AI adoption in online shopping is rapidly growing, but only 14% of e-commerce consumers blindly rely on the AI engine best choice, while the majority factors in price and brand integrity during the decision-making process.
A recent survey of 4,250 consumers across the UK, US, France and Germany, commissioned by SkyParlour on behalf of the payments consultancy firm PSE Consulting and conducted by market research company OnePoll, in March 2026 revealed that 43% of consumers have had positive experiences with AI-assisted shopping.
Over a half of the customers experimenting with AI online shopping tools describe their experience as mixed, and only 3% of respondents assess AI-assisted e-commerce scenarios as negative.
Most of the consumers have leveraged the power of AI for product discovery and price comparison. However, only 14% simply follow the AI’s top recommendation when making the ultimate purchase decision. The rest double-checks the search and recommendation results and chooses the product to buy taking into account several major factors, such as brand trust and affordability.
- 89% of respondents say recognising the seller’s brand is important or very important when AI tools present them selected items that should meet described purchase criteria;
- 92% pay attention to customer reviews when deciding between AI-generated options;
- 68% of respondents might consider an AI recommendation for a new or unfamiliar seller/merchant brand only after checking reviews and ratings;
- almost a third of consumers (32%) look at the price as their primary decision driver when choosing between recommendations made by an AI assistant.
Only a small fraction of consumers are currently feels comfortable with delegating purchasing decisions to the algorithm. As illustrated by earlier Worldpay research, even among consumers who say they would let an AI shop for them, 50% would want the ability to cancel a purchase within 24 hours and about a similar share of AI-assisted shoppers would prefer that a review step before the AI finalizes a purchase remains in the loop.
“What the research shows clearly is that consumers are using agents to find the best online deals. But once the shortlist is in front of the consumer, the same signals that have always driven purchasing decisions take over: does the consumer recognise the seller’s brand, and what do other customers say about it?
AI is enhancing consumer decision-making, not replacing it. Consumers are happy to delegate discovery and shortlisting to an AI assistant. But trust remains critical when it comes to the final purchase. If the brand is not recognised and there are no reviews to validate it, the AI recommendation does not close the sale.”
Chris Jones, Managing Director at PSE Consulting
The research also highlighted clear differences between the markets under study. For instance, consumers in the UK were the most influenced by seller brands, with 15% saying brand recognition was the main factor in their buying decisions, compared to 8% in the US, France, and Germany. UK shoppers were also the most tied to the importance of loyalty programs. Namely, 36% of surveyed Brits said they would be less likely to keep using AI shopping tools if they lost loyalty points — much higher than in Germany, where only 14% said the same.
France stood out as the European market with the highest level of trust in AI shopping tools. More than half of French consumers (53%) said their experiences with AI-assisted shopping were mostly positive. Their purchasing decisions were also more balanced between price (27%), customer ratings (22%), and simply following the AI assistant’s top recommendation (21%), making France the most evenly distributed market in the survey, and the one most agreeable when it comes to full agentic AI purchase delegation.
The level of willingness to blindly trust the AI choice differences across the countries may be attributed not only to the innovation readiness or choice fatigue. Goods return practices should also be taken into account. Thus, in the U.S., for instance, return policies are usually set by each retailer since there’s no federal law guaranteeing a return period for most goods. In this case, attention to the final decision and a choice of selling point is naturally higher. However, in the EU, there are uniform widely guaranteed consumer protection rules, that allow 14 days to return most goods without giving a reason. In this environment, delegating the purchase fully to the agentic system is easier, since the cost of mistake might be easily remedied.
