Beyond AI agents: What really keeps customers

As the global retail community gathers at Shoptalk Europe in Barcelona this week, everyone is naturally talking about the "what's next". The room is buzzing with the rise of AI-driven discovery and agentic commerce. But if you are a brand looking to scale across Europe's fragmented landscape, the most critical strategic question isn't just how digital shoppers find you. It’s how you make sure those prospective customers actually become loyal fans.

Let's look at the elephant in the room: Agentic commerce is set to emerge as a strong additional channel for customers’ online shopping. This dynamic is fundamentally rewriting the traditional rules of brand loyalty. In this new era, winning isn't about who has the loudest marketing budget. It’s also about possessing a reliable, machine-readable, and integrated infrastructure to show up in this new channel.

Building an operating system

At Zalando, we view our role as more than just a digital storefront. We are building the operating system for European fashion and lifestyle. By sharing our 17 years of data, expertise, and physical infrastructure, we directly help our partners navigate and master the structural complexities of cross-border e-commerce  Our B2B ecosystem – driven by ZEOS, SCAYLE, and Tradebyte – is moving from a "logistics-first" approach to a comprehensive software and service suite. Why does this matter? Because when consumers use autonomous AI agents to filter their shopping journeys, operational excellence becomes a primary ranking signal in this new channel.

Reliability is the new loyalty

As highlighted in the newly released ZEOS whitepaper, "Loyalty in the Agentic Era," the definition of a "loyal customer" is changing. Emotional storytelling will always be the heartbeat of fashion, but the foundation of true trust is now built on operational precision:

• Verifiable discovery: AI agents prioritise brands with transparent, real-time data on stock availability and delivery speeds. Anyone who fails to provide this will be filtered out.
• The conversion killer: Advertising doesn't define quality anymore – reliability does. In fact, 86% of consumers judge an online brand by the consistency of its delivery and returns. 81% will abandon their carts entirely if their preferred local delivery options aren’t there.
• The power of unified stock: Structural agility drives concrete bottom-line results. Brands like Pepe Jeans have seen a 9x increase in items sold by unifying their stock pools, ensuring products are never trapped in an isolated silo and are always ready for fast delivery.  

Enabling the future of European retail

Our strategic focus is to provide the physical and digital backbone that allows brands to focus on what they do best: storytelling and design. By integrating logistics into the discovery layer and utilising AI to solve complex customer needs – like our size-and-fit tools that have already reduced returns by 8% – we are building a more resilient, efficient ecosystem for all 7,000+ partners on our platform.