Podcast: The agentic era on marketplaces - what most sellers get wrong

The ecommerce funnel isn’t shrinking — it’s collapsing.

In this episode, Lucas Bassa (Marketplaces Product Lead at Channable) sits down with Imco van Elk (Head of Marketplaces at Follo) to unpack how conversational and agentic commerce are reshaping the future of marketplaces.

Consumers are no longer spending hours browsing category pages and comparing endless listings. Increasingly, discovery starts inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Amazon Rufus, where shoppers ask contextual questions and receive narrowed-down recommendations instantly.
Together, Lucas and Imco explore why marketplaces still dominate the transaction layer, how Amazon Rufus is changing product discovery behavior, and why sellers need to rethink optimization entirely. The era of keyword stuffing and “quick & dirty” marketplace onboarding is fading fast. Structured product data, contextual titles, complete attributes, and AI-readable imagery are becoming essential for visibility.

The episode also dives into how AI compresses the traditional funnel into just a few high-intent interactions, why conversational recommendations convert at significantly higher rates, and what sellers can do today to become “Rufus-ready.”

Key Takeaways

• The funnel collapse: Why consumers are moving from endless browsing to AI-guided product discovery in just a few interactions
• The Rufus effect: What Amazon’s AI shopping assistant signals for the future of marketplace search and recommendations
• Beyond keyword stuffing: How sellers should rethink product feeds, attributes, and titles for conversational discovery
• AI can “see” your listings now: Why contextual imagery and complete product data are becoming essential for visibility

Learn how to optimize, grow and scale on marketplaces with Channable

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