In The Age Of AI Agents, E-Commerce Companies Are Doubling Down On Client Retention

While there is much noise about how agentic commerce -- AI agents that execute purchases directly -- is impacting ecommerce, a few recent acquisitions in the space also point to another area of concern for these companies: client retention.

StarApps, a Shopify app developer that helps with online store-merchandising, recently acquired AppMaker, which builds native mobile apps for retailers, in an all-cash deal for an undisclosed amount.

Days later, Salesforce took a stake in Callimacus, the AI platform Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli's Solomei AI team spent nearly three years building, which uses AI agents to read a visitor's intent and assemble a personalized pageless shopping experience.

In April, Recharge, the subscription-billing platform used across most of Shopify's subscription merchants, acquired its closest rival, Skio, for $105 million in cash, folding two of the category's largest independent players under one roof.

Taken together, these acquisitions suggest that ecommerce companies are prioritizing customer retention, and platforms best positioned to own that side of the business are consolidating before the category gets overcrowded.

The math forcing the shift

For much of the last decade, growth in ecommerce meant buying customers. Spend enough on Meta, Google and TikTok ads and new shoppers would show up.

That equation has stopped balancing. Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework, which requires apps to ask for permission before tracking users across the web, has left a large share of iOS users opting out even five years on.

Global opt-in rates climbed to just 38% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 35% a year earlier, according to measurement firm Adjust's latest Mobile App Trends report, meaning nearly two thirds of iOS users can no longer be tracked or targeted precisely by the ad platforms brands are paying to reach them through.

Social ads haven't stopped working, however. They've simply gotten more expensive per customer acquired, since brands are now buying reach into an audience they can measure far less precisely than before.

At the same time, rising competition from Amazon and Chinese ecommerce giant Temu has pushed ad-auction prices higher across the board, as more brands bid for the same shrinking pool of trackable customers.

In the UK, email marketing now returns almost £41 for every £1 spent, up from just over £38 the year before, as per the Data & Marketing Association, a trade body that surveys working marketers.

Automated infrastructure widens that efficiency gap further. Klaviyo's 2026 benchmark data from over 183,000 ecommerce brands globally shows flow-based emails, including those triggered by a specific customer action, generate 18 times more revenue per recipient than manual campaigns.

That efficiency gap is pulling ecommerce marketing budgets toward channels a brand owns outright, like email, SMS, loyalty programs, and, increasingly, the app already sitting on the customer's phone.

The shift isn't sentimental. Retail and travel apps see conversion rates three to four times higher than mobile web, according to Criteo commerce research, a gap attributed to faster load times, saved payment credentials and fewer steps for the customer at checkout.

Product discovery itself is shifting, too, as AI-powered search and shopping assistants increasingly sit between a brand and the customer looking for it, which gives retailers less direct control over how they're found in the first place.

AI-referred visits to U.S. retail sites grew 393% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026 alone, as per Adobe Analytics. Those AI-sourced shoppers also converted 42% better than traffic from traditional channels that quarter, representing a full reversal from a year earlier when AI-referred traffic converted worse than direct visits.

Brands, however, are far from powerless. An entire discipline, often called answer engine optimization or generative engine optimization, has emerged specifically to make sure a brand surfaces when an AI assistant is asked for a recommendation.

But optimizing for an algorithm still means competing inside rules a brand doesn't set and can't fully see, the same tradeoff SEO always required with search. What happens after a visitor lands is different in kind; the one part of the relationship a brand runs entirely on its own terms, with no algorithm standing between the brand and the customer.

Shashank Agrawal, StarApp's founder, told International Business Times that as AI discovery becomes more popular, and the cost of ads rises, "brands are actually investing more dollars into retention and loyalty than purely betting on growth through ads."

He argues that as the top of the sales funnel gets more complicated by AI, ecommerce brands are starting to see the value in keeping the customers they already have.

What retention software is truly selling

One of the biggest challenges facing client retention in ecommerce is personalization.

A January poll of 1,000 U.S. consumers found that 74% of consumers are more likely to purchase when they receive a truly personalized offer or recommendation. However, the same survey found that 79% of shoppers believe retailers frequently get it wrong.

Gartner's 2025 research sharpens that split further: passive, recommendation-driven personalization actually made 53% of customers feel worse about their purchases, tripling buyers' remorse.

The challenge of getting personalization right could be why some of these big ecommerce platforms are racing to buy their way into better retention through acquisitions.

The brands that excel in personalization can lock in the customers that are becoming more and more expensive to acquire.

Zara is a good example of a brand excelling at retention. The app doesn't just replicate its online store. Its "Store Mode" feature lets shoppers check real-time inventory at nearby locations before they pay a visit, alongside visual search and QR-based in-store returns -- tools aimed to keep customers engaged with both the app and brick and mortar stores.

Another example is travel brand BÉIS, which uses its app to distribute exclusive product drops and behind-the-scenes content through push notifications. "It costs nothing to communicate with your consumer from your mobile application," the company's VP of digital and e-commerce Julie Chalker said of the channel.

In both cases, the apps become where the brand consolidates the parts of the customer relationship that passive, recommendation-driven personalization keeps getting wrong.

That race explains why this deal isn't isolated. Recharge's acquisition of Skio, Tapcart's continued push into enterprise mobile, and now StarApps' move into AppMaker are all bets on the same undersized real estate; a category where detectable mobile app-builder technology sits on well under 1% of Shopify's stores, concentrated overwhelmingly amongst its largest merchants.

Whatever the real market size turns out to be, multiple well-capitalized players moving on the same thin sliver at once is itself telling. None of them want to be caught without a retention play once the category stops being uncontested.

Shopify's own decision not to compete for the deep layer of customer retention, including native loyalty programs, mobile app building or behavioral personalization, for example, matters as much as any single company's presence in that fight. The platform ships a basic email tool, but it has left loyalty, subscriptions and app building to the developers now consolidating around them.

With Shopify staying neutral, the fight over who owns the layer between a brand and its repeat customers is being decided by acquisitions. Not by Shopify's own product team.

Regardless, as ecommerce continues to evolve, these recent customer retention-focused acquisitions could signal that as customer acquisition gets more expensive, retailers are doubling down on keeping the clients they already have.