Bobby from Dupe.com@ghoshal
An under-appreciated strength of agents in ecommerce... they're a potent solve for the muscle memory problem.
Amazon has it because people buy commodity goods weekly, it's automatic, habitual, instinctive.
You could give a startup $100 million and they still can't manufacture that. Startups have tried. They've all failed.
You can't buy it with subway ads. You can't buy it with influencer campaigns. You can't buy it with Super Bowl spots. Muscle memory comes from one thing only: a product so valuable that people can't imagine their life without it.
Search tools alone will never get there. You come, you find what you need, you leave. It's transactional by design. There's no reason to come back until you need something again.
But a personal buying agent that knows who you are, what you've bought, what you care about, what your immediate product needs are, what your budget is, one that tracks prices for you, surfaces deals before you even think to look, and works for you while you sleep... that's less a tool to visit and more a relationship to rely on.
Shoppers will stop trusting brands and start trusting their buying agent. This is inevitable. $dupe