What: Agentic commerce is stalling at the point of purchase: retailers are blocking agents to protect customer relationships, ad revenue and returns exposure, and US consumer data shows AI is used for mid-journey research rather than for the final transaction.

Why it is important: For department stores, the lesson is to invest in AI visibility and product data where shoppers actually consult AI, while the checkout, the loyalty relationship and the returns liability stay in the retailer's hands.

Cloudflare data shows the share of 403 Forbidden responses served to bots and agents has risen sharply since the summer, roughly double its earlier level, as Amazon and other large etailers move to block agent shoppers. Beyond protecting customer relationships and advertising revenue, retailers fear agents will aggravate returns and fraud: NRF data shows return rates have doubled and total return costs tripled since 2019, with dispute abuse the most common fraud concern.

Consumers appear equally hesitant. Around 25% say they would let AI buy most consumer goods on their behalf, luxury excluded, while 42% would not trust it to purchase at all. Similarweb clickstream data to June shows a growing share of shopping journeys passing through AI, but mostly in the middle phase between discovery and checkout, which complicates attribution when the final purchase happens in a separate session.

Social commerce points the same way. On TikTok Shop, 8.4% of sellers producing 1,000+ videos capture around 60% of sales, while the top 1% of sellers drive roughly 60% and the top 10% around 93%, a creator-driven model agents cannot replicate.

IADS Notes: The retreat of large etailers from agentic checkout extends a conflict already visible at platform level, where Amazon blocked Meta's Muse while marketplaces dependent on commissions and sponsored placement resist agents and payment providers with no advertising business to defend embrace them (a16z, October 2026). The consumer side of the Cloudflare and Similarweb data matches earlier European findings: French shoppers' trust in AI falls from 47% before a purchase to 30% at payment, and Walmart suspended its ChatGPT Instant Checkout integration after conversion came in roughly three times lower than on its own site (Journal du Net, September 2026). For department stores the mid-journey role of AI is already measurable, with searches originating from AI agents rising from 0.3% to 2.5% of John Lewis's total in a year, a shift the retailer met by opening an in-store content studio and producing daily influencer video to feed AI discovery rather than by opening its checkout to agents (Reuters, September 2026). The creator-driven skew of TikTok Shop sits on the same human-interface logic: US sales on the platform nearly doubled to $4.9bn in the first quarter of 2026 as Ralph Lauren, Ulta Beauty and L'Oréal opened storefronts, drawn by the fusion of content and conversion and by an older demographic that is now the fastest-growing segment (The Wall Street Journal, April 2026). The returns and fraud concerns that make retailers wary of agent-placed orders build on an existing $850bn annual returns burden that is already pushing the industry toward AI-based risk management, returnless returns and tighter policies for serial returners (The Robin Report, April 2026).

Retailers block AI shopping agents while consumers use AI to research, not to buy