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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Ep 2 - In an AI-shaped shopping journey, the PDP is the new homepage
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[00:00:00] Kiri: As more consumers start using LLMs to navigate their buying decisions, shoppers aren't necessarily browsing a retailer website as much. They might land on a single product page with their mind already [00:00:15] made up and that. In some shopping missions makes the PDP the new homepage and it shrinks the signals that retail media depends on.
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[00:00:27] Kiri: This expert series is sponsored by [00:00:30] Miracle, and I'm back with Amelia Van Camp who is head of ag agentic Commerce at Miracle, to talk about how retailers can design the onsite shopping journey to earn engagement and signals. Again, welcome back, [00:00:45] Amelia.
[00:00:45] Amelia Van Camp: Thank you. I'm excited to be back here.
[00:00:47] Kiri: Yeah, so I've been sharing this story a little bit about my, um, my purchase of the shark glossy, the hairstyling tool. People are probably sick of, of hearing about it, or they've gone and bought their own. [00:01:00] Um, and what happened was, I, I did all of my research upfront in chat, GPTI got to Best buy.com. I went straight to the PDP and my shopping journey on Best buy.com was two pages. was the PDP and it was the checkout page. [00:01:15] I didn't do any browsing. I didn't give Best Buy any extra signals. And so what do you think about this potential journey of the the PDP kind of becoming the homepage in some of these shopping journeys?
[00:01:29] Amelia Van Camp: Yeah, I mean, I [00:01:30] think for ag agentic commerce and Ag agentic usage for shopping journeys, it's definitely something that's top of mind for me as a consumer. Uh, and I hope that it's top of mind for retailers and brands recognizing to your [00:01:45] point that this affiliate traffic that you're getting from these LLMs.
[00:01:49] They're oftentimes landing on that PDP page, and so it's an opportunity to think about the experience inside of that setting and how you can [00:02:00] optimize it based on what your overall strategy is. Certainly retail media comes into play, but also just general product discovery. It may not be as it has been in the past with traditional settings, traditional setups, [00:02:15] and so it's an opportunity to, I think, rethink.
[00:02:19] How you approach PDP pages and how you can think of them in certain cases, as many homepages.
[00:02:25] Kiri: Yeah. Well, let's double click into that. What are some of the opportunities that [00:02:30] retailers have if they're des, design around that shorter shopping journey?
[00:02:35] Amelia Van Camp: Yeah. I think that retailers really have to think about first and foremost, as with anything, but especially with agentic commerce. What is your [00:02:45] ideal shopper journey coming from an LLM? If the user is landing on a PDP page, what ultimately are you trying to drive beyond the baseline conversion? So mapping your your [00:03:00] standard pathway, your hopeful pathway for a shopper is, in my mind, the first order of business.
[00:03:06] And then figuring out what components you plug in to support that. Whether it be sponsored placements, where specifically those come into play. I [00:03:15] know in the past what I've talked about is my experience shopping on sites like Sephora. Oftentimes, I actually land on a PDP page on Sephora because I know concretely what I'm looking for, and so either I'm using an LLM, in some cases.
[00:03:29] In the past I've [00:03:30] used traditional search, and when I get onto that PDP page, I'm already going to convert and purchase that product. Where Sephora does a really great job is they offer you a ton of different trials that come in your purchase experience. [00:03:45] So when the mailer comes, you open up the mailer, you have the product that you've purchased, but you also have all of these, these trials, and many of these trials feel.
[00:03:54] Sephora can tell me if this is true or not. They feel very targeted to who I am as a consumer. [00:04:00] There's also a loyalty based program that they have where I sign in, I get points. So they're learning more about who I am as a consumer. And I think leveraging that knowledge that you have and the programs that you have to obtain that knowledge [00:04:15] about your customer on your site is really a critical point forward as we start to see more of those consumers.
[00:04:22] Really starting and ending their shopping journey on your PDB page.
[00:04:27] Kiri: Yeah, absolutely. I, I think that there is, [00:04:30] there's opportunities without degrading the experience and having. Popups here, and you know, like just kind of over-engineering that two page pathway to death. There's opportunities for, for upsells, for [00:04:45] sampling, for post-purchase offers. There's lots of ways to get creative.
[00:04:48] I think if retailers start to think about this as being a potential new pathway, the risk that. To, to retail media when shoppers just [00:05:00] land on that one, PDP, and then it, you know, they, they convert, which is great for a retailer, but what's the, what's the, the downstream effects of that, do you think, for media?
[00:05:11] Amelia Van Camp: I think very simply put it's quote unquote [00:05:15] disintermediation of. Your retail media program, your retail media network, uh, how your supply side is, being able to play in that landscape is very, very, very different to how perhaps [00:05:30] standard programs have run. And so in thinking about that. My opinion is you probably need to be a bit more experimental these days with Ag Agentic channels and that traffic that you have coming from LLMs to try and figure [00:05:45] out how you can still offer a strong value add.
[00:05:48] To advertisers and how you can do it in a way that feels very native to the shopper, to your point, without putting in several different popups or things that feel very [00:06:00] salesy, how can you do it in a fluid motion? Um, and it may actually be, you know, old tricks of the trade that end up yielding the best results.
[00:06:09] So I don't necessarily think it's a complete change of what's been done historically. [00:06:15] But I do think, again, to my earlier point, you have to really set in stone what your ideal shopping journey is, or shopper journey, and you need to think about how your retail media program flows throughout that.
[00:06:27] Kiri: Yeah, it's a great point. Some of this [00:06:30] stuff, loyalty programs, sampling direct mail with, are we coming back to a golden era of retail again?
[00:06:40] Amelia Van Camp: Yeah, exactly. Well, it's interesting because. Uh, personally [00:06:45] I think loyalty programs are having a resurgence. Uh, you see in many cases, especially inside of OpenAI, uh, there are several organizations today that encourage you to log into their app to enable that full [00:07:00] checkout process inside of an LLM, which is a bit different than landing on your PDP, but what they're relying on is that.
[00:07:06] They don't necessarily get the same information about you as a consumer inside of an LLM, 'cause the LLM is not going to give them all of that. So [00:07:15] if they can bring you into the app, then they have that sort of information about you that can be transformative in how they think about advancing retail media strategies, um, and general e-commerce strategies more broadly.
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[00:07:30] Kiri: So today when the journey starts on A PDP, retailers need to stop. Guessing and start designing useful adjacencies, compatibility, bundles, sampling, loyalty replenishment that creates [00:07:45] stickiness and new signals. In the next episode with Amelia will zoom out if signals keep shrinking. Retailers have to earn new ones through post-purchase loops, through education and through [00:08:00] service. you next time.
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