Agents are already in your shop. Do you know who sent them?
AI shopping traffic has tripled in a month and retailers are opted in whether they like it or not. On VIA every enquiry comes from a real shopper, and your products read properly to every agent.
Forter, who handle fraud and payments for about a million businesses, reckon AI shopping assistant traffic has more than tripled in a month since Muse and Instinct launched, with agent orders up 229% in the week Muse turned up.1 Their CEO says retailers used to get six to twelve months to adjust when shopping habits changed, and now they've got six to eight weeks. And here's the bit that should make every retailer spill their tea: Muse crawls sites that aren't set up for agents by default, so, in Forter's words, "merchants are effectively opted in by default, whether they've prepared for agentic traffic or not."
So you've got agents wandering round your website at all hours. Some were sent by real shoppers, and some by somebody's scraper with nothing good in mind. You're meant to work out which is which at the checkout, while hoping the one crawling your product pages actually understands what you sell.
That's exactly the mess VIA was built to avoid.
When you join VIA as a seller, the enquiries that reach you come from real shoppers. Every one starts with a Personal Shopper on VIA, or with an agent the shopper has connected to their own VIA account. Every shopper is registered with us, contact details and all, and tied to an identity on a public registry that can't be faked. There's a real person on the other end, and we know who they are.
There's a real person on the other end, and we know who they are.
The valuable stuff doesn't come free either. A shopper's full request and every sale sit behind a payment door built into the web itself, so a bot can't see what your customers want without paying for the privilege. Spamming the network costs money too, which is a wonderful way to keep the time-wasters out.
Then there's your product data. Most product pages were written for people and Google, not for agents, which is why agents crawl them badly and get things wrong. When you list on VIA, we automatically fill out your listings by reading your descriptions and your photos, so every product carries the details an agent needs: what it is, what it's made of, the fit, the colour, the category. Agents get clean answers from us instead of guessing from your website.
You only hear from a shopper when they've asked for something you might actually have. There are no ads and nobody paying to jump the queue, and the cost of selling through VIA is tiny, so almost all of every sale stays with you.
Agents are going to do a lot of the shopping, and faster than anyone planned. You can wait for them to crawl your site and hope for the best, or you can be on the network where every enquiry comes from a real person and every product reads properly. Join at app.getvia.xyz.
