Marketplace Briefing: Inside Marc Lore and Melissa Bridgeford’s AI shopping agent Wizard
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Wizard has become the latest AI shopping agent to launch amid a surge of new tools promising to search, compare and check out on shoppers’ behalf.
The platform’s public debut has been a long time coming. Founded in 2021, Wizard initially operated in relative stealth as a B-to-B conversational commerce startup aimed at helping brands convert shoppers over text. Since then, Wizard has pivoted toward a consumer-facing AI shopping agent as generative AI tools have gained wider adoption.
Wizard was co-founded by CEO Melissa Bridgeford, who previously founded the text-based shopping startup Stylust, and Marc Lore, the CEO of Wonder Group and former CEO of Walmart U.S. e-commerce. The company debuted publicly last week alongside a native checkout partnership with Best Buy, marking its first major retail tie-up after years of building largely out of view. Wizard raised a $50 million Series A in 2021 led by NEA, with participation from Accel and Lore, who also serves as chairman.
Its launch comes during a rapid explosion of shopping agents and other AI-powered commerce features. OpenAI rolled out its Instant Checkout feature for ChatGPT last fall, allowing users to complete purchases inside the chatbot. In January, Microsoft introduced a similar checkout capability for Copilot. Amazon expanded its Rufus shopping assistant with a new automatic-buying feature. Fashion-focused AI shopping platform Daydream launched in June, while True Fit this week announced what it described as the first AI shopping agent built specifically to address fit uncertainty.
All told, AI companies and retailers alike are racing to hand off parts of the shopping journey to AI-powered agents — tools designed to research, recommend and, in some cases, buy products on a consumer’s behalf. The bigger question is which agent, if any, will emerge as the de facto winner of the AI shopping wars — and whether consumers will ultimately embrace agents for shopping at all.
Wizard is positioning itself as a dedicated shopping tool, rather than a general chatbot that happens to offer shopping as one of many features. While tools like ChatGPT and Gemini handle a wide range of tasks, Wizard was built specifically to search for products, compare options and guide users to checkout.
“Online e-commerce is broken,” Bridgeford said in an interview. Consumers, she added, are “really overwhelmed by choice and really frustrated with the friction of online shopping,” as they juggle multiple tabs, marketplaces and social platforms to make a single purchase.
Unlike retailer-specific assistants, such as Amazon’s Rufus — which is primarily tied to Amazon’s shopping app, though it can help customers buy some items from brands’ own websites in some cases — or traditional chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini that include shopping among many capabilities, Bridgeford said, “Wizard is the first agent that’s purpose-built for e-commerce.”
Users can access Wizard as a web-based search engine if they register in an account with their phone or email. The product centers on conversational queries, like “best noise-canceling headphones for gym and travel under $300.” Rather than returning thousands of links like a traditional search engine, Wizard presents five product recommendations at a time. This is a deliberate functionality meant to reduce the endless scrolling that often overwhelms shoppers, Bridgeford said. If users don’t like the initial results, they can ask for more options or refine their query to surface additional recommendations.
Wizard analyzes “millions of data points,” including product attributes, customer reviews and editorial sources, and uses a proprietary ranking system to surface its recommendations, she added.
For now, most of Wizard’s results direct users to a brand’s or retailer’s website to complete a purchase. But a key part of its public launch is native checkout with Best Buy. For products sold by Best Buy, shoppers can search, select an item and complete the transaction directly within Wizard.
The company chose to focus first on electronics because it’s the largest category in e-commerce, Bridgeford said, driving a high volume of searches and strong purchase intent. The category also lends itself to AI-assisted shopping, as consumers often want help comparing specifications, reading reviews and evaluating prices before committing to a purchase. Best Buy generated $33 billion in U.S. revenue last year.
Beyond electronics, Wizard’s models and ranking system are currently optimized primarily for beauty and skin care, as well as kitchen and dining products. Apparel and home goods are available on the platform but are still being further refined. Groceries are not yet supported.
Wizard also does not currently surface Amazon listings. Unlike many retailers that have partnered with third-party AI companies, Amazon has taken a more restrictive approach to outside agents and has blocked certain bots from accessing its site, Modern Retail previously reported. Last year, Amazon sued AI startup Perplexity, alleging improper access to its platform. Bridgeford did not attribute Wizard’s lack of Amazon listings to Amazon’s stance, saying instead that the product is “continuing to evolve” and that more retailers and merchants will be added over time.
Wizard is working on additional native retail partnerships and payment integrations, she said, with plans to move toward a “universal cart” experience that allows purchases across participating merchants with a single tap. On the back end, the company is securing direct checkout APIs and building its own agentic checkout infrastructure, though the user-facing experience will remain consistent across merchants.
While some shopping agents, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have begun testing ad-supported services, Wizard plans to keep its results free of sponsored listings. Brands and retailers cannot pay to influence recommendations. However, official partners such as Best Buy benefit from deeper data integration. Through direct product APIs, those partnerships improve the accuracy and reliability of Wizard’s catalog, meaning that when Wizard recommends a product Best Buy carries, Best Buy can appear among the top five options for that item.
“What we believe right now is what consumers really want are trusted recommendations,” Bridgeford said.
For AI shopping startups like Wizard, a key challenge will be standing out in an increasingly crowded space, according to Scot Wingo, founder of ReFiBuy, a company that helps brands and retailers optimize for agentic AI. Even if a company builds a strong discovery experience, he said, reaching consumers and changing shopper behavior remain hurdles. Many AI shopping startups have raised significant funding and will need to invest heavily not just in research and development but also in customer acquisition, he added.
As Wingo put it, “It’s just too hard to get human attention.”
This story has been updated to clarify that Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant can also help users browse products beyond Amazon’s marketplace and purchase items from brands’ own websites.
What I’m reading
- Perplexity is ending its advertising push, saying ads could undermine user trust.
- Amazon and OpenAI discussed custom AI models for shopping, per Jason Del Rey’s The Aisle.
- Amazon plans to open a second big-box store in the Chicago area after it unveiled plans last month for another large-format location in a nearby suburb, the Chicago Tribune reported.