AI-assisted shopping journeys on an ecommerce site may force merchants to reconsider what to measure, and when.

“Many familiar ecommerce metrics are built around the assumption that shoppers discover products by navigating between pages,” wrote Zhengyang Yang, a product designer at TikTok who works on AI-assisted shopping experiences, in an email exchange with Practical Ecommerce.

“A shopper who performed five searches and visited 10 product pages might now describe their requirements once, compare three recommendations, and proceed directly to a purchase,” wrote Yang.

From the shopper’s perspective, less “engagement” is progress, but in an analytics dashboard, it might look like decline.

Short sessions can signal satisfied shoppers.

Activity

Put another way, an AI-assisted session could generate lower search volume, fewer product-page visits, and shorter sessions even when the shopper is having a better experience.

Yet ecommerce marketing teams have often treated activity as a proxy for…