West Marine, a 58-year-old retailer serving boating and water sports enthusiasts, modernized its online discovery experience by implementing Agentic Commerce Search and Skipper, an interactive AI Shopper Agent, on Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C Commerce (Salesforce Commerce Blog). The retailer's previous search infrastructure relied on hundreds of hours of manual keyword rules, synonyms, and redirects to handle the specialized terminology and part-number queries common in marine retail, yet still produced empty search results that frustrated customers (Salesforce Commerce Blog).
Agentic Commerce Search uses a custom Small Language Model trained on West Marine's catalog and shopper behavior data, augmented by simulated synthetic shopper journeys, to interpret customer intent without manual configuration (Salesforce Commerce Blog). Skipper, trained on the institutional knowledge of in-store associates, provides personalized product advice and answers open-ended questions throughout the shopping journey, replicating the hands-on expertise customers experience in physical stores (Salesforce Commerce Blog). The results were immediate: customers interacting with Agentic Commerce Search achieved an 8.5% conversion uplift within the first month, shoppers engaging with Skipper converted at twice the rate of standard site traffic, and the ecommerce team eliminated 97% of manual search rules while automating cross-sell and merchandising tasks (Salesforce Commerce Blog).
For commerce practitioners, West Marine's implementation demonstrates how agentic AI can shift ecommerce teams from operational toil—building and maintaining rules—to strategic work. The company plans to expand Skipper into a unified agent handling service questions, shipping status, and return policies, while using geo-detection to surface local inventory for buy-online-pickup-in-store orders (Salesforce Commerce Blog).