Seven out of ten online shopping carts never make it to a completed purchase. That number, drawn from Baymard Institute's aggregate analysis of more than 50 studies, has hovered stubbornly near 70% for years despite significant investment in conversion optimization across the industry. The question most e-commerce leaders ask when confronted with that figure is how to reduce abandonment. Rokt is asking a different question: what happens to the customers who actually do complete a purchase, and how much value is being left on the table in those final pages?
The answer, according to Rokt's newly released white paper on the new economics of checkout, turns out to be substantial. And the opportunity is growing larger by the month as AI tools reshape the discovery phase of online shopping in ways that concentrate commercial value onto checkout pages with an intensity that those pages were never originally designed to handle.
The Compression Nobody Planned For
Rokt's white paper opens with a structural shift that has been playing out in the background of digital commerce. The multi-touch discovery journey, where shoppers moved from search to product page to category browse to comparison to cart, is compressing. AI tools now handle much of that research for shoppers, surfacing curated shortlists instead of search results. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol already lets shoppers check out from major retailers without leaving the search interface. OpenAI built and then partially walked back in-chat purchasing features after finding that users researched inside ChatGPT but completed purchases on retailer sites.
That last point is worth sitting with. Even at the frontier of agentic commerce, the transaction itself is staying where brands control the experience. Discovery is compressing into AI. The pages where money actually changes hands are remaining brand-owned territory.
For e-commerce operators, this creates an inheritance. The storytelling, the cross-sell seeding, the basket-building, and the relationship-building touchpoints that upstream pages once distributed across six or eight moments of contact are now landing on four pages: selection, cart or review, payment, and confirmation. Rokt calls this span the Transaction Moment, and the white paper frames it as the most commercially valuable real estate in e-commerce, growing more so with every percentage point of discovery that migrates into AI.
EMARKETER puts AI-platform-driven e-commerce sales at $20.9 billion in 2026, nearly four times the prior-year projection. Roughly 38% of U.S. internet users now use AI tools for product discovery, up from 8% just two years ago, according to Similarweb data. The upstream compression is not theoretical. The transaction moment, inheriting its weight, is already happening.
Relevance as the Revenue Model
What distinguishes Rokt's position in this conversation is not just that it identified the opportunity. It's that the company has spent more than a decade building infrastructure around it at a scale that produces genuine compounding advantages.
According to Rokt's own performance data, its Rokt Brain AI engine analyzes more than 1.95 trillion data points annually to determine the next best action for each user at each step of the transaction moment. The platform is projected to power more than 10 billion transactions in 2026 across 165 million monthly active users globally. That volume is not simply a headline number. It is the foundation of a network effect: every transaction processed improves the AI's predictions for all 33,000-plus active clients on the network, a compounding advantage that no single retailer building a proprietary solution could replicate independently.
For advertisers buying reach through the network, the performance metrics reflect that intent concentration. Rokt Ads delivers a 4.03% click-through rate and 6.32% conversion rate globally, according to the company's product data. That compares favorably against the 0.4% click-through rate typical of Google Display and 1.1% typical of Facebook News Feed placements. The difference is not creative. It's context. Shoppers at the point of completing a purchase are in a fundamentally different state of intent than shoppers scrolling a social feed.
Harris Poll research conducted across 7,061 adults in six markets on behalf of Rokt found that 73% of consumers report genuine joy in the act of checking out online. Fifty-two percent identified purchase confirmation as the happiest moment in the entire transaction process. Eighty-nine percent found delight in completing long-desired purchases. These are not edge cases. The checkout experience sits at a natural emotional peak for shoppers, and that peak is what makes relevant offers feel welcome rather than intrusive, and irrelevant ones feel disproportionately jarring.
The research found that 74% of consumers would rather receive no offer than an irrelevant one. Sixty-two percent said they would abandon a cart in response to irrelevant content. And 41% said a delightful checkout experience would drive them to return. These numbers explain why Rokt has built its entire product philosophy around relevance as the precondition for monetization, rather than treating those goals as competing.
Four Steps, Four Different Strategies
One of the cleaner contributions of the Rokt white paper is its treatment of the transaction moment as four distinct surfaces, each with its own customer psychology and its own economics.
Selection is where the basket forms. AI compression is already narrowing this phase, as shoppers arrive having pre-researched a product rather than browsing broadly. The bar for relevance is higher here because the customer has already done mental work. Relevant complementary products that expand order value without disrupting decision flow create value. Offers that compete with items already under consideration destroy them.
The cart or review page is a confidence moment. The shopper is validating decisions already made. What works are low-friction additions that strengthen the chosen basket, not offers that reopen decision-making. Rokt Upcart targets precisely this step, enabling relevant first-party upsells directly in checkout to drive higher average order value without redirecting customers out of their flow.
Payment is the highest-stakes step in the sequence. The customer is committing funds. The Rokt white paper notes that payment and selection pages are suppressed at a rate roughly seven percentage points higher than confirmation pages across the network, which tells its own story about how unforgiving this step is. Rokt Pay+ operates here, turning what has traditionally been treated as a cost center into a profit center by delivering payment-linked offers and incentives timed to the moment of commitment.
Confirmation is where satisfaction peaks and the relationship can genuinely begin. Loyalty enrollment, app downloads, and post-purchase engagement. These actions land well on a confirmation page because the customer is at their emotional high point, their purchase is complete, and their satisfaction is at its maximum. Rokt Thanks activates at this step with a mix of relevant first-party offers, curated third-party offers, and loyalty rewards, all governed by the same relevance thresholds that prevent the page from becoming a generic promotional dump.
The Data Infrastructure Play
Rokt's acquisition of customer data platform mParticle in January 2025 for $300 million added a dimension to its checkout monetization thesis that goes well beyond what any individual product can deliver.
AdExchanger's coverage of the deal noted that more than 90% of both companies' respective client bases consist of enterprise retailers and brands spending more than $5 million annually on each platform. In cases where clients used both Rokt and mParticle together, Rokt's performance improved by as much as 50% compared to other CDP or identity solutions. The gap is attributable partly to better match rates and partly to the live data feed that mParticle provides: rather than relying on batch-processed audience segments, Rokt can now access a real-time stream of customer data to inform its decisions during the narrow window between when a purchase is initiated and when the checkout page loads.
PRNewswire's announcement coverage quoted Rokt CEO Bruce Buchanan: "Across billions of e-commerce transactions, we have seen joint clients achieve much better consumer and business outcomes when using mParticle, up to 50% better."
The data ownership piece matters. Rokt's architecture is built on the principle that client data is never shared, never pooled, and never used to benefit other clients. Clients maintain 100% ownership and control of their first-party data, with that commitment backed by the company's SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications. At a moment when the deprecation of third-party cookies has forced a broad rethinking of how advertisers and retailers manage audience data, a platform that processes customer signals at checkout scale while preserving first-party data sovereignty is addressing a genuinely structural need.
The Suppression Principle
The Rokt white paper introduces a concept that, on its face, seems counterintuitive for a monetization platform: suppression. When the system cannot identify a sufficiently relevant offer for a specific customer on a specific page, the right decision is to show nothing.
The behavioral logic behind suppression is sound. A customer who encounters an irrelevant offer at checkout doesn't just decline it passively. They register a small erosion of trust. Repeated low-quality exposures compound that erosion. The engagement asset that makes the transaction moment commercially valuable gradually deteriorates. A customer who encounters no offer on a visit where nothing was relevant enough returns the next time with their willingness to engage intact.
Rokt's network data from the white paper shows that 28% of eligible placements were suppressed in a single-week snapshot across the network. On payment and selection pages, suppression ran approximately seven percentage points higher than on confirmation or upsell pages, tracking closely with the higher stakes of those steps.
For organizations accustomed to measuring monetization by impression volume, this framing requires a mental model shift. Suppression is not foregone revenue. It is an investment in the long-term health of the surface. The brands that consistently show the right offer, or withhold when no offer clears the relevance threshold, build an engagement asset that appreciates over time. The white paper puts it directly: both effects compound.
Scale, Confidence, and What Comes Next
Reuters reported in January 2025 that Rokt completed a $335 million secondary share offering at a $3.5 billion valuation, with investors including Tiger Global Management, Square Peg, and Barrenjoey. Buchanan noted at the time that 43% year-over-year revenue growth had brought the company to $600 million annually. Sacra's subsequent research estimated Rokt hit approximately $900 million in annualized revenue by October 2025, with profitability reaching approximately $100 million in EBITDA for the year ended August 2025. The company's revenue share model returns $7 of every $8 of value generated back to partners, a structure that keeps incentives aligned with client outcomes rather than extracting maximum margin from a captive platform relationship.
For e-commerce leaders, the strategic implication of Rokt's trajectory is clear. The company has spent more than a decade accumulating transaction-level data, refining AI decision-making, and building a network that improves with every new partner added. The brands that are working with Rokt now are not just generating incremental revenue from checkout. They are contributing to and benefiting from a learning infrastructure that gets meaningfully better over time.
As E-commerce Fastlane's analysis of Rokt's platform noted, confirmation page experiences generate up to $500,000 in incremental profit per one million transactions, while payment page experiences generate up to $400,000 per one million transactions. Across a network on track to power 10 billion-plus transactions in 2026, the aggregate value being unlocked at the transaction moment is significant and measurable.
The AI tools compressing the discovery journey are not slowing down. For brands thinking carefully about where their remaining direct access to customers lives, checkout is increasingly the answer. Rokt has been building for exactly that moment.
