Two days at Online Retailer 2026, and the biggest opportunity in the room was the one part of the funnel nobody is building.
Nearly 4,000 people spent two days at ICC Sydney this week for Online Retailer 2026. Twelve conference streams, more than 200 speakers, 150 solution providers on the floor. THE ICONIC, Chemist Warehouse, Oz Hair & Beauty, Pillow Talk and Clark Rubber all had senior people on the program. Nathan Bush from Add To Cart was there and Mal Chia and Paul Waddy ran the podcast zone. If you sell online in Australia, the room mattered.
One theme ran through almost everything: AI. Agentic commerce, personalisation, AI in customer service, AI in merchandising. That tracks with the rest of the year. At NRF in January, Google launched a commerce protocol for AI agents, Microsoft showed Copilot Checkout, and Mastercard put Agent Pay into the mix. At Shoptalk, the message from every stage was that AI has moved from pilot to production, and that personalisation is now table stakes rather than an edge.
Here is what I kept thinking about while walking the floor.
Everyone is building at the two ends
Look at where the money and attention are going, and a shape appears. The whole industry is building at the two ends of the funnel.
At the top: discovery. Ads, SEO, content, and now AI agents that find and compare products for people before they ever reach your site. Shoptalk Europe called it the shift from search-first to discovery-led. Morgan Stanley reckons nearly half of online shoppers will use AI shopping agents by 2030.
At the bottom: checkout. Faster payments, one-click, buy-now-pay-later, and now agent-driven checkout where the AI completes the purchase for you. The Google, Microsoft and Mastercard announcements are all plumbing for that last step.
Between those two ends sits the product page. The place where a real person, not an algorithm, decides yes or no. And that page has barely changed in twenty years. A photo, a price, a description, an add-to-cart button.
That is the moment of highest purchase intent in the entire funnel. The customer has found you, clicked through, read the reviews, checked the price. They are standing at the 'counter' with the product in their hand and most of the time, the only thing the page can do is hold the price firm and hope.
Think about who leaves that page. Not the tyre-kicker who was never going to buy but the almost-buyer. The one who wanted it, got to the number, and hesitated. On a good site, somewhere between two and three percent of visitors actually buy and the rest leave. Cart abandonment tools try to chase a fraction of them by email a day later, once they have already gone cold.
By then it is too late, the intent was live on the product page, in the moment. That is where the conversation should happen, and right now nothing happens at all. The customer exits in silence and you never learn why.
That silent exit is the gap. It is the last unworked part of the funnel, and it happens to be the part where intent runs highest.
The Australia Post ORIAS awards, handed out on the Thursday night, are a useful signal. What an industry chooses to reward tells you what it values.
The Impact Awards went to Mr Pool Man for small business innovation, Nakie for sustainability, and Shh!t Happens for diversity and inclusion, all three strong businesses.
Then look at the finalist fields for the big commercial categories, and a pattern shows up. Technology Champion, whose own criteria rewards conversion features that improve the path to purchase, had Freedom Furniture, Appliances Online, Carma and The Gamesmen in the running. Best End to End Customer Experience had Archie Rose, Petbarn and Oz Hair & Beauty. International Conqueror had MAISON de SABRÉ, the Australian luxury leather house.
Notice what those brands have in common. High-consideration purchases. Furniture, appliances, cars, spirits, fine leather are categories where people take their time, compare, and often walk away to think about it. Categories where the price is frequently set by the manufacturer, so a public discount is off the table anyway.
These are exactly the businesses with the most to gain at the purchase moment, and exactly the ones a static product page fails hardest. You can be a finalist for Technology Champion on the strength of your path to purchase and still lose the almost-buyer at the final step, because the final step gives them no option except take it or leave it.
The obvious pushback: if AI agents are going to do the buying, does the product page even matter?
It matters more and here is why.
At Shoptalk, Bret Taylor of Sierra and OpenAI made a point most of the coverage skipped past. The more considered the purchase, the more likely people are to use a personal AI to help them decide. Big, deliberate purchases are where agents will do the most work. Those are the same high-consideration categories above. The same place the almost-buyer hesitates.
Now picture that agent on your product page, comparing your listing against three competitors for someone buying a sofa or an engagement ring. If your page can only state a fixed price and wait, you are one of four identical options and the cheapest one wins. If your page can respond to a genuine signal of intent and open a conversation, you become the one that engages. The interaction layer at the purchase moment turns into the thing that separates you from the other three tabs.
Everyone is racing to be agent-readable at discovery and agent-ready at checkout. Almost nobody is thinking about what the agent, or the human, actually does in the middle, on the page where the decision gets made.
This is the whole reason Bidit exists. It sits on the product page at the moment of highest intent and gives the almost-buyer a way to make a private offer instead of walking. The brand engages on its own terms, turning the silent exit into a conversation.
The offer is private, between one customer and the brand, invisible to the market and to competitors. So it does not cheapen the brand or break manufacturer pricing. That is what makes it work for the appliance, furniture, automotive and branded jewellery businesses that filled the ORIAS finalist lists.
The numbers back it up. Bevilles Jewellers turned Bidit on in November 2025 and saw a 4.8x lift in conversion. Forty-five percent of the users who made an offer came back and bought again. A customer who makes an offer and then returns is worth far more than a single conversion. That is what the purchase moment can build.
So here is what I would ask anyone who was in that room last week.
You have spent years and real budget getting people to your product page, you have optimised discovery and you are about to hand your checkout to an agent. What are you doing at the exact moment the customer decides?
For most retailers the honest answer is nothing. The page holds the price and hopes. The next few years belong to the brands that fill that gap and treat the purchase moment as something to be won, not a static screen to be sat through.
The ends of the funnel are crowded. The middle is wide open.