Key facts
- Digital sales account for about a quarter of All Star Elite's total revenue, the company said.
- Bora said All Star Elite has been adding machine-readable metadata to product listings so bots can surface items.
- Bora said customers still largely prefer using ChatGPT to find items and then buy them themselves.
- Adobe expects AI traffic to US retail sites to double on Black Friday and Cyber Monday versus last year, the report said.
All Star Elite, a streetwear retailer with about 60 US stores and a growing e-commerce operation, said about 1% of its site traffic over the past month came from AI agents, head of growth Abhishek Bora told Business Insider. Digital sales represent about a quarter of the company's revenue.
Bora said the share is small but was "nowhere before." Shortly after Meta launched its personal AI agent Muse in September, he said he began seeing a few purchases a week originating from the bot, and the company has also been getting more sales from traffic driven by ChatGPT. "I know it's small, but we have been optimizing for it," he said of Muse visits.
Because bots process information differently than humans, Bora said his team has been adding machine-readable information to product listings, including contextual detail beyond a basic description and price, such as whether a sneaker suits a marathon or a night out. He said the team also has to think differently about deals and discounts, which have typically been designed to capture a human's attention.
Adobe expects AI traffic to US retail sites to double on Black Friday and Cyber Monday compared with last year, according to the report, and AI traffic is already converting to sales at higher rates than non-AI visits. Larger retailers are approaching the shift differently: Walmart rolled out tools intended to make it easier for third-party AI agents to navigate its site and complete transactions, while Amazon has blocked external agents like Muse in favor of its own Alexa.
Bora said All Star Elite's customers still largely prefer to use ChatGPT to discover items they then purchase themselves. "They're not as open to having ChatGPT or an AI or an agent do a transaction for them. They want to verify it," he said.