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Every retailer knows the pain of login friction. You spend millions driving traffic to your site, and then 23% of shoppers abandon their carts because the login or checkout process gets in the way. Passwords get forgotten. Passkey prompts confuse people. Social logins hand your customer data to the very ad platforms you're competing against.
But cart abandonment is only the visible cost. The deeper problem is attrition. Today's customers don't just leave your site when login fails - they leave for a competitor who recognizes them, remembers their preferences, and serves them with less friction. Guest checkout used to be the fallback. Now it's a relic. Shoppers expect to be known, and they'll migrate to whichever retailer delivers the most convenient, personalized experience. Think about why customers default to Amazon: not because they love the brand, but because Amazon never makes them prove who they are twice. Every other retailer is competing against that expectation.
Here's what most retailers haven't internalized yet: this problem is about to get dramatically worse - and simultaneously, dramatically more valuable to solve.
The Authentication Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
The promise of "passwordless" was supposed to fix everything. Stronger security, smoother logins, higher conversions. The reality? Passkey adoption sits around 20%. That means 80% of your customers are still stuck with password friction, and you're maintaining dual systems - legacy passwords alongside whatever modern solution you've deployed - for a fraction of the benefit.
Social logins seem like a shortcut, but the trade-offs are steep. You're redirecting customers away from your brand experience, creating messy consent trails, and giving ad platforms direct visibility into your customer behavior. Every social login is a small concession of your first-party data advantage.
The result is a fragmented identity layer that weakens everything downstream: your conversion rates, your loyalty program participation, your ability to personalize at scale, your ad targeting precision, and ultimately your Retail Media Network economics. When you can't recognize a customer consistently across channels, you can't serve them the way they expect - and they'll find a retailer who can.
Enter Agentic Commerce - And a Whole New Identity Problem
Here's where it gets interesting. We're entering the era of agentic commerce, where AI agents - think Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence - browse, compare, and purchase products on behalf of consumers. Major retailers are already enabling this. The first wave of agent-enabled e-commerce launches are happening right now, and most of them default to guest checkout.
Why? Because nobody has solved agent authentication.
Think about what that means. An AI agent acting on behalf of a loyal customer can't log in, can't redeem loyalty points, can't access saved preferences, and can't be tied back to a known identity. Every agent transaction becomes a ghost - invisible to your loyalty program, invisible to your RMN, invisible to your personalization engine.
The questions multiply fast:
How does an AI agent prove it's authorized to act on behalf of a specific customer? How do you set and enforce spending limits for agent-initiated purchases? What happens when an agent tries to redeem a loyalty discount - how do you verify the human behind the request? If an agent makes a fraudulent purchase, who's accountable, and how do you resolve the dispute? How do you prevent a compromised agent from draining a customer's account or exploiting promotional offers at scale?
These aren't theoretical questions. They're the exact conversations happening inside retail security and commerce teams right now.
Why Identity Is the Control Plane for Agentic Commerce
The retailers who get this right will have a massive advantage. If you can authenticate an agent's authorization cryptographically - with real spending limits, real-time permission adjustments, and auditable attribution - you unlock the full value of agentic commerce without the fraud exposure.
This is where the identity layer stops being a cost center and becomes a revenue enablement layer - one that powers targeting, measurement, personalization, and ultimately unlocks new monetization streams across retail media and commerce.
A properly authenticated agent transaction gives you everything a logged-in human transaction does: loyalty program engagement, first-party data capture, personalization signals, and clean RMN attribution. A guest-checkout agent transaction gives you none of it. Worse, an unrecognized agent interaction is a missed opportunity to personalize - and that gap is exactly where customers (and their agents) start drifting toward competitors who do recognize them.
The math is simple. If agentic commerce grows to even 10-15% of e-commerce transactions over the next two years - and the trajectory suggests it will - retailers without agent authentication are leaving enormous value on the table. Not just in lost loyalty engagement, but in degraded RMN economics, weaker ad targeting, diminished personalization, and a growing blind spot in their customer data. And every unrecognized transaction is an opportunity for a competitor who does recognize that customer to win them over permanently.
What the Solution Looks Like
The authentication infrastructure for agentic commerce needs to do several things simultaneously:
It needs to cryptographically bind agent authorization to a verified human identity, so every agent action is attributable. It needs to support granular, policy-controlled permissions - spending limits, category restrictions, time-based access windows - that the customer controls. It needs to work across every channel: web, mobile, in-store, and now agent-initiated. It needs to be fast enough that it doesn't add friction to the agent's workflow (sub-second authentication). And it needs to be secure against a new class of threats: agent impersonation, authorization replay, and large-scale automated fraud.
This is the same set of requirements that solve the human authentication problem in retail - frictionless, branded, secure, with full first-party data control. The infrastructure that authenticates your customers seamlessly is the same infrastructure that authenticates agents acting on their behalf. And it's the same infrastructure that enables real personalization: you can't tailor the experience if you don't know who you're talking to.
The Bigger Picture: Identity as a Revenue Enablement Layer
We need to stop thinking about identity as a compliance problem or a data problem. It's actually a revenue enablement layer - one that powers targeting, measurement, personalization, and ultimately unlocks new monetization streams across retail media and commerce.
When every login (human or agent) directly impacts your conversion rate, your loyalty engagement, your first-party data quality, your personalization precision, and your RMN yield, authentication isn't overhead. It's growth infrastructure.
The retailers who recognize this - who invest in a unified, frictionless, cryptographically secure identity layer that works for both humans and agents - will capture disproportionate value as commerce evolves. They'll be the ones who recognize customers instantly, personalize every interaction, and retain loyalty across channels. The ones who don't will watch their customers (and their customers' agents) drift to competitors who deliver a better, more seamless experience - the same way shoppers already default to Amazon today.
The window to build this foundation is now, before agentic commerce scales and the cost of retrofitting becomes prohibitive.
Hawcx Joins the NY Fashion Tech Lab 2026 Collective
We are excited to announce that Hawcx has been selected to join the New York Fashion Tech Lab's 2026 Collective - the premier program connecting B2B retail technology companies with leading fashion and retail brands.
The NYFTLab has spent over a decade at the intersection of fashion, retail, and technology, bringing together startups and retail executives to collaborate on the innovations shaping the industry's future. For 2026, the Lab introduced The Collective, an expanded format designed to foster deeper engagement between startups and retail partners navigating the most pressing challenges in the space.
For Hawcx, this is an opportunity to work directly with the retail leaders who are living these identity and authentication challenges every day and to demonstrate how frictionless, branded, passwordless authentication can drive measurable impact on conversion, loyalty, and retail media performance.
If you're a retail executive exploring how to turn authentication from a friction point into a growth lever, whether for human customers or the AI agents that will soon shop on their behalf we'd love to connect.
Hawcx delivers branded, passwordless authentication that keeps the retailer in control of identity, consent, and customer data for both human and agent interactions. To learn more, visit hawcx.com/retail.