On the NoRobots podcast, Travis McEwan, founder of 1 At Bat Media, talks about Meta Muse and agentic commerce: how AI shopping agents work, why Amazon is blocking them while Shopify leans in, how to build product pages an AI agent will read top to bottom, and what a growing e-commerce brand should do in the next 90 days.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
Is anyone actually using Meta Muse?
Meta Muse is one of the latest shifts in e-commerce: an AI agent that can shop and check out on a person’s behalf. Vlad asked whether anyone is really using it.
From his own firsthand experience, Travis hasn’t seen massive adoption yet. But a quick search shows that well over 10 million people started using it almost right away. In the grand scheme of all online shoppers, he says, that’s still a small number, but it’s clearly gaining traction. Shopify has also been talking about agentic commerce for quite a while.
Travis compares the moment to the early days of e-commerce in the early 2000s, when people were hesitant to put their credit card details online. In his view, agentic shopping is simply the natural next step, and that’s where everything is heading.
How it works for the shopper
From what Travis understands, the experience is similar to other always-on AI agents that work in the background on their own machine. Shoppers link their credit card and give the agent direction: what to look for, price limits and what it can spend on. According to Meta’s initial data, people were quickly spending up to $200 with it.
Travis admits that handing a credit card to an AI agent isn’t something he personally wants to do yet. But for those who do, it’s pretty seamless: link it up, give it direction and let it do its thing.
Vlad shared a related memory. A few years ago, a client sent him a photo of their card and asked to be charged. Now people hand their cards to agents. As Travis puts it, it’s a different world.
Shopify vs Amazon: who wins?
Shopify is working with Muse, while Amazon is blocking it. Travis would never bet against Amazon, but he thinks he knows why it’s holding back. AI shopping agents could eat into Amazon’s advertising business. An agent doesn’t care which listings are sponsored. It’s simply looking for the best product.
That may give Shopify a first-mover advantage. Walmart has also rolled out the red carpet, hoping to win some of Amazon’s market share. Still, Travis doesn’t expect Amazon to just block it and stop there. It will adjust one way or another. For now, it’s a matter of waiting to see how it plays out.
Does Shopify give brands an advantage?
For brands on Shopify, Travis sees a real benefit in being at the front of the agentic wave, because Shopify is the platform leaning into it the hardest. He doesn’t think the fair comparison is Shopify vs Amazon, since Amazon is more of a marketplace than your own store. Compared with Magento or WooCommerce, though, he considers Shopify the clear leader here.
Will AI agents only buy cheap products?
Vlad asked whether cheaper products will sell more easily through Muse, while shoppers keep bigger decisions for themselves. Travis thinks it will depend heavily on the customer. Some people will always pay more for premium products, and others will always look for the best price.
Everyday essentials are a good example. Think of toilet paper or paper towels. There’s no thousand-dollar version, so an agent could simply watch for sales. It might know you’re running low, see that Walmart has a sale on, and just buy it.
What happens to paid media when AI checks out?
If AI picks the product and checks out on its own, how should brands think about paid media? Travis says it’s still a wait-and-see situation for Meta and Google ads.
The biggest change right now is the shift from SEO to AEO: updating product listings so the data is there and properly structured. Email marketing could change too. Your personal agent might monitor your inbox and look for sales there. But how traditional Meta and Google ads will interact with AI shopping agents is still hard to tell.
How to structure a product page for AI agents
Product pages need optimizing, Travis says, but the focus should be on quality, not quantity. Don’t stuff pages with content for the sake of it.
His example: if your protein powder is the most premium on the market, explain what makes it premium. Go deep into the ingredient profile and how the ingredients are sourced. When someone tells their agent to find the most premium protein, that’s how the agent will work out which product fits.
Pages now need to work for two readers. A person might skim the page, but an AI agent will read it top to bottom and take everything into account. In other words, you need to design for both humans and AI at the same time.
Reviews, UGC and the Reddit problem
External sources still matter. Travis expects verified reviews from real platforms to be especially valuable to AI agents. With influencer videos and UGC, he wouldn’t be surprised if AI eventually learns to tell the difference between someone paid to make a video and a genuine customer.
He saw the Reddit crackdown coming from a mile away. At Shoptalk in Las Vegas in March, Reddit’s co-founder was speaking on stage, while people in the crowd were selling services to stuff fake comments into Reddit, against its terms. To Travis, that’s no different from old black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing: they might work for a little while, but AI is only getting smarter.
His advice is to focus on authenticity: build your community, invest in what’s on your own website, and use tools like Judge.me on Shopify, so AI knows your reviews are verified. Real content, he says, is going to be the most important thing going forward.
What about media mentions?
Reputable media sources will still be valuable, in Travis’s view. But he points to a well-known SEO example: lists and contributor articles on outlets like Forbes. Many people now know that much of that coverage is pay-to-play, even when it’s presented as authentic, free media. As AI gets smarter, it may learn to weigh that as well.
A 90-day agentic commerce plan for a $5–10M brand
For a medium-sized brand, Travis’s priorities for the next 90 days are:
- Optimize your website top to bottom for AI. You can even ask an AI how it would read your site. Focus on product pages, content, blog posts and articles.
- Lean into UGC. Platforms like Tribe make it possible to get high volumes of content from real people using your product.
- Experiment every day. Things are moving so fast that a lot changes month over month.
Build your store with AI or hire an agency?
Many videos promise you can build a Shopify store in 20 minutes with AI. For a bootstrapped, mom-and-pop business without much money, Travis agrees an agency probably isn’t feasible yet, and that’s the beauty of today’s platforms. You can get a website up quickly. It won’t be the best website, but it’s better than nothing and better than what you could have built on your own five or ten years ago.
Get a proof of concept up, put your product out there, run some ads and see what traction looks like. As long as the site is half decent, he says, that money is better spent on ads and traffic than on an amazing website nobody visits.
Vlad gives brands the same advice. His team at Digital Octane often recommends that new brands build the site themselves first. Once they have sales and concerns about security or conversion-focused UX, and the budget to match, they can move to an agency.
Paid ads or GEO first for a new brand?
For a brand just starting out, Travis would still lean into paid media, most likely Meta ads. They get you initial traction very quickly. AEO, SEO and GEO take time, nobody has the magic formula, and you can’t be sure what you invest in will pay off. With ads, you get traffic today and can optimize from there.
With Meta, you can turn on an Advantage+ campaign with broad targeting, add 10 to 20 creatives and learn a lot from that alone. Vlad added that it makes sense to start with a modest budget, see what works and draw conclusions from there. Travis agreed.
Why email and SMS matter more than ever
Travis says email and SMS are as important as ever, if not more. You own that data and can keep marketing to those people without ongoing ad spend. Meanwhile, ad platforms keep getting more competitive. More brands are running ads, acquisition costs are rising and ROAS is dropping in some areas.
Email flows help convert visitors in the background and drive repeat orders. Around 95% of 1 At Bat Media’s clients run both paid media and email. For Travis, it isn’t a one-or-the-other decision.
What Travis learned from building and selling his own brand
Before starting the agency, Travis built and sold his own e-commerce brand. It was his first step into running a business: accounting, finance, inventory management and more. Many of the skills he brought into 1 At Bat Media were self-taught on that brand, including Facebook ads, Google ads and email marketing.
It also helps him connect with clients. He often works directly with owners, and he knows firsthand what it’s like to be on their side.
What he would do differently today
Travis started that brand around 2013. He didn’t know anything about websites, so he paid someone to build one. Today, he would spin up a base website with an AI tool and put the budget into ads instead.
Media buying has changed too. Back then, it was all about audience targeting and separate ad sets. Now he’d let the platforms handle targeting and focus on creative. Starting today, he’d go with an AI-built website, broad targeting on Meta ads and UGC creatives rather than static graphic ads, at around $100 a day, or $3,000 a month. That, he says, is enough to learn a lot and get some initial traction.
Where e-commerce is heading
Trying to predict the next two or three years is a fool’s errand, Travis says, because everything is moving so fast. His best guess is that AI will become a bigger part of everything: websites, AI search and media buying itself. He accepts that AI will eventually handle a lot of what his agency does today.
Still, he believes expert human judgment will always be needed, especially when running a business from top to bottom. Vlad shared a line from an earlier guest: you’ll always need a human, because you need someone to blame if AI spends $20,000 of your budget on something worthless. Travis agreed.
About Travis McEwan and 1 At Bat Media
1 At Bat Media is an e-commerce growth agency. The team runs paid media across Meta, Google and TikTok, handles email marketing with Klaviyo as a partner agency, and helps brands create UGC content. Most clients fall in the $10–50 million range, which Travis calls the agency’s current sweet spot, and the largest client is a $250 million brand. The agency continues to move up market and is building out SEO and GEO services, though they aren’t a formal service yet.
FAQ
What is Meta Muse?
Meta Muse is an AI shopping agent. Shoppers link a credit card, set parameters like price limits, and let the agent find and buy products for them.
Why is Amazon blocking AI shopping agents?
Travis believes it’s largely about advertising. AI agents look for the best product and ignore sponsored listings, which could eat into Amazon’s ad business.
How should a product page be written for AI agents?
Focus on quality, not volume. Explain what makes your product different in detail, such as ingredients and sourcing, because an AI agent reads the whole page.
Should a new brand start with paid ads or GEO?
Travis recommends starting with paid media, most likely Meta ads, because they bring traffic right away. AEO, SEO and GEO take longer to pay off.
Do email and SMS still work?
Yes. Travis says they are as important as ever because you own the data, and rising ad costs make retention and repeat orders more valuable.
Who is Travis McEwan?
Travis McEwan is the founder of 1 At Bat Media, an e-commerce growth agency for $10–50M brands. He built and sold his own e-commerce brand before starting the agency.
Where to find Travis McEwan
Learn more about the agency at 1atbatmedia.com. You can also find 1 At Bat Media on NoRobots.
Watch the full interview: Meta Muse – the Next Big AI Opportunity?
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