Loyalty benefits used to show up at checkout: a card swiped, a code entered, a discount applied after the decision was already made. That moment is moving earlier, into the conversation where an artificial intelligence agent is still deciding where to buy.

Synchrony announced an enterprise collaboration with OpenAI on Aug. 17 to power what the companies call “the next era of agentic commerce,” with plans to launch a ChatGPT plugin that lets shoppers browse promotional financing and partner offers from the Synchrony Marketplace directly inside a ChatGPT conversation.

Modern social media marketing requires a sophisticated mix of data-driven strategy, rapid community response and operational efficiency. Whether you’re managing social channels, directing creative vision or spearheading marketing strategy, AI tools enable you to be at the forefront of the industry while unlocking your team’s full potential.

However, working smart means not losing hours getting AI tools to produce brand-aligned results or meaningful insights.

PYMNTS surveyed 5,841 consumers and 1,185 merchants across the U.S., Brazil and the UAE and found that AI, mobile and payment choice are reshaping the shopping journey. Nearly half of online shoppers used AI in their latest purchase, but many merchants are still moving too slowly.

Inside the index:

• AI has become part of the shopping journey. Nearly half of online shoppers used AI for their latest purchase, and ChatGPT’s share as a product research tool jumped from 2% to 30% in two years.

The products that win on TikTok Shop are overwhelmingly worn, applied, or consumed. Among the top 1,000 U.S. products by lifetime sales, drawn from the more than two million products Marketplace Pulse now tracks, more than two-thirds of revenue comes from products applied to the body, taken into it, or worn on it. That is personal transformation a creator can demonstrate on camera. The same mechanism that produced a top-heavy seller economy is visible at the product level: TikTok Shop rewards the narrow set of things that perform in a video, not the broadest assortment.

A landing page is a webpage designed to drive one action, like a sign-up, download, or purchase. Landing pages are commonly linked to from paid ads, email promotions, and other campaigns. When your landing page reflects what your campaign promised, visitors feel confident they’re in the right place — which is why landing pages tend to have strong conversion rates. Plus, ads on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft often have better placements and a lower cost per click ( CPC) when the landing page is relevant to the ad.

As customers turn to agentic AI to make peak season shopping faster and more convenient, brands need to do the same. The real secret to decking out your cart is connecting operational and customer data to produce actionable insights.

This guide gives you the frameworks, calendars, and AI-driven strategies for engaging customers in the moments that matter most during your next big shopping event!

This Sephora case study examines the Sephora omnichannel strategy: how the beauty retailer turned its 3,000-plus stores into a connected system that gathers customer data and ships orders, tying nearly every purchase to a single customer identity through its Beauty Insider program. AI tools for shade-matching and skin analysis link the store and the app, a form of retail personalisation that gives shoppers confidence and cuts returns. The strategy has held up in a shaky luxury market: LVMH’s Selective Retailing division, which houses Sephora, posted €18.35 billion in 2025 revenue, and multi-channel shoppers spend about three times more than single-channel ones.

Beauty brands have cracked the code for social commerce. What can wider ecommerce markets learn from their successes? Beauty brands are having a moment on social media, with online beauty sales growing at roughly triple the rate of the wider retail sector, and haircare and skincare emerging as some of the sector’s strongest-performing categories.

Key Takeaways: 

The beauty industry is outperforming other major categories online