REPORT

Designing the Shopping Agent Experience

A capability model for brands building agent-led customer experiences

Most shopping agents built today are little more than chatbots wearing new clothes. They live in a corner popup, answer narrow questions, and go silent the moment the order confirmation lands. The technology to do something fundamentally different is already here, what lags is the design discipline to take advantage of it.

This report is the capability model Orium uses to design shopping agent experiences for DTC and B2C brands. It covers six customer lifecycle stages—from first discovery through long-term loyalty—plus the foundational layer that decides whether the rest holds up in production. Forty capabilities in total, organized by the customer's job at each stage, not the vendor's feature list.

What’s Inside

The report covers forty capabilities across six customer lifecycle stages — from first discovery through long-term loyalty — plus a foundational layer that decides whether the rest holds up in production. For each capability, you'll find the customer job it solves, a concrete example of what it looks like in practice, and what separates a table-stakes implementation from a differentiated one.

You'll also find a prioritization framework for where to start: the four capabilities that consistently deliver the highest return across categories, and where Orium recommends putting the first investment to maximize ROI.

The Five Confrontations of Agentic Systems

Five organizational pressures that surface when agentic AI scales, and the diagnostic questions every leadership team needs to face before they become blockers. Co-authored with Zapier.

GET THE REPORT

Trail Appliances case study featuring Orium agentic commerce implementation

Trail Appliances: Agentic Commerce in Production

How Trail Appliances deployed multi-agent capabilities—including Product Q&A and Compare agents—to improve discovery and decision-making for complex purchase categories.

READ THE CASE STUDY

Orium Studio

A working session for digital, CX, and product leadership teams. Bring your team, walk through the shopping agent capability model, and leave with a prioritized view of where an agent investment pays off first for your customers.

BOOK A SESSION