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In October 2026, Apple began blocking third-party identity-resolution infrastructure. Two months earlier, Shopify restricted how tracking operates. Consumer brands now need a more accurate, consent-based way to recognize customers.

Learn about Ground

Two infrastructure changes are happening at once.

Apple is restricting the signals that third-party identity-resolution tools use to recognize people. Shopify is replacing unrestricted checkout scripts with controlled Web Pixels and consent-aware data collection.

For consumer brands, this affects attribution, audience measurement and the lifecycle flows responsible for recovering revenue.

When an identity tool loses access to a reliable signal, it can fail to recognize an existing customer or connect activity to the wrong profile. This means two things: sending messages to the wrong person, and leaving revenue on the table.

Both outcomes are expensive. One loses revenue quietly. The other produces complaints, unsubscribes and visible damage to the customer relationship.

The time to audit identity vendors is now. Brands need to know where a vendor’s data originates, whether the customer consented to its use and how the system behaves when confidence in a match is low.

What Apple Changed (and Why It’s Costing You Brand Equity and Revenue)?

Apple Is Blocking Post-Cookie Identity Infrastructure. Safari 26 prevents known fingerprinting scripts from reliably accessing device characteristics. It can also stop those scripts from creating long-lived cookies or local storage. (WebKit)

In October 2026, Apple addressed identity resolution directly.

WebKit described a post-cookie model in which third parties collect email addresses across participating websites, convert them into permanent tracking IDs and use those IDs for profiling and advertising. Logging out or unsubscribing may leave the external identifier intact.

Apple is now blocking infrastructure associated with this model. (WebKit)

The implication is immediate: identity vendors built on cross-site email collection, external identity graphs or device fingerprinting may see their match rates deteriorate on Safari. Tools that respond by making less-certain matches create a customer-experience risk alongside the technical one.

Recognition should increasingly be based on information the customer consented to provide and activity generated through the brand’s direct relationship with them.

Shopify Is Restricting How Tracking Runs

Shopify’s privacy settings is restricting data collection until a visitor grants permission and merchants are expected to verify that third-party services respect those settings. (Shopify)

Brands may see fewer tracked sessions as these controls take effect. That reduction reflects a stricter consent boundary. Identity tools must now produce value with cleaner, permissioned data rather than compensate with external profiles.

The Brands That Win Long Term Will Use Modern, Compliant Identity Solutions

Modern identity infrastructure has two jobs.

First, it must recognize returning customers without depending on third-party cookies or purchased identity networks. That requires using first-party variables - such as browsing behavior, device CPU, time zone, etc.

Second, it must turn recognition into incremental revenue. Once your CRM knows who the shopper is, it can trigger the right flow at the right time and recover revenue that would otherwise be lost.

Ground’s ReCartify combines multiple first-party signals to identify returning shoppers and trigger the abandonment flows your existing stack misses - driving more conversions without mis-sends. Unlike third-party tools, it relies on your own data, not guesswork.

See ReCartify in Action

Third-Party Identity vs. Owned Customer Identity

Modern Brands Need Modern Customer Recognition

Identity resolution has always had a significant impact on revenue for ecommerce brands.

It determines whether an existing customer is welcomed as a stranger, whether flows reach the right person and whether personalization reflects a real relationship or an external prediction.

Apple is reducing the viability of cross-site identity infrastructure. Shopify is making consent part of the tracking environment. Regulators are holding brands responsible when third-party technology ignores customer choices.

The durable response is precise, permissioned recognition built on data the brand controls - and systems capable of acting on that recognition automatically.

ReCartify helps brands identify more returning customers, send the right lifecycle message and recover revenue their current flows cannot see.

Get a Demo of ReCartify

Resources to Learn More:

• Apple WebKit: Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure
  Apple’s October 2026 explanation of how third-party identity networks operate and why Safari is blocking them. Read More

• Apple WebKit: Privacy Changes in Safari 26
  Technical details on Safari’s protections against fingerprinting scripts, persistent storage and navigational tracking. Read More

• Shopify: Upgrading Thank You and Order Status Pages
  Shopify’s guidance on replacing legacy checkout scripts with compatible apps, blocks and Web Pixels. Read More

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Learn about Ground

The way we do marketing is being rewritten.

For years, marketing software has worked in roughly the same way. A marketer logs into the platform, creates a segment, builds a flow, launches a campaign, waits for results, and returns later to decide what to change.

That is now changing.

What AI is Capable of in 2026: Give it the Context and Goal, Then Let It Work Autonomously

This is how it works: A marketer defines what the business wants to accomplish, along with its brand standards, and guardrails.

The AI handles more of the operational loop:

Observe → understand → decide → act → measure → learn

“Grow repeat-purchase revenue,” for example, might become:

• Analyze order history.

• Calculate an average replenishment window.

• Identify eligible customers.

• Create a segment.

• Choose a delay.

• Build a flow.

• Write the messages.

• Launch the campaign.

• Review the results.

• Adjust the timing.

This is a significant change. But we believe talking to your AI is only the transitional phase.

The more important change is what happens when the AI no longer needs to wait for someone to ask.

Where’s the shift: From Prompting to Autonomy

The term agent is now applied to almost every AI feature, so it helps to separate three different stages of the technology.

• Old-school marketing: A person logs into each tool and performs every step manually.

• How most brands use AI today: A marketer asks ChatGPT or Claude to analyze, create, or recommend something. The work happens faster, but a person still needs to initiate every task

• How leading brands operate (next gen of using AI): Autonomous agents are responsible for specific business results. They continuously spot opportunities, make decisions, take action across the existing stack, and learn from the results.

This is the future we built toward at Ground.

Want to see what autonomous revenue agents could uncover inside your existing ecommerce stack? Book a demo with our team.

Book a Ground AI Demo

AI Should Generate Revenue, Not Just Save Time

At Ground, we started with a simple question:

What if AI did not just help marketers complete tasks? What if it was directly responsible for finding and generating incremental revenue?

Ground connects with the systems a brand already uses, including Shopify, Klaviyo, advertising platforms, subscription platforms, and other parts of its customer stack.

Our specialized revenue agents then work across specific parts of the customer journey:

Greet AI turns existing traffic into new customers

Most visitors leave an ecommerce website without purchasing - and without joining the brand’s email or SMS list.

Greet AI, our acquisition agent, interprets hundreds of first-party behavioral signals in real time. It looks at how a visitor arrived, what they are exploring, where they are hesitating, whether they appear ready to leave, and when an invitation is most likely to be helpful.

It then determines the right moment and experience for turning an anonymous visitor into an identified subscriber and first-time customer. It continuously works toward the outcome it was designed to improve.

ReBeat AI predicts the next customer opportunity

ReBeat AI is Ground’s retention agent.

It learns from first-party purchase history and browsing signals to predict which customer is likely to purchase again, what they may want next, and when the next high-conversion window is likely to occur and sends the right message to them.

For one customer, that may mean replenishing a product they are about to run out of. For another, it may mean recommending a complementary product they have never tried. For a frequent repeat buyer, it could mean presenting a subscription at the moment it becomes more useful than another one-time purchase.

Our goal is to replace that guesswork with individual-level predictions - and activate those decisions through the email and SMS platforms the brand already uses.

Your CRM Can Turn into Your Best Revenue Engine with Ground AI

Want to see what autonomous revenue agents could uncover inside your existing ecommerce stack? Book a demo with our team.

Book a Ground AI Demo

Curated Intelligence

• Ambient Agents and the New Agent Inbox (Sequoia’s Inference, with Harrison Chase)

• LangChain founder on why ambient agents are the future (CO/AI)

• The State of Retail - Attentive 2026

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Many brands still do not know that Claude or ChatGPT can connect directly to their CRM - whether that is Klaviyo or another email and SMS platform - and help execute the work inside it.

In this issue, we will show you how to use it for two of the most important parts of BFCM preparation:

1. Building your email and SMS flows.

2. Segmenting your audience so the right people receive the right messages.

🎉 We also made you a pack of AI skills to download and install in Claude or ChatGPT. The skills give your AI the instructions and best practices it needs, so you do not have to explain BFCM strategy from scratch.

Install The BFCM Skills Pack

First, connect your AI to your CRM

Connect Claude or ChatGPT to Klaviyo, then install the Common Ground BFCM skill. You do not need one enormous prompt. Work through one job at a time: flows first, then segments.

1. Build your BFCM email and SMS flows

If your welcome, browse, cart, checkout, post-purchase, and winback flows already exist, you do not need to rebuild them from scratch.

You need to make sure the emails and SMS inside them reflect your BFCM offer. We prepared a prompt that uses the Common Ground BFCM skill to review your existing flows and prepare the necessary updates.

Copy this prompt

Use the Common Ground BFCM skill and my connected Klaviyo account. Review my existing welcome, browse abandonment, cart, checkout, price-drop, post-purchase, and winback flows.

My BFCM offer is [INSERT OFFER]. It begins on [START DATE AND TIME] and ends on [END DATE AND TIME]. [ADD VIP EARLY-ACCESS DETAILS, IF APPLICABLE].

Find any email or SMS with an offer, discount, timing, or end date that conflicts with the BFCM promotion. Recommend the necessary changes, including shorter browse and cart timing where appropriate, and explain what should return after the sale.

After I approve the plan, prepare the updated messages as drafts. Do not activate, schedule, or send anything without my approval. Keep the copy simple, mobile-friendly, and focused on one call to action.

This prompt audits the flows you already have, finds messages that could contradict the sale, and prepares updated versions with the right offer and timing. It also creates a post-sale revert plan, so an expired BFCM message does not stay live in December.

2. Segment your audience

Copy this prompt

Use the Common Ground BFCM skill and my connected Klaviyo account. Review my current segments and create a simple BFCM segmentation plan.

Include 30-day, 60-day, 180-day, 365-day, and never-engaged groups. Also include VIPs, repeat buyers, customers due to replenish, people who clicked but did not buy, early-access signups, and first-time BFCM buyers.

Exclude people who purchased in the last 48 hours, profiles with delivery or consent problems, and customers with an unresolved support issue if that data is available.

Show me the rules, estimated size, and overlap of each group before creating anything. Explain which BFCM messages each group should receive. After I approve, create the segments supported by Klaviyo.

This prompt keeps you from sending every message to the entire list. It groups people by recent engagement, then creates useful audiences such as VIPs, repeat buyers, customers ready to replenish, and people who clicked but did not buy.

Your most engaged customers can receive the full BFCM campaign. Less-engaged groups receive only the biggest moments, such as launch, Cyber Monday, and last chance. Never-engaged and high-risk profiles stay out of promotional sends, protecting your deliverability while the volume increases.

Personalization in groups is not enough

Claude or ChatGPT can create the flows. Klaviyo can send them. Your segments can organize customers based on what they already did.

What these tools still do not know is which individual shopper is ready to act right now.

After you create the flows, the next step is giving them the intelligence to reach the right people at the right time.

Klaviyo is the execution layer. Intelligence brains (like Ground AI) decide what happens next.

Brands using Ground’s AI agents see
30–50% more first-time customer revenue.

🔌 This is the gap Ground fills for hundreds of brands - including Tower 28, MaryRuth Organics, and VIOLETTE_FR - driving revenue growth across every stage of the funnel.

How? Grounds ambient agents watch every shopper individually, learn what they want and when they’re most likely to buy, then tell Klaviyo (for example) exactly when and how to act.

This ability to observe and act on the individual behavior of your prospects and customers drives significant revenue increases across all stages of the funnel - from first-time acquisition to customer retention.

Book a Demo With Ground's Team

Customer story: How Ghia grew email and SMS revenue by 43%

Ghia, the non-alcoholic apéritif brand, connected Ground to its existing stack to make its lifecycle marketing more responsive to real customer behavior.

Ground analyzed how shoppers behaved onsite after discovering or purchasing from the brand. It identified peak moments when a new visitor was most likely to shop, recognized when someone returned with renewed interest, and distinguished between customers coming back for the same product and those who appeared to need something else.

Ground then told Ghia’s email and SMS system when to act and how to respond.

By turning those previously missed signals into timely actions, Ghia saw an approximately 43% increase in revenue from email and SMS.

See Ground in Action

Ground’s AI agents work with your existing flows (no changes required) and they work on their own, with no lift on your team.

Curated Intelligence

1. Will AI agents turn brands into interchangeable suppliers? Read more

2. Dreamforce 2026: The shift from software interfaces to intelligent agents. Read more

3. Why digital identity is becoming core business infrastructure? Read more

Most brands look at their BFCM revenue and call the campaign a success. But the bigger question is whether it remains profitable long after the weekend ends.

A record BFCM can still be a bad outcome if you had to overpay for traffic, over-discount the first order, and then never see those customers again.

So if I were planning BFCM backward from profitability, I would start with three questions:

• How do we turn more of the traffic we already paid for into first-time customers?

• How do we get those customers to come back after the promotion ends?

• How do we execute the lifecycle work without adding more headcount, tools, or chaos?

This is where AI can make a real difference.

Not by generating another subject line. By increasing the conversion rate at every step of the customer journey.

Fix Conversion Leak #1: AI acquiring more first-time customers

BFCM traffic is expensive. Every visitor who lands on your site and leaves unidentified is not just a lost session. It is paid attention you may have to buy all over again.

AI changes that because it can understand behavior at a level a static rule cannot.

It can process hundreds of live signals: which product a shopper is viewing, how they arrived, what they return to, where they hesitate, how deeply they browse, and when their intent appears to peak.

Then it can act.

Instead of showing the welcome offer because five seconds passed, AI can resurface it when the shopper is most likely to use it. That means more high-intent visitors opt into your CRM, more people enter your welcome flow, and more of the traffic you already paid for becomes first-time customer revenue.

🔌 This Is Exactly What We Built With Greet AI. Greet AI, Ground’s acquisition agent, autonomously increases first-time customer revenue from the same traffic.

Brands using Ground see 30–50% more first-time revenue. Book a demo →

Brands using Ground’s AI agents see 30–50% more first-time customer revenue.

Book a Demo

Fix Conversion Leak #2: AI making every customer come back again and again

AI is not only good at understanding what someone is doing on your site right now. It is also very good at finding patterns across purchase history and real-time behavior to predict what is likely to happen next.

Who is likely to replenish soon? Who may be ready for a complementary product? Who has developed a repeat-purchase habit that makes a subscription relevant? And who is beginning to lapse?

Those customers should not all receive the same message on the same day.

AI can predict who is likely to buy again, what they are likely to buy, and when the window is most likely to open. Then it can communicate through the channel where that customer is most likely to act - in practice, email or SMS.

🔌 This Is Exactly What We Built With ReBeat AI. ReBeat AI is Ground’s retention agent. It predicts the next best revenue opportunity for each customer, then activates the right email or SMS journey at the right time and drives revenue on its own.

Brands using Ground increase repeat-purchase revenue by 2–4x, while giving their team a system that keeps learning after BFCM is over.

Deploy a Retention Agent on Your Shopify

🎉 We Created a Gift For You: AI Skills for BFCM in Claude

We’re fortunate to work with leading consumer brands across industries, giving us a close look at what it takes to execute a successful campaign this year.

So we packaged all those insights into Ground’s BFCM playbook, a set of AI skills your team can run inside the AI assistant it already uses.

The skills can help you:

• Audit the lifecycle flows you already have and identify what is missing.

• Build the programs you need before traffic peaks, including winback, replenishment, browse abandonment, and one-time-purchase-to-subscription flows.

• Create VIP, repeat-buyer, engagement, and suppression segments.

• Review last year’s performance and decide what to repeat, stop, and test.

• Build a dated email and SMS campaign calendar.

• Protect deliverability as sending volume increases.

• Monitor the weekend and produce a useful postmortem once it ends.

You describe the outcome you need in plain English. The AI selects the right playbook and turns it into a working deliverable for your brand.

Try starting with:

Help me plan BFCM backward from profitable growth. Audit my existing lifecycle program, tell me what is missing, and build a dated plan for acquisition, conversion, retention, and post-BFCM follow-up.

[NEW] Download The Claude Skills

Most brands wait until Black Friday to give customers a reason to visit their website.

Gymshark started much earlier.

For its BFCM campaign, the brand ran a campaign so people build their wishlists beforehand, and built multiple momentum by announcing multiple offers instead of just one.

The brands set to win BFCM 2026 aren’t sending gimmicky emails, relying on third-party databases to convert site visitors like it’s 2018, or waiting until November to get started. They’re already moving - with brand equity and a clear AI strategy at the center of their plans.

Here’s what Gymshark did and what other brands can learn from it.

1. Capture intent beforehand with wishlists

Gymshark encouraged customers to visit the website and start building their wishlists before the sale begins.

This meant when the sale went live, much of the decision-making had already happened and gymshark could see where the demand already is.

Gymshark’s content creators helped spread the message. They published sale previews, shared their favourite products, explained how to build a wishlist, and reminded followers when the promotion would begin.

2. Build Momentum With a Sequence of Offers

Gymshark didn’t launch one Black Friday offer and leave it unchanged for the rest of the campaign.

Its initial promotion offered up to 70% off everything. But throughout the campaign, the brand continued introducing new reasons to return.

These included:

• Restocks and VIP access.

• Limited-time additional discounts.

• A larger Cyber Monday offer on top of the site-wide promotion

Shortly after the campaign began, Gymshark introduced an additional 20% discount on top of its existing Black Friday prices.

It also used short promotional windows around specific product categories. By Cyber Monday, the brand was offering an additional 25% off with a discount code.

Every change created a new moment to communicate.

This allowed Gymshark to stretch BFCM beyond one launch email.

Instead of repeating the same “sale ends soon” message, the brand could give customers a genuinely new reason to open the next email, click the next ad, or revisit the website.

Join the Brands Using Ground’s AI Agents to Grow Email Revenue Autonomously

Book a Demo

If you’re planning your BFCM and holiday campaigns right now, the offer is only part of the opportunity.

You also need to identify more of the visitors already coming to your site - and give them the right reason to buy.

Ground’s AI agents help brands opt more visitors into their CRM, turn more of them into first-time customers, and autonomously grow email and SMS revenue without adding more work for the team.

Book a demo to see how Ground can help you capture and convert more of your holiday traffic.

3. Use creators to resolve purchase objections

Gymshark’s creators didn’t just announce that the sale was coming.

They helped customers decide what to buy.

Creators produced try-on hauls, product recommendations, sizing advice, wishlist tutorials, and comparisons between different products.

They discussed how products fit, what sizes they wore, which styles they preferred, and what they would personally buy during the sale.

The discount creates urgency. The creator gives the customer enough confidence to act on it.

Community: Meet Ground in Los Angeles, and New York

Are you in LA on October 28th? We’re hosting an intimate, invite-only dinner in Santa Monica, bringing together a select group of beauty founders and operators for an evening of great food and conversation.
RSVP here to request your spot.

RSVP

The CAC Problem Has One Real Answer

Customer acquisition costs are up 222% over the past eight years. Most brands respond by working harder just to stay in place.

The brands escaping that treadmill aren’t spending less on acquisition - they’re earning more from every customer they acquire. Retention compounds, which makes CAC hurt less. Identifying high-intent visitors early and converting them faster makes every acquisition dollar work harder.

The answer isn’t a smaller team or a smaller budget. It’s an intelligence layer that makes every dollar and every hour more productive.

For our partner brands, Ground already drives around 10% of DTC revenue - and that share grows as the models improve. Which means the brands that adopted early aren’t just ahead. They’re compounding.

See what your identification rate would be with Greet AI →

Learn more

Loving BFCM Compounded? It’s our latest Common Ground series exploring how to turn the biggest shopping moment of the year into growth that lasts long after the weekend ends. Stay tuned as we have 8 more days to ring in BFCM!

Most brands approach Black Friday with the same playbook:

They offer the biggest discount they can afford. Put it everywhere. Hope the additional volume makes up for the margin they lose.

Patrick Ta Beauty took a more thoughtful approach in 2025 and they’ve already dropped their holiday gifts, sets, bundles, and playbook in October 2026…

The brands set to win BFCM 2026 aren’t sending gimmicky emails, relying on third-party databases to convert site visitors like it’s 2018, or waiting until November to get started. They’re already moving - with brand equity and a clear AI strategy at the center of their plans.

What we can learn from Patrick Ta’s 2025 BFCM Playbook:

The brand created a compelling reason to shop without turning Black Friday into a race to the bottom.

It used limited-time access, holiday-exclusive products, and gifts with purchase to generate urgency - while keeping the brand premium. If you go to their site right now, you’ll see similar instances of this playbook “play out” making consumers tune in when the world feels a bit less shiny.

So…here’s what Patrick Ta did and what other brands can learn from it.

1. It made the promotion feel genuinely rare

Patrick Ta offered 20% off sitewide beginning November 14, 2025, with 25% off sets.

The important part of the offer was its scarcity: this was the brand’s first-ever sitewide Black Friday promotion.

Patrick Ta doesn’t train customers to wait for the next sale. So when it finally offered one, the promotion felt like an event.

A discount becomes much more powerful when customers believe it is one of their only opportunities to get it. The urgency comes from the rarity of the promotion - not simply from increasing the percentage off.

2. It used gifts to increase AOV

in 2026, we see the same strategy on their website

From November 17 through November 30, Patrick Ta offered two complimentary gifts with purchases above $150.

This added another layer to the campaign.

Instead of discounting every additional product more aggressively, the brand gave customers a reason to build a larger cart. Someone sitting at $110 or $125 now had an incentive to add another product and cross the $150 threshold.

That can increase average order value while protecting more of the brand’s margin.

The gifts also felt aligned with the brand. They weren’t generic promotional items added as an afterthought. This October, they’re offering a limited-edition Puffer Clutch, for example, and it feels like part of the Patrick Ta world: premium, visual, giftable, and exclusive.

Join the Brands Using Ground’s AI Agents to Crush BFCM and Acquire First-Time Customers

Book a Demo

Patrick Ta isn’t the only brand thinking outside the box this season.

As we approach the Superbowl of DTC, the best brands with AI agents understanding autonomous browsing behaviors come out to play!

If you’re planning your BFCM and holiday campaigns, your offers and product drops are only part of the opportunity. The rest comes down to understanding every shopper - and knowing when they’re ready to act.

Ground’s AI revenue agents read shopper behavior in real time, helping more visitors join your CRM, make their first purchase, and come back for their next. Working across your existing stack, they continuously learn and act on purchase intent to grow revenue autonomously - with virtually no lift from your team.

Book a demo to see how Ground can help you capture and convert more of your holiday traffic.

3. It launched holiday-exclusive sets before BFCM

A reason to visit before Black Friday

Patrick Ta didn’t wait until Black Friday to give customers something new to shop.

The brand introduced exclusive holiday sets ahead of the promotional period, including curated lip sets, product trios, and larger vaults.

This gave the campaign more depth than a sitewide sale.

Sets help customers make decisions. They package products into a clear use case, make gifting easier, and create a natural way to increase basket size. They also allow the brand to offer a stronger perceived value without discounting every individual product at the same rate.

More importantly, holiday exclusives give customers a reason to visit before Black Friday.

Instead of compressing all demand into one weekend, the brand can begin building interest earlier, capture more shoppers, and create multiple moments to communicate with them throughout the season.

The strategy was bigger than the discount

Before defaulting to a deeper discount, ask:

Can we create a bundle customers can only get during the holidays?

Can we introduce a gift threshold that encourages shoppers to add one more product?

Can we make the promotion feel rare instead of simply making it louder?

And can we begin building demand before every other brand starts sending its Black Friday emails?

That is how you create a promotion that drives revenue without sacrificing the brand you spent the rest of the year building.

Community: Meet Ground in Los Angeles, and New York

Are you in LA on October 28th? We’re hosting an intimate, invite-only dinner in Santa Monica, bringing together a select group of beauty founders and operators for an evening of great food and conversation.
RSVP here to request your spot.

Request Your Spot

Today, we’re sharing a playbook for acquiring more customers before BFCM, converting them when intent peaks, and turning them into repeat buyers after the rush.

Most brands focus on one thing: converting as much traffic as possible during BFCM.

That makes sense. But if November is the first time you start thinking about acquisition - and December is the first time you start thinking about retention - you’re late.

Here’s the playbook:

October: Build your audience.
November: Convert the intent.
December: Earn the second purchase.

In this essay, we’ll show you how to build and segment your audience in October - so you’re ready to convert more customers during BFCM.

October: Get more visitors into your CRM

You’re already paying to bring people to your site.

The first opportunity is making sure more of them leave you with an email or phone number - even if they aren’t ready to purchase today.

Most welcome pop-ups treat every visitor the same. Same creative. Same offer. Same timing.

But every visitor did not arrive for the same reason.

Someone clicks a Meta ad for your bestselling serum. They land on your site and see a generic pop-up featuring another product.

The ad started one conversation. Your website started another.

That disconnect matters.

The better experience is simple: if someone clicked the serum ad, show them the serum. If they clicked a holiday bundle, continue with the holiday bundle.

🔌 This is where AI solutions can help and why we built Greet Halo. It’s an AI agent - not a pop-up tool - that identifies when each shopper’s buying intent is highest, then resurfaces your welcome offer with creative matched to the ad that brought them in. This converts more visitors into CRM subscribers and welcome-flow customers, driving a 20–30% lift in first-time customer revenue across our brands. Get a demo of Greet Halo.

Book a Demo

Timing matters as much as creative

Most welcome offers appear within seconds of someone landing.

But very few shoppers are ready to act within five seconds. They need to browse, compare products, read reviews, and understand why they should trust you.

By the time their intent peaks, they can’t find the offer or forget about it and you’ll lose that person’s information like their email or phone number.

AI can now make that timing decision for each shopper by processing signals, movements, how the visitor behaves in real time and respond to what is happening in the moment.

🔌 This is where AI solutions can help and why we built Greet, our acquisition agent. It’s an AI agent - not a pop-up tool - that identifies when each shopper’s buying intent is highest, then resurfaces your welcome offer with creative matched to the ad that brought them in. This converts more visitors into CRM subscribers and welcome-flow customers, driving a 20–30% lift in first-time customer revenue across our brands. Get a demo of Greet.

Book a Demo

Segment the customers you already have - inside Claude

🎉We built a skill for Claude that does this for you! Download link is at the end of this section.

Growing your CRM list is only half the October work. The other half is understanding who is already on it.

Not every customer should receive the same BFCM message at the same time.

You want to know:

• Who are your most loyal customers?

• Who only buys during promotions?

• Who are your highest-value customers?

• Which one-time buyers are likely to purchase again?

• Who has strong cross-sell potential?

• Who may be ready to replenish or subscribe?

Your highest-value and most loyal customers should probably hear from you before everyone else.

Early access turns BFCM into recognition - not just another discount. It gives your best customers a reason to shop before inboxes become crowded and inventory starts disappearing.

We built a Claude skill that can get connected to your Shopify and email/sms platforms, analyzes your customer data and creates these segments for you.

🎉 [NEW!] Download Segmentation Skill

Join the Brands Using Greet AI to Grow Their CRM Lists on Autopilot

The work you do now determines how much you can convert in November. Grow your CRM list, capture shoppers when their intent is highest, and understand which customers deserve your attention first. The goal isn’t simply to collect more contacts - it’s to enter BFCM with a larger, better-understood audience you’re ready to convert.

Grow your CRM list on autopilot: Ground’s AI agents opt more visitors into your CRM, turn more of them into first-time customers, and continuously learn how to improve - without adding more work for your team.

‌See Ground's agents in Action

Introducing BFCM Compounded

A Series by Common Ground on How to Make BFCM Pay Off All Year.

Over the next few weeks, we’re excited to share that we’ll be publishing BFCM Compounded: a series of practical strategies, customer stories, AI workflows, and tools for what ecommerce teams should do before, during, and after BFCM.

If we haven’t met yet, this series is written by Ground’s team. Our AI revenue agents help 200+ consumer brands grow autonomously, converting more first-time customers and driving repeat purchases.

We’re fortunate to work with leading consumer brands across industries, giving us a close look at what they’re planning, where they’re struggling, what has worked before, and which small changes can unlock outsized revenue when traffic peaks.

We’re turning those learnings into resources your team can use immediately - to acquire more customers before BFCM, convert more of the traffic you’ve already paid for, and turn first-time holiday shoppers into repeat buyers long after Cyber Monday.

Because the best BFCM strategy doesn’t end with a November revenue spike.

It compounds.

BFCM Compounded: A Series on How to Make The Season Pay Off All Year

BFCM is a prime time to sell more. More importantly, it is your best opportunity to learn what customers want across the entire funnel.

Every visit, click, and purchase reveals something:

• What is this shopper interested in?

• Where are they in their journey?

• What will help them make their first purchase?

• Who could become a repeat buyer or subscriber?

• Who only purchases during promotions?

These insights should shape more than your messaging. They should inform how much capital you deploy, how you allocate ad spend, and how you turn first-time customers into profitable, long-term relationships.

For years, ecommerce technology could record transactions and execute predetermined flows, but it couldn’t understand every shopper, predict their next move, and respond at the right moment.

AI changes that.

Brands can now observe intent across the customer journey and act on it in real time - from first visit to first purchase, cross-sell, replenishment, and subscription.

That creates a new flywheel:

More traffic → more customer signals → smarter decisions → more conversions → more repeat revenue

That is the philosophy behind BFCM Compounded. Throughout this series, we’ll show you how to use BFCM to acquire more customers, understand them better, and generate revenue long after Cyber Monday.

This Series Is Brought to You by Ground AI

If we haven’t met, Ground’s AI agents help ecommerce brands acquire more customers and drive more repeat purchases.

They connect to your existing stack - including Shopify, your email and SMS platforms, and ad accounts - to determine which creative, offer, or product each shopper should see and when. The result: 30–50% more revenue from opportunities your current setup would otherwise miss. We’re proud to partner with leading brands including Makeup by Mario, MaryRuth Organics, Ghia, Heaven Mayhem, and many more.

If you want to see the revenue opportunities Ground can find across your acquisition, abandonment, and retention programs, book a consultation here.

Book a Call

The goal of this series

By the end of the series, you should have:

• A plan for growing your audience before BFCM

• A stronger offer and promotional calendar

• AI skills your team can download and use immediately

• A clearer connection between your paid campaigns and onsite experience

• A prioritized list of the flows worth changing

• A strategy for turning first-time BFCM buyers into repeat customers

• A better way to measure incremental revenue - not just attributed revenue

BFCM will always create a spike.

The opportunity is to turn that spike into a flywheel:

More traffic → more identified customers → more purchases → more customer data → smarter decisions → more repeat revenue.

That is the BFCM strategy we’ll be building over the next few weeks.

If you want to see the revenue opportunities Ground can find across your acquisition, abandonment, and retention programs, book a consultation here.

Book a Call

Join Ground for Dinner at Beauty Connect

Are you in LA on October 28th? We’re hosting an intimate, invite-only dinner in Santa Monica, bringing together a select group of beauty founders and operators for an evening of great food and conversation.
RSVP here to request your spot.

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Black Friday is 5 weeks out, and the standard playbook is already being written in a thousand planning docs: raise the ad budget, deepen the discount, send more email.

CPMs spike every November because every brand in your category floods the same auctions in the same four weeks - you’ll pay more per click in Q4 than at any other point in the year. So the brands that win BFCM aren’t the ones that buy the most traffic. They’re the ones that convert the most of the traffic they were already going to buy.

If I were running retention for a DTC brand right now, this is exactly what I’d do in order:

Project #1: Fix the Experience Between the Ad and the Landing Page

Start where the most expensive dollars are. If you’re increasing paid spend for BFCM - and nearly every brand does - the first place your money leaks is the three seconds after the click.

Someone clicks a piece of creative built around a specific need. A specific product. A specific color. A specific promise. And then they land on your site and hit a generic welcome offer that has nothing to do with what brought them there. The ad said one thing; the site says another. The thread breaks, and so does the conversion.

That break gets more expensive every day. During BFCM, when you’re paying peak auction prices for every visitor, it’s the single costliest gap in your funnel.

This is where AI agents are quietly pulling CAC back down. Connected directly to your ad platforms, your CRM, and your storefront, an agent can read which creative brought each visitor in - and reshape the on-site moment to match it. Same offer, same language, same promise. Then it carries that thread into the welcome flow that follows. More people opt in, and more of the ones who do actually convert, because the experience never stopped being the one the ad sold them.

🔌 This is exactly why we built Greet Halo. It connects to your ad platforms, reads the creative behind each click, and mirrors it in the on-site moment and through the welcome flow after it. Brands running it are seeing a 10% lift in first-time customer revenue. See Greet Halo run on your own ad account →

Book a Demo

Project #2: Audit Your Flows

Most brands haven’t looked hard at their flows since they were built. If I had to bet on what an honest audit would find in the median Klaviyo account fourteen weeks before Black Friday, it would be some mix of: segmentation that hasn’t been rethought since the list was a third of its current size, a welcome flow that treats a $200 ad-click visitor the same as an organic browser, and at least two revenue-critical flows - browse abandonment, post-purchase, winback - that simply don’t exist.

🔌 We built a pack of Claude skills that run this audit for you. Add them to your Claude, connect your Klaviyo, and it runs a full audit of your flows, segmentation, and structure - and tells you exactly what’s missing before Q4 traffic finds out for you. It’s free. Download the Retention Claude Pack →

Project #3: Install the Thing That Sells While You Sleep

What moves the needle, and the time to act on is now, is adding an intelligence layer that analyzes your customer data, finds the patterns behind what makes each buyer buy next - or when they’re ready to opt into a subscription or replenish - and then acts on its own when it gets the right signal. Not a dashboard that tells you what happened. An agent that sells more of your inventory while you’re running the rest of Q4.

🔌 This is exactly why we built ReBeat AI. It connects to your stack - Shopify, ads, your email and SMS system, your popup tool - reads purchase history alongside real-time browsing, and pulls the lever on its own when the signal is there. If someone’s due for a replenishment but suddenly browsing something else entirely, it catches the shift, reads the intent behind it, and surfaces the right product at the moment the desire is actually there. Replenishment, cross-sell, one-time-buyer-to-subscription - driven by what the customer is telling you right now, not by a calendar.

Book a Demo

Customer Story: Ground helped Chief Nutrition triple (3x) their DTC revenue!

Chief Nutrition is a health-focused brand making clean, whole-food snacks - beef jerky, protein bars, the kind of products people reorder when the timing is right. In under a year running Ground’s revenue agents, they tripled their DTC revenue. The receipts:

• 12x in repeat purchases, while growing subscriptions

• 15x ROI

Justin Babet, Co-founder & COO: “Ground AI is a great product! This is how all AI products should be - where it actually GROWS your business for you. It was a super easy onboarding and in 15 minutes Ground was up and running doing what it does best... lifting sales.”

Notice what’s in that quote and what isn’t. No replatform. No new headcount. No six-month implementation. Fifteen minutes of onboarding, and the acquisition side and the repeat side started compounding on each other - new customers in, repeat purchases up 12x behind them.

🔌 Ground AI drives up to 50% more email and SMS revenue with zero effort - scanning your site for revenue-generating opportunities from first-time visitor all the way to repeat buyer, and acting on them on its own. Get a BFCM-readiness read on your own store → Book your audit

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Before you spend more to acquire customers this BFCM, make sure your retention engine is ready to keep them.

Download Retention Skills for Claude

BFCM is when most brands look forward: bigger campaigns, more creative, higher spend, more traffic.

But one of the smartest things your team can do right now is look backward.

Which flows are missing? Which ones are underperforming? Which customers are getting the same message when they should be treated differently? And when the traffic spike is over, do you have the reporting in place to know what actually worked?

And you do not need a retention manager to do it.

So, we built something to help.

13 AI-powered retention skills for Claude. Free. Five-minute setup.

These are the guides we built for Claude to find retention gaps, packaged into downloadable skills your team can run inside Claude.

Here’s what’s inside:

• Build the flows you do not have: Audit your current email and SMS setup against a 15-flow benchmark map, find the gaps, and build complete Klaviyo-ready flows with triggers, timing, splits, and copy. That includes the programs brands often leave until too late: winback, replenishment, browse abandonment, and one-time-purchase-to-subscription.

• Fix the flows you already have: Review flow performance against current benchmarks, identify where revenue is leaking, and get specific recommendations for what to change. It can optimize your welcome series, coordinate cart, browse, and checkout recovery, and build a stronger churn-prevention system before BFCM volume hits.

• Segment your audience better: Build RFM, engagement, lifecycle, and suppression segments. Map the customer journey to find where an automation should exist but does not. Create dynamic content and personalization logic so every customer is not getting the same message on the same schedule.

• Protect deliverability: Audit authentication, sender reputation, list health, and Gmail and Yahoo compliance before your sending volume spikes. Because the best BFCM offer in the world does not matter if it lands in spam.

• Plan and report: Build your BFCM campaign calendar, tighten your SMS strategy and compliance, and create retention dashboards with cohort analysis and executive-ready reporting.

All of it runs inside Claude. You describe what you need in plain English. It picks the right skill and gives you a ready-to-use deliverable.

Prompts to start with:

Audit my email flows. I have welcome, cart abandonment, and post-purchase. What am I missing before BFCM?

Or:

Review the performance of my winback flow and tell me what to change.

The brands that win BFCM are the ones that prepare for the second purchase before the first one happens.

Acquisition gets most of the attention in Q4. But a record weekend of first-time orders is only as valuable as the system waiting on the other side of it.

The window to clean that system up is now.

These skills exist because we believe every brand should be able to see what is missing, fix what is underperforming, and walk into BFCM with a retention engine it trusts - even without a dedicated retention hire.

Download Skills for Claude

Brought to you by Ground AI

🔌 Ground AI is the leading AI partner powering DTC brands like MaryRuth Organics, Makeup by Mario, Heaven Mayhem and many more.
With its suite of AI revenue agents, ground grows both customer acquisition and repeat purchases autonomously in a zero effort way.
Brands using Ground see 30-50% more first-time revenue and repeat purchase revenue up 2-4x.Want to learn more about Ground? Book a demo.

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Finding Common Ground

The Ground community comes together sharing different stories, but common ground.

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The prevailing narrative about AI agents in commerce is seductive and mostly wrong: the customer asks, the agent buys, friction disappears, done.

That’s not how people shop. The real shift isn’t at checkout - it’s in the moment before someone decides to buy, where discovery, trust, and intent collide. And with Q4 weeks away, the brands that understand that moment are about to pull ahead of the ones still waiting for one-click commerce to save them.

Top of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel - at the Same Time

Agentic traffic breaks the funnel diagram. It’s top-of-funnel, because many of these customers have never heard of you until ChatGPT said your name. And it’s bottom-of-funnel, because they land with product knowledge, comparison context, and a decision half-made.

Some will trust their agent completely and convert on the spot. Others treat the recommendation as a starting point - landing on your site to explore, evaluate, and decide on their own terms. The journey is fluid and individual, and your brand needs an answer for both ends of it.

The Make-or-Break Moment

When someone clicks through from ChatGPT, you’re holding the most valuable visitor in ecommerce: pre-qualified, high-intent, hand-delivered. They might already be sold on the product - now they want to be sold on the brand. They’re validating the trust they placed in their agent, and if the validation lands, the selling part is easy.

If your site experience is generic, your capture timing is off, or your personalization is a first-name merge tag, you just dropped a customer an AI walked to your door. This isn’t cold traffic. It isn’t even paid traffic. It’s AI-qualified traffic, and it needs a different experience entirely.

Why This Is Exactly What Ground Was Built For

This landing moment is the problem Ground’s AI exists to solve. Our system reads intent signals from live visitor behavior, adapts messaging and timing to how each person is actually engaging, personalizes discovery to the context they arrived with, and times capture so it enhances the research instead of interrupting it - then hands off cleanly into nurture that builds the relationship.

No manual segmentation, no predicting every scenario in advance. It learns from how customers actually behave, not how you guessed they might.

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The Trust Variable Nobody’s Talking About

How much research a customer does before converting depends on how much they trust their agent - and that varies wildly by category, price point, and personal comfort. Office supplies and replenishment items? The agent can buy. Premium skincare, furniture, anything with fit or aesthetics attached? Customers want to look you in the eye first. Fashion, beauty, and wellness - where brand values are part of the product - demand discovery.

The smart move is to optimize for both extremes: make instant conversion effortless for the ready, and make discovery exceptional for the researchers. Then let your AI adapt to the individual signals instead of forcing everyone down one path.

What to Test in Q4

Working across hundreds of brands navigating this shift, here’s what we’d test now, while there’s still runway before peak season: capture timing for AI-referred visitors (they engage differently - find the moment that doesn’t break their research); nurture sequences built for agent-referred discovery rather than recycled cold-traffic flows; and conversion patterns by product - which SKUs convert instantly through AI checkout and which drive site visits first. That data is your agentic strategy.

The brands treating this as a live experiment will own the learnings. The ones waiting for “best practices” will be reading about them in someone else’s case study.

The Shift Is Already Happening

Customers are already shopping through AI recommendations - this stopped being a future-state conversation months ago. The only open question is whether your site is ready when they arrive with high intent, specific expectations, and a short attention span.

The customers are coming. Are you ready to convert them?

Book a Demo

Curated Intelligence

• Evercore’s new consumer survey: 57% of shoppers say Amazon’s AI assistant helped them buy products they hadn’t previously considered, and 36.4% report spending more on Amazon because of it. Agents are expanding baskets, not just fulfilling them. (Retailgentic)

• OpenAI’s ads platform crossed $1 billion in revenue just 200 days after launch - a milestone that took Amazon roughly five years. Discovery attention is repricing fast. (Retailgentic)

• BCG’s study of 13,000+ consumers across 12 markets found AI introduces shoppers to new brands in 63% of AI-assisted journeys. (Retailgentic)

• The peak-season readiness gap: 65% of consumers plan to use AI for holiday shopping, while only 8% of retailers say they’re “very confident” in their agentic capabilities. (Retailgentic)

Subscribe to Artificial Beauty

Before we get into this week’s issue, we have something new to share.

Common Ground grew to 25,000 executive leaders, reading it every week (which is still a little wild to say out loud!) 🎉. The love we’re getting from all of you made us wonder what a more focused version could look like for one category we know especially well.

So, we launched a spin-off just for beauty leaders: Artificial Beauty.

At Ground, we’re lucky to work with 100+ beauty brands, including Tower 28, U Beauty, VIOLETTE_FR, and many more. That gives us a front-row seat to the category and to the practical questions beauty teams are working through every day.

Every week, we’ll be sharing honest insights and lessons from the industry: what we’re learning, what is changing, and what it actually takes to build a beauty brand from the ground up - or scale one without losing the plot - in the age of AI.

If you’re a beauty founder, leader, marketer, or simply someone trying to build great products and grow a business, subscribe to Artificial Beauty.

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If beauty isn’t your category, stay with us. The question at the heart of today’s issue applies to almost every consumer brand with a product customers need to buy again.

How do you turn repeat purchases into subscriptions? and how AI can help?

A customer buys your hero product. Then buys it again. Then again.

Your product has earned a place in their routine. But every refill still depends on them remembering to come back, finding the right product, and checking out.

You might already have a subscription option on the product page. But a customer who declined it before trying the product may feel differently after finishing their second - or third.

Does your marketing recognize that change? We have an answer for that.

Refill intent and subscription intent are fundamentally different - and your CRM probably can’t tell them apart.

Here is a useful exercise for your next CRM review. Pick your strongest replenishable product and ask:

• How many repeat buyers are still purchasing it one order at a time?

• What subscription invitation do they receive after they have experienced the product?

• When does that invitation arrive, and what determines the timing?

• Does it explain the ongoing price, delivery options, and flexibility clearly?

Doing this for one customer is straightforward. Keeping the timing, product, and message relevant across thousands of customers takes more work.

Purchase history provides one part of the picture. Current browsing can add another. A customer may be approaching their usual reorder window while browsing a different product. Another may have just replenished and no longer need the reminder you planned to send.

AI can help interpret those signals and decide which opportunity to act on. The practical questions are specific: what might this customer need next, when is an invitation useful, and is a refill or a subscription the more relevant next step?

This is where the topic connects to what we build at Ground.

Ground is the AI partner powering retention-focused revenue agents for leading consumer brands. ReBeat Arc, our subscription growth agent, analyzes purchase history and millions of onsite behavioral signals to identify the optimal creative, SKU, timing, and offer - converting repeat one-time buyers into loyal subscribers.

🔌 Curious how Ground’s agentic solutions can drive more repeat purchases and subscription growth? Book a demo with our team.

See ReBeat in Action

Customer story: How Ground Helps Adapt Naturals Drive Subscription Growth with AI

Ground became Adapt Natural’s AI partner in 2024. Three of Ground's revenue agents - Greet AI, ReCartify, and ReBeat AI - went to work side by side, 24/7: one converting more of the traffic already landing on the store, one reclaiming returning shoppers who'd slipped into anonymity, and one turning more first-time shoppers into subscribers.

After partnering with Ground, Adapt Naturals Almost Doubled Their Subscription Revenue.

🔌 Book a call with Ground to talk strategy and See how Ground approaches repeat-purchase and subscription opportunities in a demo.

Book a Demo

Where to Start Today: Build the Right Subscription Flows, and Power Them with Intelligence

1. Build the necessary flows

Start with one product, one audience, and one clear subscription invitation. Decide who reviews the creative and how the journey interacts with campaigns already running. Exclude existing subscribers from offers for the same subscription, and stop reminders when someone has already reordered.

After signup, let customers manage their delivery timing. If they repeatedly have too much product, a longer interval may be more useful than another retention discount.

2. Understand when a subscription offer fits naturally into each customer’s purchasing habits.

For your brand, the next step is to identify where that promise fits an existing purchase habit.

This is what AI can understand and act on. In a demo, we’ll walk you through ReBeat’s approach, explore how it fits into your current setup, and show how it autonomously identifies the best opportunities to grow subscription revenue.

Book a Demo

Curated Intelligence

1. Will AI agents turn brands into interchangeable suppliers? Read more

2. Dreamforce 2026: The shift from software interfaces to intelligent agents. Read more

3. Why digital identity is becoming core business infrastructure? Read more

Learn More

Most BFCM plans start with the same strategy: buy more traffic.

But more traffic does not automatically create more revenue. It sends more shoppers into the same customer journey you already have.

Before spending another dollar on acquisition, there are two more important questions to answer:

• How will you turn more BFCM visitors into first-time customer revenue?

• How will you bring those new customers back after the discounts end?

It’s one thing to help shoppers discover your brand inside ChatGPT, TikTok Shop or your Meta ads. But discovery is only the beginning. It does not convert the visitor once they arrive, identify the anonymous shopper, or generate their next purchase.

That is where revenue agents come in.

A revenue agent is AI responsible for a specific revenue outcome - such as first-time conversion, customer identification, retention, or repeat purchases. Instead of waiting for someone to interact with a chatbot, it works in the background, recognizes revenue opportunities, and acts on them.

So before we explain how revenue agents can help brands capture more value from BFCM traffic, here is the simple breakdown.

AI x Ecommerce Terminology at a Glance

💡 Revenue agent: autonomous AI tied to a revenue outcome. Conversion, retention, repeat purchases, upsells, abandoned carts, customer activation. This is our world. Ground’s revenue agents drive new DTC revenue for brands like Glossier, U Beauty, Tower 28, and MaryRuth Organics.

💡 Ambient agent: AI that works invisibly in the background. You do not prompt it. It watches for signals, notices when something matters, and acts or escalates at the right moment.

💡 AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): shaping your content to be the direct, short answer a model gives.

💡 GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): shaping how your brand gets cited and synthesized across conversational AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.

The agents are here, and the market is not subtle about it. Salesforce has shipped its shopper agents, and the executive running its commerce business did not hedge: “If you don’t have agentic live as of yesterday morning, you’re already behind.” Bain projects agentic commerce will reach $300 to $500 billion by 2030, up to a quarter of all US online retail.

But brands have seen this movie twice before, and both times it ended the same way.

From Product Discovery to Autonomous New or Repeat Customer Growth

The internet disintermediates - cuts out the middleman between - the brand and its customer about once a decade, and it always arrives disguised as a convenience.

Search came first. Google made discovery effortless, and then brands spent twenty years paying rent, in SEO and SEM, to reach customers who were already looking for them.

Social came second. Meta and TikTok made attention effortless, and then brands paid rent again, in ad spend, and lost the direct line to their audience. iOS 14 was the reminder of how fragile rented reach is. One privacy update, and the targeting a lot of brands had built their business on stopped working overnight.

Agents are the third wave. LLMs are making the entire purchase effortless, from discovery to checkout. This time the rent is not just attention. It is the transaction and the first-party data too.

Every wave, the same brands won: the ones who built something they owned instead of only renting reach.

What the Shopping Agent Takes

When a shopping agent stands between a brand and its customer, the sale might still happen, but the brand loses everything around it. The relationship. The first-party data. The cross-sell. The ad inventory it used to monetize. The agent keeps the shopper. The brand becomes a supplier.

This is not hypothetical. 71% of marketing leaders already say AI agents have weakened their direct connection to customers. Salesforce drew the line itself: there is a difference between shopping inside an LLM and shopping on your own site, where you keep control of the transaction and the data.

What a Revenue Agent Does Before and After BFCM

A revenue agent is the part you own, and it is ambient by nature. It works in the background on your own site, greeting the visitor who lands, learning who they are, converting them, and bringing them back. Every one of those moments does two jobs at once. It drives revenue, and it keeps the relationship and the data on your side of the table.

During BFCM, that means converting more of the expensive traffic you worked hard to acquire. After BFCM, it means turning more of those first-time buyers into repeat customers instead of letting the relationship disappear when the promotion ends.

The winning move is not to fight the shopping agents. It is to do both: show up inside the shopping agents so you stay discoverable, and own the revenue agent that keeps the customer once they arrive.

Join Brands Already Optimizing for Revenue With Ground’s Revenue Agents

🔌 Ground’s AI works inside your Klaviyo and Shopify stack, greeting every visitor, converting the ready buyer, and bringing the lapsed customer back, all while the relationship and the data stay yours. Brands using Ground see 30–50% more first-time revenue and 2–4x higher repeat-purchase revenue. Setup takes 15 minutes.

Book a Demo

What This Means for Your BFCM Strategy

Every brand has two jobs this BFCM: get discovered and turn that attention into durable revenue. AEO, GEO, and paid acquisition can bring shoppers to your brand. Revenue agents help convert more of those shoppers into first-time customers - and bring them back for their next purchase.

Being discoverable inside a shopping agent is rent. Owning the agent that keeps your customer is real estate. The brands that win the agentic era will be the ones who see the difference early, the same way the winners of search and social did.

When an agent finally makes the sale, the only question that matters is who keeps the customer.

Before You Buy More BFCM Traffic

Make sure your brand is ready to earn more from the traffic it already has. The brands that win this season will not simply acquire more shoppers. They will deploy revenue agents to convert more of them, learn from them, and bring them back after BFCM ends.

See how Ground’s revenue agents can grow your first-time and repeat-purchase revenue.

Curated Intelligence

• How Salesforce is positioning for the agentic landscape. Shopper agents, and the line between selling inside an LLM and selling on your own site. Digital Commerce 360, Jul 2026. Read More

• Who gets to transact. A sharp map of the agentic commerce stack and where the value is actually accruing. Activant Capital. Read More

• Agentic commerce is an engagement problem, not just a transaction one. Why brands risk losing the direct relationship, and what to do about it. Braze. Read More

• AI agents for ecommerce: what is real and what is hype. A clear-eyed taxonomy of the agent categories brands are being sold. DTC Skills. Read More

• The agency-led ecommerce model is changing. Why continuous agentic execution is outpacing campaign-cycle agency work. CommerceIQ / MartechView, Jun 2026. Read More

BFCM is the most important time to make your tech stack work harder, and the worst time to rebuild it.

Book a Demo

In the lead-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, every DTC operator asks the same question: What can we change now to acquire more customers and generate more revenue when traffic peaks?

It is the right question. But this close to the holidays, the answer probably is not a new CRM, loyalty platform, popup provider, or complete lifecycle overhaul. Fundamental changes introduce risk at the exact moment your team needs stability.

The better opportunity is to make the stack you already have more intelligent.

Brands like Heaven Mayhem and MaryRuth Organics are doing this with a new class of technology called ambient agents. These agents continuously read shopper intent and decide when to surface the right message, offer, or product-without waiting for a marketer to create another segment or launch another campaign.

They do not replace the tools you already rely on. They add a decision-making layer on top of them.

And before BFCM, that may be your biggest unlock.

What Are Ambient Agents?

Ambient agents are AI agents that operate quietly in the background, responding to events and making decisions within the guardrails a brand sets.

Traditional automation follows fixed rules: if a shopper takes action X, send message Y after Z hours. Ambient agents can interpret the shopper’s behavior as it happens and decide on the next best action.

They answer questions like:

• When is the right moment to offer a discount? This shopper has returned to the same product three times and appears close to buying. A timely incentive could convert them without discounting every visitor.

• Which product are they most interested in right now? Their latest session may reveal more intent than the static segment they entered weeks ago.

• Which message should come next? A shopper comparing two SKUs needs something different from a shopper who abandoned checkout or returned to replenish a product.

On Shopify, ambient agents can observe millions of behavioral data points across the customer journey and respond like a top sales associate: attentive, well-timed, and relevant.

The important part is what they do not have to change. They do not need to generate new creative, rewrite your copy, or invent off-brand offers. Your team sets up the approved emails, SMS messages, creatives, and discounts. The agent decides who should receive what, for which SKU, and at what moment.

The brand stays in control. The decision-making becomes continuous.

🔌 Don’t miss the opportunity to act on ambient agents before holiday traffic peaks. Book a call with Ground to talk strategy and see how AI can elevate your Shopify performance. Ground’s agentic technology has powered more than $2B in GMV.

Book a Demo

Why It Matters to Act Before Black Friday and Cyber Monday

BFCM brings more traffic, more competition, and more buying intent than almost any other moment of the year. Ambient agents help brands get more value from that surge without asking the team to rebuild its stack at the eleventh hour.

1. Control rising acquisition costs

Ambient agents give each visit a better chance of turning into revenue. By recognizing intent in real time, they can surface the right product or approved offer when a shopper is most receptive - not simply when a generic timer expires.

That means more value from the traffic you already paid to acquire.

2. Capture more leads you can convert later

Not every BFCM visitor will buy on the first session. That does not make the visit worthless.

Even if they leave without purchasing, you have earned permission to continue the conversation. More qualified emails and phone numbers in your CRM mean more opportunities to convert holiday browsers during the rest of the season - and beyond it.

3. Turn return visits into repeat purchases

A first-time shopper, a gift buyer, and a returning customer should not receive the same experience. Their context is different. Their intent is different. Your response should be different, too.

This is where personalization moves beyond a first name in a subject line. It becomes a decision made around the shopper’s actual behavior.

Your Checklist for Maximizing Holiday Revenue

BFCM preparation is not about adding as many tools as possible. It is about making sure every part of the journey is ready to capture the demand you are about to create.

1. Lock in your flows before you touch campaigns

Browse, cart, and checkout abandonment flows do the quiet work during BFCM, when traffic and intent are at their peak.

2. Warm your list now, not on Black Friday

Brands that jump from one email a week to three emails a day on Black Friday risk landing in spam when visibility matters most.

Increase volume gradually with engaged segments.

3. Plan the post-purchase moment as carefully as the sale

Holiday buyers can become your most efficient source of Q1 revenue - if you give them a reason to return.

Build a first-time buyer flow. Create a way to identify gift purchases and capture gift recipients where appropriate.

4. Put real-time intent to work

Your existing flows can only act on the triggers they receive. Ambient agents add a richer layer of intent.

This is how you expand personalization without expanding the holiday workload.

Book a Demo

🔌 Don’t miss the opportunity to act on ambient agents before holiday traffic peaks. Book a call with Ground to talk strategy and see how AI can elevate your Shopify performance. Ground’s agentic technology has powered more than $2B in GMV.

If You Add Just One Thing to Your E-commerce Stack Before BFCM, It Should be Revenue Agents

The first era of DTC personalization was segmentation. The next was automation. Ambient agents are the next step: continuous decisions based on live intent.

BFCM will bring the traffic. The brands that win will be the ones prepared to understand it.

Your competitors are planning bigger campaigns. The real advantage may be making every shopper interaction smarter.

🔌 Don’t miss the opportunity to act on ambient agents before holiday traffic peaks. Book a call with Ground to talk strategy and see how AI can elevate your Shopify performance. Ground’s agentic technology has powered more than $2B in GMV.

Book a Demo

Learn More About Ambient Agents

• Ambient Agents and the New Agent Inbox (Sequoia’s Inference, with Harrison Chase)

• LangChain founder on why ambient agents are the future (CO/AI)

Lately we’ve had a tough time keeping up with all the jargon in the AI E-commerce space and it’s getting a little out of hand. Revenue agents, ambient agents, AEO, GEO, agentic this, autonomous that. Half of it is the same few ideas wearing different labels. So before we get to the one that actually decides who owns your customer, here is the simple breakdown.

Learn More

AI x Ecommerce Terminology at a Glance

💡 Revenue agent: autonomous AI tied to a revenue outcome. Conversion, retention, repeat purchases, upsells, abandoned carts, customer activation. This is our world. Ground’s revenue agents drive new DTC revenue for brands like Makeup by Mario, U Beauty, Tower28, and MaryRuth Organics.

💡 Ambient agent: AI that works invisibly in the background. You do not prompt it. It watches for signals, notices when something matters, and acts or escalates at the right moment.

💡 AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): shaping your content to be the direct, short answer a model gives.

💡 GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): shaping how your brand gets cited and synthesized across conversational AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.

Notice the split already. AEO and GEO are about getting found inside someone else’s AI. A revenue agent is about what happens on your own turf. Hold onto that difference, because it is the whole story.

The agents are here, and the market is not subtle about it. Salesforce shipped its shopper agents this month, and the executive running its commerce business did not hedge: “If you don’t have agentic live as of yesterday morning, you’re already behind.” Bain projects agentic commerce will reach $300 to $500 billion by 2030, up to a quarter of all US online retail. But brands have seen this movie twice before, and both times it ended the same way.

This Is the Third Time the Industry’s Felt a Shift

The internet disintermediates (cuts out the middle man of) the brand and its customer about once a decade, and it always arrives disguised as a convenience.

Search came first. Google made discovery effortless, and then brands spent twenty years paying rent, in SEO and SEM, to reach customers who were already looking for them.

Social came second. Meta and TikTok made attention effortless, and then brands paid rent again, in ad spend, and lost the direct line to their audience. iOS 14 was the reminder of how fragile rented reach is. One privacy update, and the targeting a lot of brands had built their business on stopped working overnight.

Agents are the third wave. LLMs are making the entire purchase effortless, from discovery to checkout. This time the rent is not just attention. It is the transaction and the first-party data too.

Every wave, the same brands won: the ones who built something they owned instead of only renting reach.

Book a Demo

What the Shopping Agent Takes

When a shopping agent stands between a brand and its customer, the sale might still happen, but the brand loses everything around it. The relationship. The first-party data. The cross-sell. The ad inventory it used to monetize. The agent keeps the shopper. The brand becomes a supplier.

This is not hypothetical. 71% of marketing leaders already say AI agents have weakened their direct connection to customers. Salesforce drew the line itself: there is a difference between shopping inside an LLM and shopping on your own site, where you keep control of the transaction and the data.

What a Revenue Agent Does

A revenue agent is the part you own, and it is ambient by nature. It works in the background on your own site, greeting the visitor who lands, learning who they are, converting them, and bringing them back. Every one of those moments does two jobs at once. It drives revenue, and it keeps the relationship and the data on your side of the table.

The winning move is not to fight the shopping agents. It is to do both: show up inside the shopping agents so you stay discoverable, and own the revenue agent that keeps the customer once they arrive.

Join Brands Who Are Already Optimizing for Revenue With Ground’s Revenue Agents

🔌 Ground’s AI works inside your Klaviyo and Shopify stack, greeting every visitor, converting the ready buyer, and bringing the lapsed customer back, all while the relationship and the data stay yours. Brands using Ground see 30-50% more first-time revenue and 2-4x higher repeat purchase revenue. Setup takes 15 minutes.

Learn More

Ground has a suite of agents, each tasked with a different ecommerce revenue KPI to optimize for. Greet AI owns the first-touch conversion. ReCartify resolves identity. ReBeat owns retention. Terra knows your repetitive tasks as a marketer and do them for you. All designed to increase the revenue you’re not capturing.

What Discovery Means Now For Consumer Brands

Every brand faces the same choice now. Feed your customers into someone else’s agent, or run one of your own.

Being discoverable inside a shopping agent is rent. Owning the agent that keeps your customer is real estate. The brands that win the agentic era will be the ones who see the difference early, the same way the winners of search and social did.

When an agent finally makes the sale, the only question that matters is who keeps the customer.

Book a Call to See Ground in Action

Curated Intelligence

• How Salesforce is positioning for the agentic landscape. Shopper agents, and the line between selling inside an LLM and selling on your own site. Digital Commerce 360, Jul 2026. Read More

• Who gets to transact. A sharp map of the agentic commerce stack and where the value is actually accruing. Activant Capital. Read More

• Agentic commerce is an engagement problem, not just a transaction one. Why brands risk losing the direct relationship, and what to do about it. Braze. Read More

• AI agents for ecommerce: what is real and what is hype. A clear-eyed taxonomy of the agent categories brands are being sold. DTC Skills. Read More

• The agency-led ecommerce model is changing. Why continuous agentic execution is outpacing campaign-cycle agency work. CommerceIQ / MartechView, Jun 2026. Read More

  Thanks for reading Common Ground! Subscribe for free to receive new posts about AI x Commerce.

BFCM is the most important time to make your tech stack work harder, and the worst time to rebuild it.

Book a Demo

In the lead-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, every DTC operator asks the same question: What can we change now to acquire more customers and generate more revenue when traffic peaks?

It is the right question. But this close to the holidays, the answer probably is not a new CRM, loyalty platform, popup provider, or complete lifecycle overhaul. Fundamental changes introduce risk at the exact moment your team needs stability.

The better opportunity is to make the stack you already have more intelligent.

Brands like Heaven Mayhem and MaryRuth Organics are doing this with a new class of technology called ambient agents. These agents continuously read shopper intent and decide when to surface the right message, offer, or product-without waiting for a marketer to create another segment or launch another campaign.

They do not replace the tools you already rely on. They add a decision-making layer on top of them.

And before BFCM, that may be your biggest unlock.

What Are Ambient Agents?

Ambient agents are AI agents that operate quietly in the background, responding to events and making decisions within the guardrails a brand sets.

Traditional automation follows fixed rules: if a shopper takes action X, send message Y after Z hours. Ambient agents can interpret the shopper’s behavior as it happens and decide on the next best action.

They answer questions like:

• When is the right moment to offer a discount? This shopper has returned to the same product three times and appears close to buying. A timely incentive could convert them without discounting every visitor.

• Which product are they most interested in right now? Their latest session may reveal more intent than the static segment they entered weeks ago.

• Which message should come next? A shopper comparing two SKUs needs something different from a shopper who abandoned checkout or returned to replenish a product.

On Shopify, ambient agents can observe millions of behavioral data points across the customer journey and respond like a top sales associate: attentive, well-timed, and relevant.

The important part is what they do not have to change. They do not need to generate new creative, rewrite your copy, or invent off-brand offers. Your team sets up the approved emails, SMS messages, creatives, and discounts. The agent decides who should receive what, for which SKU, and at what moment.

The brand stays in control. The decision-making becomes continuous.

🔌 Don’t miss the opportunity to act on ambient agents before holiday traffic peaks. Book a call with Ground to talk strategy and see how AI can elevate your Shopify performance. Ground’s agentic technology has powered more than $2B in GMV.

Book a Demo

Why It Matters to Act Before Black Friday and Cyber Monday

BFCM brings more traffic, more competition, and more buying intent than almost any other moment of the year. Ambient agents help brands get more value from that surge without asking the team to rebuild its stack at the eleventh hour.

1. Control rising acquisition costs

Ambient agents give each visit a better chance of turning into revenue. By recognizing intent in real time, they can surface the right product or approved offer when a shopper is most receptive - not simply when a generic timer expires.

That means more value from the traffic you already paid to acquire.

2. Capture more leads you can convert later

Not every BFCM visitor will buy on the first session. That does not make the visit worthless.

Even if they leave without purchasing, you have earned permission to continue the conversation. More qualified emails and phone numbers in your CRM mean more opportunities to convert holiday browsers during the rest of the season - and beyond it.

3. Turn return visits into repeat purchases

A first-time shopper, a gift buyer, and a returning customer should not receive the same experience. Their context is different. Their intent is different. Your response should be different, too.

This is where personalization moves beyond a first name in a subject line. It becomes a decision made around the shopper’s actual behavior.

Your Checklist for Maximizing Holiday Revenue

BFCM preparation is not about adding as many tools as possible. It is about making sure every part of the journey is ready to capture the demand you are about to create.

1. Lock in your flows before you touch campaigns

Browse, cart, and checkout abandonment flows do the quiet work during BFCM, when traffic and intent are at their peak.

2. Warm your list now, not on Black Friday

Brands that jump from one email a week to three emails a day on Black Friday risk landing in spam when visibility matters most.

Increase volume gradually with engaged segments.

3. Plan the post-purchase moment as carefully as the sale

Holiday buyers can become your most efficient source of Q1 revenue - if you give them a reason to return.

Build a first-time buyer flow. Create a way to identify gift purchases and capture gift recipients where appropriate.

4. Put real-time intent to work

Your existing flows can only act on the triggers they receive. Ambient agents add a richer layer of intent.

This is how you expand personalization without expanding the holiday workload.

Book a Demo

🔌 Don’t miss the opportunity to act on ambient agents before holiday traffic peaks. Book a call with Ground to talk strategy and see how AI can elevate your Shopify performance. Ground’s agentic technology has powered more than $2B in GMV.

The Next Era of Personalization Is Already Running in the Background

The first era of DTC personalization was segmentation. The next was automation. Ambient agents are the next step: continuous decisions based on live intent.

BFCM will bring the traffic. The brands that win will be the ones prepared to understand it.

Your competitors are planning bigger campaigns. The real advantage may be making every shopper interaction smarter.

🔌 Don’t miss the opportunity to act on ambient agents before holiday traffic peaks. Book a call with Ground to talk strategy and see how AI can elevate your Shopify performance. Ground’s agentic technology has powered more than $2B in GMV.

Book a Demo

Learn More About Ambient Agents

• Ambient Agents and the New Agent Inbox (Sequoia’s Inference, with Harrison Chase)

• LangChain founder on why ambient agents are the future (CO/AI)

Join Ground

📍 Catching us at Shoptalk Nashville? We will be on the floor September 29th & 30th. Grab a time to meet us here

Common Ground is Ground’s newsletter highlighting the most important consumer news, tech trends, artificial intelligence, in-depth analysis, along with a few extra thoughts from our team. Subscribe today to get the latest issue delivered to your inbox.

Lately we’ve had a tough time keeping up with all the jargon in the AI E-commerce space and it’s getting a little out of hand. Revenue agents, ambient agents, AEO, GEO, agentic this, autonomous that. Half of it is the same few ideas wearing different labels. So before we get to the one that actually decides who owns your customer, here is the simple breakdown.

Learn More

AI x Ecommerce Terminology at a Glance

💡 Revenue agent: autonomous AI tied to a revenue outcome. Conversion, retention, repeat purchases, upsells, abandoned carts, customer activation. This is our world. Ground’s revenue agents drive new DTC revenue for brands like Glossier, U Beauty, Tower28, and MaryRuth Organics.

💡 Ambient agent: AI that works invisibly in the background. You do not prompt it. It watches for signals, notices when something matters, and acts or escalates at the right moment.

💡 AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): shaping your content to be the direct, short answer a model gives.

💡 GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): shaping how your brand gets cited and synthesized across conversational AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.

Notice the split already. AEO and GEO are about getting found inside someone else’s AI. A revenue agent is about what happens on your own turf. Hold onto that difference, because it is the whole story.

The agents are here, and the market is not subtle about it. Salesforce shipped its shopper agents this month, and the executive running its commerce business did not hedge: “If you don’t have agentic live as of yesterday morning, you’re already behind.” Bain projects agentic commerce will reach $300 to $500 billion by 2030, up to a quarter of all US online retail. But brands have seen this movie twice before, and both times it ended the same way.

This Is the Third Time the Industry’s Felt a Shift

The internet disintermediates (cuts out the middle man of) the brand and its customer about once a decade, and it always arrives disguised as a convenience.

Search came first. Google made discovery effortless, and then brands spent twenty years paying rent, in SEO and SEM, to reach customers who were already looking for them.

Social came second. Meta and TikTok made attention effortless, and then brands paid rent again, in ad spend, and lost the direct line to their audience. iOS 14 was the reminder of how fragile rented reach is. One privacy update, and the targeting a lot of brands had built their business on stopped working overnight.

Agents are the third wave. LLMs are making the entire purchase effortless, from discovery to checkout. This time the rent is not just attention. It is the transaction and the first-party data too.

Every wave, the same brands won: the ones who built something they owned instead of only renting reach.

Book a Demo

What the Shopping Agent Takes

When a shopping agent stands between a brand and its customer, the sale might still happen, but the brand loses everything around it. The relationship. The first-party data. The cross-sell. The ad inventory it used to monetize. The agent keeps the shopper. The brand becomes a supplier.

This is not hypothetical. 71% of marketing leaders already say AI agents have weakened their direct connection to customers. Salesforce drew the line itself: there is a difference between shopping inside an LLM and shopping on your own site, where you keep control of the transaction and the data.

What a Revenue Agent Does

A revenue agent is the part you own, and it is ambient by nature. It works in the background on your own site, greeting the visitor who lands, learning who they are, converting them, and bringing them back. Every one of those moments does two jobs at once. It drives revenue, and it keeps the relationship and the data on your side of the table.

The winning move is not to fight the shopping agents. It is to do both: show up inside the shopping agents so you stay discoverable, and own the revenue agent that keeps the customer once they arrive.

Join Brands Who Are Already Optimizing for Revenue With Ground’s Revenue Agents

🔌 Ground’s AI works inside your Klaviyo and Shopify stack, greeting every visitor, converting the ready buyer, and bringing the lapsed customer back, all while the relationship and the data stay yours. Brands using Ground see 30-50% more first-time revenue and 2-4x higher repeat purchase revenue. Setup takes 15 minutes.

Learn More

Ground has a suite of agents, each tasked with a different ecommerce revenue KPI to optimize for. Greet AI owns the first-touch conversion. ReCartify resolves identity. ReBeat owns retention. Terra knows your repetitive tasks as a marketer and do them for you. All designed to increase the revenue you’re not capturing.

What Discovery Means Now For Consumer Brands

Every brand faces the same choice now. Feed your customers into someone else’s agent, or run one of your own.

Being discoverable inside a shopping agent is rent. Owning the agent that keeps your customer is real estate. The brands that win the agentic era will be the ones who see the difference early, the same way the winners of search and social did.

When an agent finally makes the sale, the only question that matters is who keeps the customer.

Book a Call to See Ground in Action

See You at Shoptalk

We’re on the floor at Shoptalk and would love to connect in person. Our co-founder and co-CEO, Kat Garcia, is meeting with DTC leaders on September 29th and 20th to talk through how to navigate the AI commerce landscape right now: what’s working, what’s noise, and how lean brands are building real revenue with AI.

If you want to sit down and get a real read on where things are heading, book time with Kat here.

Curated Intelligence

• How Salesforce is positioning for the agentic landscape. Shopper agents, and the line between selling inside an LLM and selling on your own site. Digital Commerce 360, Jul 2026. Read More

• Who gets to transact. A sharp map of the agentic commerce stack and where the value is actually accruing. Activant Capital. Read More

• Agentic commerce is an engagement problem, not just a transaction one. Why brands risk losing the direct relationship, and what to do about it. Braze. Read More

• AI agents for ecommerce: what is real and what is hype. A clear-eyed taxonomy of the agent categories brands are being sold. DTC Skills. Read More

• The agency-led ecommerce model is changing. Why continuous agentic execution is outpacing campaign-cycle agency work. CommerceIQ / MartechView, Jun 2026. Read More

  Thanks for reading Common Ground! Subscribe for free to receive new posts about AI x Commerce.

📍 Join Ground for an intimate dinner at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville

We’re bringing together a small group of founders, CMOs, and ecommerce leaders for a candid roundtable on AI and growth.

If we haven’t met, Ground is the AI partner powering intelligent revenue growth for brands including Violette_FR, U Beauty, Heaven Mayhem, and many more.

Seats are intentionally limited. Our community team will review each request so we can curate a table of people with useful perspectives who will genuinely enjoy one another’s company.

Request a seat →

Join Ground

What AI Can Do Now: Map What Each Customer Is Most Likely to Buy Next

Most brands know which products sell the most, so they feature those products in their win-back flows. That can work, but it leaves a much larger opportunity untouched: understanding the next best product for each customer individually.

For every SKU, brands should be able to answer three questions that is doable with AI now:

• How likely is this product to be replenished, and when?

• Which products are most often purchased together or one after the other?

• When has a customer shown enough repeat behavior to be ready for a subscription?

Until now, answering those questions for every customer and every product was difficult to do at scale. AI can analyze purchase history across the entire catalog to understand product relationships, individual buying patterns, and likely repurchase timing.

It can also combine that history with real-time Shopify browsing behavior. If a customer returns and starts viewing a different product, that visit is a new signal of intent. AI can identify it and tell your email or SMS platform which product to recommend and when to send the message.

The Advantage Comes From Acting on Those Signals in Real Time

The data required to make a better retention decision already exists across purchase history, product relationships, and onsite behavior. The challenge is analyzing millions of customer-product signals quickly enough to act while the customer is still interested.

That is what we built Ground to do, the leading AI partner trusted by hundreds of brands, including Violette_FR, U Beauty, Heaven Mayhem, and many more.

Ground is a suite of AI agents that finds incremental revenue from acquisition through retention. ReBeat, our retention agent, learns the natural repurchase patterns across your catalog and combines them with what each customer is doing on your site right now.

When an existing customer returns, ReBeat can recognize the visit, understand what that person is browsing, and determine whether the opportunity is replenishment, cross-sell, or subscription. It then sends that intelligence into the brand’s existing Klaviyo email and SMS flows.

There is no need to build or rebuild your flows. Ground improves what you already have by helping it reach the right customer, at the right time, with the right product. Brands using Ground see a 2–4x increase in repeat-purchase revenue, with no additional lift required from their teams.

🔌 Your customers are already telling you what they want next. Book a demo to see how Ground turns those signals into repeat-purchase revenue.

Book a Demo

How U Beauty Increased Repeat-Purchase Revenue by 29% With AI

U Beauty built its reputation on high-performance skincare - exactly the kind of category where repeat purchase should be a growth engine. But even a highly repurchasable product does not tell a brand which customer is ready to buy again, what they are ready to buy, or when the message should arrive.

Ground helped U Beauty turn those individual signals into action, increasing repeat-purchase revenue by 29%.

That result came from making the retention decision more intelligent: using customer and product data to identify the next best opportunity instead of treating every buyer like the average buyer.

That is the real promise of AI in retention. Not more content. Not another dashboard. A better decision for every customer, made in time to win the next order.

🔌 Want to find the repeat revenue hiding in your customer data? Book a demo and see what Ground can uncover for your brand.

Book a Demo

Ground Is Hosting a Dinner In Shoptalk Nashville

​Ground is coming to Shoptalk Nashville. And while we love a spiced pear spritz, we love a good conversation even more.

​We’re bringing a few brand leaders - CEOs, Founders, CMOs, and Retention Marketers - together for an intimate dinner: excellent food, interesting company, and a welcome pause to bring some calmness to a Shoptalk storm.

Please RSVP to express your interest. Our community team will curate a small guest list, bringing together brand leaders we think will enjoy meeting one another. Ground customers and community members will have first consideration.

​Seats are few.

Request to Join

At Ground, we get a front-row seat to how ambitious consumer brands are evolutionizing growth with AI. We sat down with AJ Patel, Senior Vice President of Growth at U Beauty, to hear what U Beauty is doing differently to uncover new revenue opportunities by developing a deeper understanding of each customer.

Watch: How U Beauty Grows with Ground’s AI Agents

AJ Patel, SVP of growth at U Beauty explains how they use Ground’s advanced AI technology to recognize post-purchase intent, deliver more relevant customer experiences, and increase customer lifetime value.

🔌 Ground connects to your e-commerce stack in as little as 15 minutes, then works in the background to uncover incremental revenue opportunities. Book a demo →

Book a Demo

The Revenue Potential U Beauty’s Existing Stack Couldn’t See

Retention programs are usually built around schedules. A customer purchases, a timer begins, and the next message is sent after a predefined number of days. That structure is useful, but it assumes customers move at the same pace.

They do not. One customer may replenish early. Another may return to research a complementary product. A third may revisit the same product several times before deciding to buy again. Those actions reveal intent, but unless they trigger an event the CRM understands, the existing lifecycle program continues on its original schedule.

That was the opportunity for U Beauty. The brand did not need more campaigns. It needed an intelligence layer capable of connecting onsite behavior data, customer events, and purchase history - then telling the existing stack which customer needed attention, what was relevant, and when to act.

“Our biggest goals prior to working with Ground were really to drive and fuel repeat purchase rate and increase customer lifetime value.”
— AJ Patel, Senior Vice President of Growth, U Beauty

Read the Story

Ground’s Ambient AI Agents: Recognizing When Each Customer Is Ready to Buy Again

Ground’s suite of AI revenue agents helped U Beauty uncover new revenue opportunities by determining when to engage each customer, which message would be most relevant, and which product to recommend.

The agents work inside the existing e-commerce stack and continuously:

1. Observe each customer’s live onsite behavior and lifecycle activity.

2. Learn from that customer’s individual purchase history and patterns observed across the broader customer base.

3. Decide who is showing repeat-purchase intent, what product or message is relevant, and when to act.

4. Activate the opportunity through the brand’s existing CRM, email, or SMS platform.

This allows Ground to act on individual retention opportunities without requiring U Beauty’s team to build another flow or manage another campaign. Ground does not replace the CRM, commerce platform, or lifecycle program. The agents operate autonomously in the background and make the systems already in place more intelligent.

“ReBeat AI identifies the appropriate time for us to send new messages to those consumers - and what messages to send - based on onsite behavior, events, and historical transaction behavior.”
— AJ Patel, Senior Vice President of Growth, U Beauty

🔌 Ground finds retention revenue the existing stack is missing and activates it through the CRM and messaging tools already in place. See how it works →

Book a Demo

Turning Customer Signals Into Retention Revenue Autonomously

By making more post-purchase intent visible and actionable, Ground helped U Beauty engage customers when their individual behavior showed they were ready- not simply when a fixed timer expired.

That produced measurable growth across the program:

• 29% increase in repeat purchase revenue

• 16% revenue growth across the CRM program

• 9x return on investment

At the center is Ground’s “growth ontology” - the intelligent brain behind its agents - which processes more than 372 million behavioral signals each month. By contextualizing real-time shopper activity, historical purchase data, and zero- and first-party data across Shopify and Klaviyo, Ground developed a deeper understanding of each customer.

“From an ROI standpoint, with Ground, we’ve seen around a 9x return.”
— AJ Patel, Senior Vice President of Growth, U Beauty

Read the Story

The Next Wave of Retention Is Individual

The old retention stack was built to segment, schedule, and send. The next one will observe, learn, predict, and decide. It will understand that every customer has a different replenishment cycle, different product interests, and a different moment when another message becomes useful.

U Beauty’s story offers an early look at that future. The brands that lead the next wave will not be the ones sending the most retention messages. They will be the ones whose systems recognize when each individual customer is ready to receive one.

🔌 Your next wave of repeat-purchase revenue is already inside your customer base. Give your stack the intelligence to find it. Book a demo →

Book a Demo

Ground Is Hosting a Dinner In Shoptalk Fall

​Ground is coming to Shoptalk Fall. And while we love a spiced pear spritz, we love a good conversation even more.

​We’re bringing a few brand leaders - CEOs, Founders, CMOs, and Retention Marketers - together for an intimate dinner: excellent food, interesting company, and a welcome pause to bring some calmness to a Shoptalk storm.

Please RSVP to express your interest. Our community team will curate a small guest list, bringing together brand leaders we think will enjoy meeting one another. Ground customers and community members will have first consideration.

​Seats are few.

Request to Join

Your acquisition problem may actually be a customer-intelligence problem

Every click you pay for arrives with context.

A shopper saw a particular ad. They landed on a particular product. They explored a category, returned to the site, compared options, or showed patterns that resemble customers who purchased before them.

Those actions are not random. They are signals of intent.

But most ecommerce stacks act on only a small portion of them. Shopify records the transaction. Klaviyo and SMS platforms execute messages when a known event triggers a flow. Ad platforms optimize for the signals they can see.

Each system performs its job. The gap is between them.

That is why brands can keep buying more traffic without seeing the same growth in revenue.

🔌 This is the gap Ground fills for hundreds of brands - including Tower 28, MaryRuth Organics, and VIOLETTE_FR - driving revenue growth across every stage of the funnel.

How? Grounds ambient agents watch every shopper individually, learn what they want and when they’re most likely to buy, then tell Klaviyo (for example) exactly when and how to act.

This ability to observe and act on the individual behavior of your prospects and customers drives significant revenue increases across all stages of the funnel - from first-time acquisition to customer retention.

Book a Demo

Klaviyo is the execution layer. Intelligence decides how it acts

Klaviyo is excellent at sending, segmenting, automating, and reporting. But sending is not the same as deciding.

Traditional lifecycle marketing leaves marketers to predict the most likely journey, define the segments, set the delays, and manually build the flows.

That model is valuable, but limited. A team can program the journeys it anticipates. It cannot manually account for every signal from every visitor and customer in real time.

An intelligent layer changes the workflow:

Observe → understand → decide → act → measure → learn

It connects behavior across the ecommerce stack, learns from past purchasing patterns, identifies individual opportunities, and tells the execution systems when and how to act.

Klaviyo still sends the email. The SMS platform still delivers the text. Shopify still powers the store.

The intelligence layer gives those systems a brain.

🔌 This is the gap Ground fills for hundreds of brands - including VIOLETTE_FR, Ghia, and Heaven Mayhem - driving revenue growth across every stage of the funnel.

See Ground in Action

Customer story: Nopalera turns more discovery into revenue

National Hispanic Heritage Month is a moment to celebrate the culture, creativity, and contributions of Hispanic and Latino communities. It is also a fitting time to recognize Nopalera, a luxury Mexican fragrance brand bringing more people closer to Mexican culture through scent, storytelling, and design.

Nopalera has grown into a brand carried by major retailers and hundreds of boutiques across the United States - all as part of a broader mission to build generational wealth in the Latino community.

They onboarded Ground’s agents in early 2026, since then our agents generated them extra revenue that was left on the table. Two Ground revenue agents, Greet AI and ReCartify, work side by side, 24/7. One converts more of the traffic already landing on the store. The other creates more value from the shoppers Nopalera worked so hard to earn.

The result: Additional 27% lift in overall revenue on top of the brand’s existing performance.

This is the value of an intelligent brain behind the stack. Ground didn’t replace Nopalera’s CRM setup - it made it smarter, enabling Klaviyo to reach more customers, act on richer signals, and engage each shopper at the right moment with the right message.

Book a Demo

Curated Intelligence

1. Will AI agents turn brands into interchangeable suppliers? Read more

2. Dreamforce 2026: The shift from software interfaces to intelligent agents. Read more

3. Why digital identity is becoming core business infrastructure? Read more