Intentless Commerce Is The New E-commerce...

Good afternoon.

My good friend Roy Rubin was the founder of Magento (acquired by Adobe) which simply was Shopify before Shopify and still goes head to head with them globally.

We spend a lot of time together on crazy bike rides talking about life and family and product and investing. He is my go to when we think about E-commerce at our firm. He is also an incredibly curious geek and product guy. (I had him on the old ‘Panic’ podcast back in 2023 to talk E-commerce which was just pre AI)

He has been a very early adopter of all the AI products and tools and has a clear vision on where AI meets E-commerce. He calls it ‘intentless commerce’. Here is his LinkedIn post:

Bookmark this.

We’re entering the era of intentless commerce.

Shoppers don’t browse, they prompt.

AI responds instantly - surfacing products based on behavior, context, and data.

No homepage, no funnel - just “Here’s exactly what you need.”

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲.

It’s when AI handles intent upstream - collapsing discovery, evaluation, and purchase into a single moment.

Decisions are made before a customer lands on your site, or even knows your brand exists.

And it’s already here. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios that Google now crawls 18 pages for every visit it sends - up from 2:1 a decade ago. For OpenAI, the ratio is 1,500:1; Anthropic? 60,000:1

That means AI is consuming the content - but not sending users back.

Discovery is happening - traffic isn’t.

This isn’t search 2.0.

Discovery is moving upstream—into the model. You’re no longer optimizing for clicks, you’re competing to be what the model chooses first.

If your product isn’t structured, trusted, and ready for AI-driven discovery - you won’t show up.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁.

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Howard here again…I am this person for the most part, but not for all these reasons.

When I use Instagram I am THE sucker for golf and cycling toys/tools/stuff and vitamins that gets served to me every second photo.

Their intent is to sell me stuff.

It is not my intent to buy something when I go to see Max or Rachel or Dachshund videos. Kudos to the assholes at FaceMetaBookVerseAIAIO.

But, everywhere else I can see this being the case. I know the brands I like. I can imagine me adding price points and enough info to get brands that might be related and get all that from my Chat LLM interface du jour.

I was thinking about $ADBE ( ▲ 1.35% ) (which owns Magento) and Shopify ( $SHOP ( ▼ 2.32% ) ) and AI is a boon and horror for them. I think it is why Shopify’s stock has lagged a lot of tech leaders the last few years. They can launch as many AI tools as they want to help their customers but in the end, the end shopper, the customer of Shopify’s customers are going to be coming via LLM so I imagine a big shakeout is at hand once again in the E-commerce world.

One of our seed stage portfolio companies DSTNC.com is on the frontline of this new era and we are lucky to have Roy as an investor and advisor as the small team navigates the fast changing world. I use DSTNC.com for all my cycling and fitness gear and they are close to solving all this with just a team of three and doing over $2 million a year in gross sales already.