internal data lake to get all the information in a single source of truth: > But of course we rely as well on market data, marketplace data.The challenge for our team since we have a lot of marketplaces, is to have one single place where we can analyze data and spot trends not just by marketplace or by country but general trends.