Value & Price Reimagined in the Agentic Era

Value and price have always mattered to shoppers, but the cost-of-living crisis has pushed both to the front of every retail and brand strategy. What's less talked about is how AI is about to change the mechanics of finding value altogether. For decades, finding the best deal has required effort. Agentic commerce removes much of that effort, fundamentally changing how shoppers discover value and how brands compete for it. Never before has finding the best price, the best deal, or the best-value solution been this easy.

The 2026 IAB Commerce and Discovery Report shows Australian consumers are cutting back, cancelling, or delaying spending across many discretionary categories, from eating out and petrol to major household purchases such as televisions. This has been a sustained pattern rather than a short-term reaction.

But spending less is only part of the story. Cost-of-living pressure isn't just changing what people buy, it's changing how they buy. As budgets tighten, shoppers are investing more time researching, comparing and validating purchases before they commit.

Seventy-one per cent of shoppers say they've changed their retail choices because of rising costs, whilst 69% now rely on online research to feel confident buying at all. Effort has replaced ease as the price of confidence.

Cutting back isn't, however, the only lever shoppers are pulling. Rewards points and loyalty benefits have become a cost-of-living essential, with 89% of Australians belonging to a rewards program and 55% increasing their use of points and rewards in the past six months, according to recent CommBank data from May 2026. Loyalty has effectively become a second currency, and it's the first adaptation shoppers make before cutting spend outright. Before many shoppers change what they buy, they're squeezing more value out of relationships they already have with retailers and brands.

A bigger change, however, is underway, as agentic commerce will flip the model on its head. Shoppers have always faced a genuine trade-off: shop around and spend the time or accept the convenience of not bothering and likely pay more or extract less value. That trade-off saw shoppers weighing up when to go the extra mile based on the potential upside from the process.

AI is collapsing that effort-versus-value trade-off entirely. This isn't about AI replacing a single shopping task. It's that the cost of seeking value has structurally dropped, so shoppers can now capture the upside of shopping around and get their time back, across far more shopping journeys than before, not just the big purchases. Seventy-nine per cent of Australians now want AI tools to help with their online shopping in some way. A third want help finding the retailer with the best price, and close to a quarter wanting alerts when a product is cheaper elsewhere. This appetite spans everyday purchases, not just major annual purchases, and agentic commerce will increasingly enable it – and we are already seeing the first iteration of that. 

This isn't simply the next generation of comparison shopping. Consumers have long had access to Google Shopping, ShopBack, PriceSpy and other comparison tools, but the burden of using them still sat with the shopper. Agentic commerce shifts that burden to the machine.

Google's Universal Cart is one of the clearest signals of this shift underway. It tracks prices over time, so shoppers can buy when a product hits its lowest point, and it alerts them to price drops without any manual monitoring. It also layers in loyalty program rewards and payment methods to maximise value from existing retailer relationships, and automatically applies promos and discounts at checkout. Each of those used to be a separate task a shopper managed themselves, now it can happen for them. Microsoft Copilot checkout offers some comparable features, unlocking member-only pricing for shoppers while tracking price changes in the background. These are examples of the shift, not the shift itself, and more will follow as agentic commerce matures.

However, not all categories will feel the change equally. Categories with low product differentiation and frequent repurchase including groceries, electronics, household cleaning products, vitamins and other consumables are the most exposed, because an agent can compare like-for-like almost instantly and act on it. Categories built on subjective or experiential value, fashion, beauty, hospitality, have more insulation for now, because “best value” is harder for an agent to define on the shopper's behalf and brand preference often influences the purchase in a bigger way. That won't hold forever. As these tools become more intuitive, they'll be able to weigh up where an individual is willing to trade down and where quality at the right price point matters more, therefore selecting the best value for each person's preferences.

For brands and retailers, this changes what “competing on value and price” requires. The rulebook has changed.

Value and price have never mattered more, and more shoppers than ever are chasing both which is now made dramatically easier by agentic commerce. What's changing isn't the intensity of that pursuit, it's the boundaries of how brands and retailers compete for it. 

💬 WhatsApp is becoming retail's newest storefront. New research from Infobip and Retail Economics suggests retailers are rapidly shifting from one-way marketing to conversational commerce, with WhatsApp emerging as one of the most effective customer engagement channels. With open rates of 85–95% compared to around 33% for traditional eCommerce email, retailers are increasingly using the platform to answer questions, recommend products, provide order updates and support purchases within a single conversation. Layer conversational AI on top, and WhatsApp begins to function like a digital sales associate that's available 24/7. While much of the AI conversation has focused on search engines and chatbots, messaging platforms are quietly becoming another important commerce channel. For brands and retailers, the opportunity isn't simply to automate customer service, but to create persistent, personalised conversations that support discovery, purchase and loyalty in the same place consumers are already spending their time.

🛍️ TikTok Shop is borrowing Amazon Prime's playbook. TikTok is reportedly testing a paid membership program, TikTok Shop Plus, offering benefits including free shipping, exclusive discounts and member-only offers as it looks to deepen loyalty and keep shoppers from completing purchases elsewhere. The move reflects a broader shift in social commerce: platforms are no longer competing solely on discovery and entertainment; they're investing in deeper customer relationships that encourage shoppers to stay within their ecosystem. Membership programs increase purchase frequency, reduce shopper churn and create stronger reasons to return. For brands, this signals the continued maturation of social commerce. As platforms become destinations rather than just acquisition channels, decisions around assortment, exclusive launches, loyalty benefits and investment will become increasingly important as TikTok competes not just for attention, but for a greater share of retail spend.

🛒 Marketplaces are cementing their place in Australia's retail infrastructure. A recent report by Inside Retail revealed that Australian consumers spent $18.9 billion on online marketplaces in 2025, making them the fastest-growing online retail category, while marketplace apps are now used by 69% of online shoppers - almost on par with retailer websites. More importantly, the report argues marketplaces are no longer an experimental sales channel or a way to clear excess stock. They have become the starting point for product discovery, price comparison and purchase decisions. As AI increasingly influences how consumers shop, that importance is only set to grow, with clean product data and marketplace optimisation becoming critical for visibility. For brands and retailers, the question is no longer whether marketplaces should be part of the channel mix, but how to build the operational capabilities, product content and data foundations needed to compete effectively across them.

If you’re a brand advertising on social, you’ll already know Meta’s commerce engine well: interrupt the scroll, earn attention through creative, and convert that interest into a product visit or purchase.

Muse Spark begins to rewrite that model. I’ve been a bit late to the party to write about Muse as Google’s Universal Cart stole the show, but it is no less newsworthy.

Launched in April, Muse Spark is the first model developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs and now powers the rebuilt Meta AI experience. It is multimodal, meaning it can interpret images as well as text, use tools and deploy multiple agents to work on different parts of a request simultaneously.

Whilst it performs a bunch of functions, it is the shopping experience that is most interesting to us at Arktic Fox. Shopping Mode, which was showcased at Cannes in June, pulls content from Instagram, Facebook and Threads and will leverage it to power its shopping experience.

Social today tops the list of tools used by Australians to discover – as seen in the recent IAB commerce and discovery report.

With so much of discovery and inspiration occurring within social platforms today, it is a natural progression and one that seeks to provide a new and distinct commerce strategy for Meta – which has trailed TikTok in building a compelling commerce offering and one that will potentially extend Meta well beyond pay-to-play commerce advertising that has been at the core of their strategy. The distinction matters because a brand could perform strongly in Meta advertising and still be poorly represented in Meta’s new commerce experience.

ChatGPT and Google can already recommend products conversationally. Meta’s advantage is the enormous layer of social context, trust signals and UGC sitting underneath the conversation.

Shopping Mode draws on brand storytelling, product catalogue content, creator content and user interaction behaviour within their vast ecosystem to enable the social giant to re-invest shopping through AI. You can also be selective about what Meta AI draws on as source information, so it surfaces the brands or creators you trust most.

This gives Meta something traditional search engines and retailer assistants do not possess at the same scale on two fronts:

This is where creator content and strategy play a much more important commercial role. It is no longer valuable only because it generates reach, engagement or clicks. It also gives Meta’s AI more context about where a product fits, how it is used and which customers may find it relevant and will drive discoverability within Meta’s new shopping experience.

Finally, its newer shopping features can also combine products from Facebook Marketplace with options from across the web, then refine them by factors such as price, style or distance.

As many of Meta’s platforms are video and image-driven content, interpreting that content via AI is key to Muse Spark. It can analyse a photograph, understand what is in it and use that visual information to support a recommendation. Meta gives the example of scanning a product and asking how it compares with alternatives.

For brands, this elevates imagery beyond something designed to make a product page look appealing.

Clean hero shots help the AI identify the product. Multiple angles reveal its form and features. Lifestyle imagery provides context around style, scale and use. Creator videos show how the product behaves in the real world.

The stronger the alignment between the image and the structured product information behind it, the easier it becomes for an AI system to understand when that product belongs in an answer.

Muse Spark is not replacing Meta advertising. It is adding another layer to Meta commerce - one where the opportunity to win begins before an ad is served.

The feed asked brands to capture attention. Muse Spark will ask them to earn the recommendation.

I’m an advisor, trainer and thought leader with 25+ years’ experience across digital, marketing, loyalty and commerce, working with consumer, FMCG and retail brands. I’m also the host of Unpacking the Digital Shelf – APAC Edition and have been recognised as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert (2026), and Top 20 CMO (2018).

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