Written by Brook Schaaf

When we look back on this time in the future, we’ll see that browser extensions were the natural precursors to agentic shopping. Or, if affiliate marketing can’t get its act together, we’ll see that they might have been.

One case for agentic shopping is that users want convenience and efficiency, at least when they trust the system they’re using. This can lead to greater, faster commerce. Per Modern Retail, “Walmart customers who use the company’s Sparky AI-powered shopping assistant have an order value that’s about 35% higher than those who don’t.” While correlation doesn’t equal causation, it makes sense that a tool that can help synthesize reviews and find and suggest products would be a natural improvement over “users also bought” tiles.

Of course, a merchant’s own bot may work better for that merchant than for the user. It probably won’t suggest products the merchant does not sell or recognize when LLM summaries are nudging users toward purchases they would not otherwise have made.

The case for browser extensions is that they can provide this perspective across tens of thousands of merchants, regardless of whether formal partnerships exist. They occupy an intermediary position between tens of millions of users and the broader ecommerce ecosystem. In doing so, they have accumulated valuable commercial and behavioral data.

Of course, browser extensions again have a pall hanging over their heads, as they did 20 years ago. Why this is and what to do about it are topics for another day. For now, we need to recognize that there is somewhere for us to go, and if we don’t get there, someone else will. 

Mike McNerney summed this up in a thoughtful piece last month when he observed: “A single YouTuber on the other side of the world can knock this industry off balance.” He pointed out that other channels are plagued with absurd and outrageous scandals, yet continue to grow. If affiliate wants to do so, it can, but we need to straighten out our story, speak confidently, and work together. Mike is leading a project on quantifying clickstream patterns that you should consider supporting.

Google, which recently launched its Universal Commerce Protocol, is actively using “AI Mode to boost its role in e-commerce.” Its main target is probably Amazon, which still leads for product discovery, but affiliates could easily be collateral damage. Does this mean Google will launch a browser extension? No. But it does not matter if it takes over the modality and chokes out all the oxygen.

With dozens of business models in the market today, from cashback platforms like Rakuten to points programs like Capital One Shopping, from wish lists like Locker to alternative booking sites like Directo and style discovery tools like Phia, affiliates are uniquely positioned to serve an enormous range of consumer needs. But that only works if we embrace these commercial relationships on terms that are sustainable and acceptable to everyone involved.

In which case, in the future, we’ll have regretted our failure to act.

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