Half of consumers now use AI to decide what to buy, sellers warned

Half of consumers now turn to AI instead of Google or Amazon search when deciding what to buy, and sellers are being warned that brands appearing in those AI recommendations today are locking in positions that get harder to crack every week, echoing the first-mover dynamics of Amazon's early days.

The warnings come ahead of a free 90-minute live training on Friday, April 10 at 1pm EST, where an e-commerce strategy team is presenting its playbook for scaling brands under the new conditions. The session was not recorded.

The case for urgency rests on several claims. Selling only on Amazon leaves a business exposed to a single policy change, tariff or algorithm shift. Brands not applying AI to content creation, advertising optimization and product discovery risk losing to small competitors with an AI stack. Ignoring social and TikTok Shop means ignoring a channel said to drive one free Amazon sale for every three TikTok sales. And email still drives nearly 25 percent of all online store revenue while most sellers send none.

The same team's survey of more than 900 e-commerce sellers found 46 percent naming cash flow as their biggest constraint, 39 percent admitting they themselves are the bottleneck, and 73 percent saying AI is what they most want to learn but barely use.