Dec 3, 2025 | 4 minute read
written by Bryan House
Commerce is entering another period of rapid change. The digital storefront once shaped how brands sold online and how buyers made decisions. It served as the primary place where discovery, comparison, and conversion happened.
That foundation began to loosen when marketplaces rose to dominance. Aggregators like Amazon and Walmart offered vast selection and remarkable convenience, and buyers adapted quickly. They started their journeys in environments designed to remove friction. The storefront remains relevant, but its influence has since weakened.
A new pattern is emerging now, and it’s moving fast. Shoppers are beginning with prompts instead of navigation. They ask answer engines to recommend the right product, explain differences, or complete a task. This behavior forms relationships with products before a customer reaches a brand’s owned channel.
When buyers start with conversational interfaces, the storefront no longer determines the first impression. The answer engine becomes the guide. It interprets constraints, manages context, and presents options that meet the buyer’s intent.
This shift changes where influence lives in the purchase journey. The buyer’s first understanding of a product is shaped by the data the answer engine has access to. The environment is conversational, contextual, and shaped by structured inputs rather than visual design.
In this new pattern, gravity pulls toward the source of truth. That source is the catalog.
The product catalog defines the information that powers every interaction inside answer engines. Attributes, variations, related content, compatibility rules, pricing, inventory, and relationships all feed into how recommendations form. When the catalog is complete, content rich, and structured well, generative AI engines can represent a brand accurately. When it is inconsistent or ambiguous, the brand’s visibility fades.
This makes the catalog the first trust layer in intelligent commerce. It sets the standard for how products are understood by humans and machines. It creates confidence in recommendations, quotes, and configurations. It offers clarity on what a product is and where it fits in a buyer’s workflow.
At Elastic Path, this is the role Product Experience Manager is designed to serve. It becomes the environment where product truth is defined, enriched, and published consistently across every channel, including conversational interfaces.
As answer engines take on more of the early discovery process, the commerce platform itself must handle new responsibilities. It needs to coordinate activity across systems, trigger workflows programmatically, and manage transactions that originate in many environments. The platform must ensure that pricing, inventory, and fulfillment operate with the same context, regardless of where the order starts.
Elastic Path supports this model through API-native extensibility and the MCP Server. Developers can generate components, orchestrate complex workflows, and expose safe interactions for agents and applications. The platform becomes the connective tissue that keeps transactions accurate and predictable.
Complex environments highlight the value of a structured catalog most clearly. B2B organizations manage intricate product relationships, negotiated price books, and configuration rules that require precision. This data cannot be left to inference and must be explicit.
Manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers rely on well-defined catalogs to ensure recommendations are correct and quotes are configured without errors. AI will accelerate these processes, but only when the underlying data is reliable. Elastic Path helps B2B teams express this complexity cleanly. Products, catalogs, price books, and hierarchies are represented as discrete APIs. This architecture reduces ambiguity and supports buying flows where AI agents assist with configuration and discovery.
Teams benefit from this shift as well. When catalog data is structured and governed, new automation becomes possible. Merchandisers can publish offers more consistently. Developers can generate storefront elements quickly. Operations teams can trust that downstream systems receive clean information.
Commerce has moved beyond its storefront-centric era. Marketplaces dispersed attention, but answer engines are only accelerating that trend. The place where influence begins is now upstream, in the data that defines your products.
As a result, the catalog is becoming the gravitational center. It determines visibility, accuracy, and trust, shaping how both humans and AI agents understand what a product is and why it matters.
Elastic Path is building for this future. A future where brands control their data, catalogs guide intelligent experience, and trust is earned through product truth rather than page design.
In intelligent commerce, everything starts with the catalog.
Schedule a demo to see how Elastic Path delivers unified commerce for leading global brands.