Post-Click Is The New Battleground In E-Commerce

Retailers are discovering the real fight isn’t for clicks, but for what happens immediately after them. Spangle AI is betting it can plug the $8 billion leak.

The true frontier of e-commerce is no longer personalisation engines or ad tech, but the post-click moment where high-intent traffic converts or bounces. Spangle AI claims to solve the $8 billion “post-click leak” by replacing static landing pages with adaptive, in-session shopping journeys powered by agentic AI. Fashion retailers are proving the model, while Parag Agrawal’s Parallel is building the infrastructure layer agents like Spangle rely upon.

Why the Post-Click Moment Matters

For twenty years, retailers have poured billions into personalisation engines and elaborate homepages. The result? Bloated stacks of more than 100 SaaS tools on average, slower sites, falling conversions and according to Spangle’s internal estimates an $8 billion hole in post-click commerce.

Marketing has become brutally efficient. Meta’s ASC and Google’s PMax can target the right shopper with surgical precision. Instagram can seed a new obsession in seconds. Yet when a user finally clicks, the magic collapses. Static landing pages, irrelevant recommendations, and tone-deaf grids create a disjointed experience. Forty percent of discovery traffic now comes from paid ads, cost per visit has risen 9% year on year, and conversion rates are down 11%. The economics are unsustainable.

The Failure of Personalisation

For years, retailers sold the promise of personalisation. What shoppers got instead was “personalisation theatre”, endless pop-ups, recycled grids, irrelevant offers. The issue lay in the data. Engines relied on past purchase histories, not real-time signals, and no single retailer ever had enough behavioural data to make its models genuinely predictive.

TikTok changed the rules. Its feed adapts in-session, learning from micro-behaviours minute by minute. That expectation has bled into shopping. Static engines that look backwards can’t compete with feeds that adapt in the moment. Unless retailers solve this post-click problem, their ad spend risks becoming dead weight.

Spangle’s Bet: Adaptive, Agentic AI

Spangle’s thesis is blunt: the future of commerce belongs to agentic AI that lives inside the shopping experience, not in bolt-on widgets. Its proprietary ProductGPT acts as a unified brain, reading ad creative, interpreting style cues, and adapting page content in-session.

Click an ad for a dress with an asymmetrical hem and the feed tilts towards similar cuts. Browse an ad for a “daytime wedding in New York” and the journey reshapes around that occasion.

Unlike legacy landing-page firms, Spangle integrates natively into a retailer’s domain, preserving brand storytelling and first-party data. Early controlled tests with Revolve and SPARC Group show:

51% lift in conversion rates,46% increase in engagement,18% rise in average order value,2× improvement in ROAS

The post-click leak, in other words, is patchable.

Fashion as the Stress Test

Fashion retail is notoriously volatile: thousands of SKUs, constant turnover, fickle trends. This made it the perfect testbed for Spangle. Revolve reported a 60% lift in ROAS and 30% higher conversions, while Forever 21 saw conversion rates jump 66% and AOV rise 18%.

“As a data-driven, innovation-focused retailer, we’re always looking for ways to elevate the customer journey,” says Ryan Pabelona, VP of Performance Marketing at Revolve. “Spangle allowed us to extend the latest AI tech to our ad landing experiences without slowing down our internal roadmap. The results speak for themselves.”

If Spangle can tame fashion, the thinking goes, it can tame other inspiration-led verticals from beauty to home décor.

Parallel and the Infrastructure Play

Spangle is not alone in shaping the post-click stack. While it focuses on the application layer, former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is building the infrastructure. His startup, Parallel AI, is betting that AI agents will soon outnumber humans online. Its first product, Deep Research, helps agents pull structured, citation-backed insights from across the web, eliminating hallucinations and stale data. With $30 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Parallel aims to become the invisible plumbing powering agentic commerce. This approach aligns with the broader discussion around how AI recalibrated the value of data in various industries.

The Agentic AI Arms Race

What emerges is a two-layered stack:

Infrastructure: Parallel, LangChain, LlamaIndex, cloud providers,Application: Spangle, Cimulate, Daydream, Shopify’s own AI layer

The competitive frontier is clear: whoever controls the orchestration between discovery, decision and transaction will reset the economics of retail. This shift also impacts how companies will approach advertising, potentially leading to significant changes like why display ad budgets will be cut by 30% as AI and CTV take centre-stage.

The Provocation: Rebuilding Retail

Two decades of bolt-on software have left e-commerce fragile and fragmented. The future will be built on agentic AI that adapts in real time, closing the $8 billion leak at the heart of retail. Slick landing pages and influencer campaigns no longer win the race. The fight is decided after the click. For further reading on the impact of AI on consumer behavior, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research explores how AI influences consumer decision-making^(AI and Consumer Decision-Making: Evidence from a Field Experiment).

As Spangle CEO Maju Kuruvilla puts it: “The future of commerce will be intelligent, contextual and agentic — and it demands a new infrastructure.” Retailers that master it will squeeze more profit from every click. Those that don’t will keep leaking revenue to the bounce button.