The Results Are In: 2025 Holiday Shopping Trends You Can’t Ignore
The 2025 holiday season exceeded expectations across the board. Global spending rose 6.8% year-over-year, but the real story sits beneath the surface.
AI-driven and Agentic-AI shopping surged by 693.4%, accounting for nearly 20% of all holiday commerce — approximately $262 billion in spend. This isn’t a seasonal spile or experimental channel. It marks a structural shift in how discovery, decision-making, and purchasing now happen online.
For PSPs and their merchants, the question is no longer if AI will shape commerce — it’s how quickly they adapt.
AI Is Reshaping Retail — and Redefining the PSP Opportunity
Retailers have moved past experimentation. AI is now embedded directly into the shopping experience, from discovery to checkout. Beyond search engines and marketplaces, conversational commerce platforms like ChatGPT Shopping are rapidly becoming discovery engines in their own right.
Instead of browsing dozens of listings, consumers increasingly ask AI questions like “What’s the best option for…” or “Where can I buy…”, and received curated, intent-driven recommendations. These recommendations don’t rely on ads alone, they are shaped by structured product data, reputation signals, pricing clarity, and merchant trustworthiness.
For PSPs, this marks a critical shift. Supporting merchants now means helping them remain discoverable and selectable in AI-meditated environments, not just searchable. AI delivers efficiency, personalization, and automation, but merchants only benefit when their data, checkout flows, and trust signals are optimized for how AI systems evaluate and recommend businesses.
How AI Agents Work
Unlike traditional approaches, AI agents don’t scrub through pages or simulate clicks. They connect directly to business systems, pulling structured data like their inventory, pricing, and checkout logic to analyze.
This same model underpins conversational shopping tools, where AI evaluates merchants based on data completeness, clarity, consistency, and credibility — not just marketing spend.
If product or business data isn’t machine-readable, merchants run a high risk of becoming invisible. Data must be structured, accessible, and trustworthy to ensure AI systems can confidently surface and recommend a business.
Are Merchants Keeping Up?
Agentic AI is no longer a novelty; it’s quickly becoming the backbone of digital commerce. Often described as “a-commerce”, this model reflects a world where AI doesn’t just assist shoppers — it actively narrows choices, recommends merchants, and in some cases initiates transactions.
As conversational platforms like ChatGPT increasingly influence where and how consumers discover products, a pressing question emerges for PSPs:
Are your merchants visible, credible, and selectable to these AI systems?
How Merchants Can Prepare for AI-Driven Commerce
Structure Your Data for Agent Consumption
Visibility starts with machine readability
- Expose products, pricing, availability, and policy data in clear, structured formats
- Include detailed attributes and standardized fields
- Use semantic, descriptive language rather than marketing copy
- Present technical specifications in scannable bullet points
Agentic AI systems rely on structured data to compare options, validate eligibility, and make purchasing decisions. When data is incomplete or ambiguous, merchants risk exclusion regardless of product quality.
Optimize for Conversational & Intent-Driven Queries
How AI interprets shopper intent
- Add contextual metadata that explains when and why a product is relevant
- Include FAQs, reviews, and reputation signals
- Mirror the language customers naturally use when asking questions
AI systems, whether embedded in storefronts, wallets, or conversational platforms, prioritize clarity of intent over keyword density. Merchants who reflect real customer language are more likely to be surfaced in AI-generated recommendations.
Use Agent-Ready Feeds and Commerce Channels
Where AI looks for truth
- Maintain clean, up-to-date feeds across Google Shopping, Meta, and major marketplaces
- Ensure pricing, availability, and fulfillment data stay synchronized
- Explore Product-Data-as-a-Service or enrichment layers to support AI-ready outputs
As Shopify and marketplaces expand AI-native discovery and checkout experiences, agent-compatible feeds become a prerequisite — not a nice-to-have.
Enhance Media and Multi-Modal Visibility
AI evaluates visuals, not just text
- Use high-resolution, consistent imagery
- Standardize aspect ratios across channels
- Add descriptive alt text to improve AI interpretation and accessibility
Agentic AI increasingly evaluates products across text, image, and contextual signals. Visual clarity directly impacts whether a product is confidently recommended.
Preserve Buyer Trust in an Agent-Initiated World
Trust becomes programmable
- Support agent-initiated transactions with strong authorization and fraud controls
- Implement mechanisms to distinguish trusted AI agents from malicious automation
- Align with evolving payment-network standards and policies
Payment networks like Visa are actively exploring frameworks for AI-mediated commerce, reinforcing the importance of trust, consent, and verification at the transaction layer.
Preserve Buyer Trust in an Agent-Initiated World
Trust becomes programmable
As Agentic AI accelerates, merchant readiness can’t rely on static documentation or one-time onboarding. Requirements evolve quickly across discovery, data quality, trust frameworks, and platform expectations.
This is where Direct-to-Merchant™ (D2M™) becomes a critical layer of enablement for PSPs.
Deliver timely updates on Agentic AI developments, platform changes, and best practices.
Provide guided journeys for visibility, reputation, and catalog optimization.
Embed contextual, in-the-moment education directly within on-terminal workflows.
Provide step-by-step guidance for critical setup tasks.
Rather than asking merchants to keep up on their own, D2M™ allows PSPs to translate ecosystem shifts, from Shopify innovations to Visa trust standards, into clear, actionable guidance at the right moment.
The PSP Advantage in an Agentic AI Era
Staying relevant in an AI-driven commerce world requires more than awareness, it demands coordinated action. With D2M™, PSPs gain a scalable way to keep merchants informed, trained, and operationally aligned as Agentic AI reshapes discovery and transactions.
By enabling merchants to adapt quickly and confidently, PSPs deepen relationships, protect transaction volume, and future-proof their portfolios. In a commerce landscape increasingly shaped by autonomous systems, D2M™ helps ensure merchants don’t just keep up — they remain competitive where decisions are increasingly made.