Does retail media or agentic commerce offer bigger margins by 2029?

Andrew Lipsman argues that, measured by concrete revenue forecasts rather than hype, retail media remains a far larger opportunity for retailers than "agentic commerce" buildout. He cites Emarketer, "a reputable third-party source of forecast data," projecting that "agentic commerce" — defined by Emarketer as "AI platform on-site retail ecommerce sales" — "will reach $28 billion" by 2029, while "commerce media ad spend will increase by $48 billion from its 2025 total" over the same period. Applying "typical margins of 10% for ecommerce and 60% for retail media," Lipsman calculates that "commerce media would produce $29 billion in operating margin vs. $2.8 billion for ecommerce occurring on AI platforms."

The argument is explicitly about resource allocation: Lipsman is responding to "the directive" circulating in the industry that "retailers should forsake current initiatives — such as RMN buildouts — to adapt to [a] zero-traffic future" supposedly brought on by agentic shopping. By converting both opportunities into comparable operating-margin dollars rather than raw revenue or narrative momentum, he argues the math, not the hype cycle, should guide where retailers invest, concluding "retailers can make decisions rooted in rationality over hyperbole."

This bears on Why do consumers delay adopting agentic search?: that formal model describes a platform's incentive to push agentic search ahead of consumer readiness, while Lipsman's forecast-based argument is aimed at retailers and concludes the opposite allocation — that retail media, not agentic commerce infrastructure, is where near-term margin actually sits through 2029 on Emarketer's numbers. It also qualifies Will brands succeed by building their own AI shopping agents?: where Accenture frames agent-readiness as an urgent strategic imperative for brands, Lipsman's margin comparison suggests the dollar-denominated opportunity being forgone by over-indexing on agentic commerce is larger than the opportunity being chased, at least on this forecast horizon. See also Does Adobe's AI referral traffic growth statistic hold up under scrutiny?, the companion debunking of the traffic statistics used to justify the same urgency.

Lipsman's own caveat is that "there's no way to predict this future with certainty," and he invites readers to "use different margins assumptions" — the $29 billion vs. $2.8 billion comparison depends on the 10%/60% margin figures he chose, not on margins Emarketer itself reported, and both revenue numbers are forecasts to 2029 rather than measured outcomes. The excerpt does not establish that this margin gap will hold if agentic commerce adoption accelerates faster than Emarketer projects; it only shows that, under current forecasts and assumed margins, retail media is the larger opportunity.