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Key Highlights:

Two-track shopping future: Human shoppers will continue seeking rich experiences while AI agents focus purely on product data and specifications

Memory-powered personalization: As AI tools improve their memory capabilities, they’ll provide increasingly contextual shopping recommendations without requiring repeated inputs

Quality over quantity imperative: With AI-generated content creating more noise, brands must prioritize human creativity and authentic experiences

Niche brand opportunities: Small, focused brands can still thrive by understanding their specific audience and building tailored experiences

The Interview

In this forward-looking conversation, Drew Giovannoli speaks with Paul Gray, Head of Partner Marketing at Webflow, who brings a unique perspective on how shopping behavior is evolving. With experience at Disney and Shopify, where he focused on enterprise merchants and agency partnerships, Paul offers insights into how both large and small brands can navigate the changing e-commerce landscape.

Q&A with Paul

Drew: What do you see as the evolution of shopping behavior?

Paul: There’s going to be a fundamental split. On one side, you’ll have humans—us—who are still going out and buying things. We’ll still be visiting websites and online stores, and we’ll still want that experience and to know stuff about products. We care about color, look, and feel.

Then there are the agents, which do not care about any of that. They just want the product title, the description, the SKU, the price, the shipping information, the tax details, the reviews. They’ll synthesize that from owned media—the store itself—through its channels and through earned media. What are people saying on YouTube? What are they saying on Reddit? What’s the aggregate perception of this brand?

The interesting part is how this relates to individual contexts. A guy in his forties running a half marathon will want a very different kind of shoe and experience than someone who’s 25 and crushing marathons every week.

Drew: Has this changed your own shopping experience? Have you researched anything differently?

Paul: Actually, yes. This October I’ll be running my first half marathon. I’ve never been much of a runner before—I did a 10K race last year, which felt very challenging at the time. So I went to ChatGPT to research running plans and ask how I should prepare.

Because it already had context about my training plan and what I needed to do, when I asked about running shoes and what I should consider, it just made sense. The powerful thing that will continue to evolve is as these tools improve their memory and reduce hallucination, they start really remembering and knowing a lot about you, so you don’t have to repeat context every time.

I think that’s going to be super compelling and will change how people shop and how sellers sell.

Drew: How should smart brands adapt their websites for this changing behavior?

Paul: Shopping behavior continues to go through such a transition. Even looking back at physical retail decades ago—from corner stores to when Walmart reset how people shopped, to department stores and shopping malls.

At Shopify, I focused on the enterprise side with larger merchants building sophisticated, headless stores. But even four or five years ago, I noticed increasing curiosity about “link-in-bio” applications and really simple, lightweight shopping platforms. We saw how much TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts rose as commerce tools.

If you’re a creator making videos about home hardware or makeup, your main function is creating content and engaging your audience. Maybe you have five makeup brushes—do you even really need a traditional website to sell them?

Drew: Do you think these new tools will benefit smaller brands or larger ones like Walmart and Amazon more?

Paul: It’s a common tug of war between small innovative brands and bigger brands that sometimes just out-muscle them or copy them. But I feel like there’s always opportunity. For every story of large brands taking market share, there are just as many stories of small, independent brands crushing it.

When they succeed, it’s because they’re realistic and honed in on who their audience actually is. I spoke to this fantastic brand called Bond and Grace—they create beautiful coffee table books, artworks, and accessories based on beloved fiction that’s now in the public domain. Stories like Alice in Wonderland and The Secret Garden.

These are premium products with pretty high prices—like $200 coffee table books. It’s not an impulse purchase; it’s for someone who either loves that story or literature in general. That’s probably a fairly small total addressable market. But if they build the product, messaging, story, and experience entirely catered to that audience and engage them effectively, it can and does work and will scale to the size of that audience.

Drew: What’s Webflow’s sweet spot for brands considering the platform?

Paul: Webflow is a website experience platform built to make it as easy as possible for designers, developers, and marketers to work collaboratively on websites. We want to make sites as beautiful and engaging as possible while ensuring they deliver on their goals.

We work with a lot of B2B companies, financial services, professional services, associations, organizations, and government bodies—really any website where you go to find information, book an appointment, or learn about a product.

We have an app ecosystem with connections to HubSpot, Zapier, Microsoft Clarity, Stripe—whatever tech stack you need based on your business, you can connect and get your job done as quickly and easily as possible with Webflow.

Drew: What’s been surprising about successful brands in the past year?

Paul: You see a lot of valid criticisms about AI slop—people intentionally making garbage with AI tools, but also just being lazy and using AI to rewrite entire sections of websites while fully trusting whatever the tool produced meets the bar.

This creates a lot of sameness and noise, potentially reducing quality. It’s critically important to still have that human eye for creativity—assessing and making sure things feel right, read right, and the experience is correct.

I think there’s going to be a focus on quality over quantity, and we’re seeing interesting applications emerge from brands that maintain that human touch.