Platform & products
Intent-to-purchase rate
Definition
The percentage of agent conversations that include at least one purchase-oriented question — about a product, a comparison, fit, compatibility, or availability — as opposed to pure support or order-status queries.
Defined in How to Measure Agentic Commerce ROI.
Where Intent-to-purchase rate comes up
The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.
Related terms
- Agentic commerce
- Commerce transactions initiated, researched, or completed with an AI agent acting on the shopper's behalf, rather than a human clicking through a storefront unassisted.
- Conversation flow
- A named pattern of shopper intent — e.g. 'compare two products on a specific attribute' — paired with the reasoning logic and catalog data the Brand Agent needs to answer any phrasing of that intent well, not a single scripted exchange.
- Launch drift
- The gradual mismatch between an agent's configuration and reality that sets in when nobody actively tunes it after go-live — catalog changes go unreflected, new question patterns go unanswered, and the agent that was accurate on day one becomes gradually less accurate with each week of neglect.
- Confidence threshold
- The internal setting that decides whether a Brand Agent answers directly or escalates to a human. Set too low, it guesses too often; set too high, it escalates so much the feature stops saving anyone time.
- Prose-trapped fact
- A true, useful product fact that exists only inside a marketing description rather than as a structured field — readable by a shopper, invisible to an agent's filtering logic.
- Brand Agent
- Shopify's merchant-controlled AI shopping assistant, shipped in the Spring '26 edition on June 17, 2026, currently available to Shopify Plus merchants only.
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