I’ve been in the eCommerce game for a while, last month I outlined why I thought edge use cases where the biggest opportunity for Agentic Commerce. The idea was simple. While the big retailers focus on building great CX with their own data, the real, unsolved problems in commerce exist in the long tail ( the small retailers without massive marketing departments). Think about finding an in-stock item for pickup today, or a slightly used version right in your community. That’s where I saw the gold.

I still believe Edge UCs are  the biggest long-term opportunity. But right now? The reality on the ground is brutal for the little guy.

I recently did an informal survey of small retailers, and the results were stark. The majority are seeing a 50-70% drop in traffic since the rise of AI-powered search. For specialty retailers, it’s a 20-40% drop in orders, which they attribute directly to agentic platforms like Perplexity and OpenAI’s Operator.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I was talking to the CEO of the MRC, and she mentioned that several of her large retail members are actually seeing net new customers. This is a significant, and frankly, surprising trend. My take? Agentic commerce, in its current form, is a demand aggregator for the giants.

It makes sense, right? If you’re building an agentic platform and need to prove your value to eventually charge for it, are you going to integrate with 10,000 small shops or with Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Home Depot? You’re going to take the path of least resistance and greatest immediate impact. So, the only seamless checkout integrations are with the top 10.

The economics are a mess. As the MRC CEO pointed out in a recent video, it’s not always clear who you’re even buying from. In her Perplexity test, the platform itself was the merchant of record. She thought she was buying from Walmart, but a Target box showed up, and the return process was a nightmare. This isn’t a streamlined future; it’s the messy, chaotic beginning.

We’re in a period of flux, but the trend is clear. Right now, small businesses are getting absolutely crushed by AI. Some are completely devastated, as you can see in notes like this one on Reddit.

While edge use cases might be the best long-term bet for a truly diverse and responsive market, they have to survive the short term first. And right now, it feels like a new industrial railroad is being built, making the internet’s big cities more powerful than ever and threatening to leave very few survivors at the edge.