Your customer's agent, not your customer: who's doing the shopping now.

What wins this kind of customer

Someone has set up a standing assistant to keep their household stocked: reorder washing powder when it's running low, replace a coffee it's noticed they buy every few weeks, compare a couple of options if the usual brand's out of stock. Nobody sits down to shop for any of this. The assistant already knows the person's preferences, their usual spend, their size if it's relevant, and it acts on all of that without a session, a browse, or a single click from the person it's shopping for.

This is a different kind of customer to design for, not a variant of the one a shop already knows. A person browsing can be caught by a good photo, a persuasive headline, a discount banner at the right moment. A standing agent checks facts against what it already knows its person wants, and either finds a match or doesn't, unmoved by any of that. Marketing aimed at catching attention has nothing to catch, because there's no attention in the room to catch.

Being correctly matched to what the agent already knows about its person, specific size, specific preference, specific price range, checked reliably every time, not persuaded once. A shop that's clear and current on exactly the facts a standing agent checks, and consistently is, wins repeat business from a customer who never manually reconsiders the choice each time. A shop relying on being rediscovered and re-persuaded on each visit has nothing to offer a customer who isn't visiting at all.

What happens the first time the usual choice runs out

The real test of this relationship comes the moment the agent's default option isn't available: the usual coffee is out of stock, the usual size is sold through. A person in that situation can be persuaded into an alternative by a good offer, a nice photo, a limited-time discount. A standing agent compares the alternatives the same way it would have compared them the first time, against the same facts, price, size, whatever matters to its person, and picks whichever one is genuinely closest, regardless of how loudly any of them are asking to be chosen. This is the moment a shop either earns a second, unplanned sale by having its facts in good order, or loses one entirely to a competitor the agent had never previously considered, purely because that competitor's facts happened to answer the question more completely.

Why small today doesn't mean safe to ignore

Nobody has a reliable figure for how much buying already happens this way, and a number stated with confidence here would be worth less than it sounds. What's visible without needing one: standing agents are real, they're already placing real orders, and the businesses winning that repeat custom aren't the ones with the loudest offer, they're the ones a delegated agent never has a reason to leave. That's a commercial position worth having regardless of how large the category turns out to be, because the alternative is competing for the same customer's attention every single time they might have bought once and never had to be won again.

Treating this as too small to matter yet misreads what's actually at stake. It isn't a new segment to size up before investing in. It's the moment a customer stops being available to be won at all, competed for, discounted at, persuaded, because the decision has already been delegated. A shop that becomes the default answer to a standing agent's question keeps that business without fighting for it again on that particular purchase. A shop that doesn't never gets the chance to notice the sale it lost, because no one was ever there to be persuaded out of it.

Selfe makes sure a shop's real facts are checkable and current enough that a standing agent, acting quietly on someone's behalf, keeps choosing it without either party ever needing a persuasive moment. The buying side of this same test, a standing agent still has to check a real fact and complete a real purchase, no mention required, is this hub's own foundational distinction between being found and being bought from, applied here.

How would we even know if this kind of customer is buying from us?

Check your own order data for repeat purchases with no browsing activity attached. That pattern is the tell.

Do we need a different approach for this versus a person browsing?

No, the same clear, current, checkable facts serve both. What differs is that a standing agent has no patience for anything that isn't already true and checkable.