INC Magazine: 87 Percent of Shoppers Pay More for Brands They Trust. AI Is Putting That Advantage at Risk
Trust has always been the “invisible currency” of the internet, particularly when it comes to e-commerce. Unlike physical retail, where a customer can touch the packaging or see the product on a shelf, shopping online requires a leap of faith. That’s why most DTC businesses invest in marketing just to prove they aren’t a scam. After all, research confirms that 87 percent of shoppers are willing to pay more for a brand they trust.
Even still, online trust is on the ropes. Consumer confidence is actually near an all-time low. We’ve moved from an era of skepticism, where active verification and “Authenticity Guarantees” are the norm. Worse yet, the rise of AI has eroded trust even further, with its many purposefully and accidentally fraudulent uses either pointing people toward the wrong products or outright scams. As a result, a recent report found that 88 percent of American shoppers now find it harder to tell what is real online compared to just a year ago.
For DTC brands, this is an existential threat—risking a “Dead Web” scenario, where the signal-to-noise ratio becomes so poor that consumers stop discovering new brands entirely and retreat only to giant, “safe” platforms like Amazon or physical retail. So, as more AI drives our online shopping experiences—from social media content to agentic commerce—it’s crucial that large and founder-led brands use more dedicated tactics to make sure that industry wide trust isn’t sacrificed in the process.
Protecting trust
It’s not an exaggeration to say that AI has lowered the cost of creating a perfect lie to near zero. The impact is already being felt around the e-commerce landscape. For example, there’s cloned storefronts: bad actors using AI to scrape a legitimate brand website—like Magic Spoon or Olipop—and create a “mirror site” in minutes. Elsewhere, deepfake influencers use AI-generated video/audio of popular wellness influencers endorsing “limited time 90 percent off” products to drive shoppers to scam sites. And then there are the instances that are less nefarious, with AI search hallucinating results that accidentally point shoppers in the wrong directions.
This has created a “skimming effect” with counterfeit trade reaching an estimated $467 billion globally in 2025 and consumer doubt causing 61 percent of shoppers to abandon a purchase simply because the site felt “sketchy” or they couldn’t verify the brand’s reality. Even reviews aren’t safe—30 percent of reviews are now flagged as AI-generated, making the coveted “five-star rating” almost meaningless to savvy shoppers.
Of course, some brands are already taking steps to fight AI fraud. When Popflex founder, Cassey Ho, discovered deepfake ads using her image to sell fakes, she didn’t just ignore it—she created a massive educational campaign showing her audience how to spot the difference. But it’ll take more than that to build back that hard-earned trust. Here’s where to start:
Fight fire with fire: Bad actors aren’t the only ones that have access to emerging tech. For example, there’s Blockchain-enabled “digital passports” that allow customers to track the entire lifecycle of the products they buy, providing complete transparency. With the use of a QR code, brands can use tamper-evident packaging that, when scanned, provides a cryptographically signed “proof of origin”. Both Walmart and De Beers already use blockchain to track provenance in seconds. But even snacking brands can use this to prove “Farm-to-Bag” integrity.
Lean into “human-first” content: Because of the inherent aesthetics of AI-generated content, high production values aren’t the badge of quality they used to be. So, move away from overly-polished, AI-looking studio shots. Instead, use raw, “lo-fi” video content from willing customers, founders or even employees. AI is great at “perfect” so “imperfection” is now a hallmark of humanity that can also earn trust.
Get a co-sign: In a world where countless reviews can be faked by AI in a matter of seconds, it helps to have someone with trust and authority, letting people know that your brand can be trusted too. That’s where third-party authenticity badges come in. Integrate your ecommerce site with 2026-era verification tools like Transparency by Amazon 2.0 that provide a visual “Verified Human/Brand” checkmark that is harder to spoof than a static JPEG.
AI’s getting better and harder to spot every day. But that doesn’t mean that ecommerce brands need to surrender to a future of lost sales and jaded customers. If they start now, they can protect their hard-earned brand equity so that, as other brands are swallowed up by scams and counterfeits, their brands will have cultivated powerful trust built to last.