Benchmarks / Beauty and personal care / v2.0.0
Beauty and personal care agentic commerce benchmark v2.0.0
This is version v2.0.0, issued 29 September 2026. The current version is v2.0.5.
Across 26 beauty and personal care stores Ottom measured at every stage in the 90 days to 29 September 2026, the median agentic readiness score was 55 out of 100. 0% of them let an AI shopping agent reach the payment step.
n = 26 of 26 stores · 1 July 2026 to 29 September 2026 · v2.0.0 · bench-v5 · methodology
A store enters Ottom’s survey only if a catalogue of at least ten products can be read from it in one request, which in practice means Shopify and WooCommerce storefronts. These figures therefore describe the storefronts Ottom can read in bulk rather than beauty and personal care as a whole. The methodology sets out what that excludes.
Readiness score
The median of the 26 beauty and personal care stores Ottom measured at every stage in the 90 days to 29 September 2026 scored 55 out of 100, and a quarter of them scored 52 or below.
The spread of overall readiness scores across the category. We publish quartiles rather than a best and worst store, because the best and the worst are each one identifiable merchant.
Where agents stall
Of the 26 beauty and personal care stores Ottom measured at every stage, 0% scored 80 or better at the buy stage, against 96% at the compare stage.
Each stage of the journey, and the share of beauty and personal care stores whose score at that stage was 80 or better.
| Stage | Median score | Stores passing | Stores measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discover | 75 | 35% | 26 |
| Evaluate | 88 | 88% | 26 |
| Compare | 100 | 96% | 26 |
| Buy | 0 | 0% | 26 |
Reaching the payment step
0% of the 26 beauty and personal care stores Ottom measured let an AI shopping agent reach the payment step. Ottom stops there and never submits payment.
What stops them
The most common stall on beauty and personal care stores is no sitemap for agents to crawl, found on 65% of the 26 stores Ottom scanned in the category in the 90 days to 29 September 2026.
The most common stalls in this category, as a share of all 26 stores scanned. A stall found on fewer than 5 stores is withheld, because at that count it points at a merchant rather than at a category.
- No sitemap65%
- No product identifier62%
None common
- Hover only variant picker62%
- Popup blocks the flow19%
| Stall | Stage | Severity | Share of stores |
|---|---|---|---|
| No sitemap for agents to crawlDiscover | Discover | High | |
| Size or colour can only be chosen by hoveringBuy | Buy | High | |
| Products have no GTIN or MPN to match againstEvaluate | Evaluate | Medium | |
| A popup blocks the path to the cartBuy | Buy | High |
What to change first
- No sitemap
Publish /sitemap.xml covering product, collection and policy URLs. Most platforms generate this for you once it is enabled.
- Hover only variant picker
Make each option a real control: a select, a radio input, or a button that responds to a click and to the keyboard.
- No product identifier
Populate the barcode field (GTIN, EAN or UPC) on each variant, which most platforms already have a field for.
5 further stalls were found in this category but withheld: too few stores showed them to report a share without pointing at an individual store.
Citing this benchmark
These figures are published under CC BY 4.0. Quote them freely, with this attribution:
Ottom, Beauty and personal care agentic commerce benchmark v2.0.0, 1 July 2026 to 29 September 2026, methodology bench-v5. https://ottom.io/benchmarks/beauty/v2.0.0. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
The same figures as JSON.