Why Checkout Tools Struggle Up-Funnel
Stuart Kearney, co-founder of Vetted, on AI agents in shopping
The hard part was not finding more users, it was expanding from a coupon tool at checkout into the earlier, messier part of shopping where people are still deciding what to buy. Honey worked when the shopper already had a cart and just wanted savings. Moving up funnel meant building reliable search, recommendations, merchant data syncing, and a consistent app experience, all at once, and one weak step could ruin trust.
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Honey’s original wedge was lower funnel. Its extension and app focused on coupons, cashback, and price checks at checkout, which is a simpler job because the user has already picked the product and merchant. That is very different from answering which product fits a person’s needs in the first place.
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Going upstream adds a chain of failure points. Product search has to interpret long, fuzzy questions, compare many merchants, and keep pricing, inventory, shipping, and returns current. Vetted describes that as the key reason one click shopping and meta checkout products have been hard to make reliable.
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This is why research first products and checkout first products tend to expand in opposite directions. Vetted started with recommendations, then can move toward checkout after trust is earned. Honey started with checkout automation, including the Two Tap acquisition, then tried to move toward discovery before the underlying search technology was ready.
The next winners in shopping will be the companies that can connect these layers without breaking the experience. As LLMs improve product search and payments players expose better checkout infrastructure, the gap between research and transaction gets smaller, but the company that owns user trust at the decision stage will have the strongest position to move through the rest of the funnel.