65% of Shoppers Decide Before Visiting Your Website

The decision has already been made by the time a shopper lands on your product page. They've compared prices, validated options through AI tools, and browsed deal aggregators. Your website is no longer the beginning of the journey. It's close to the end.

New consumer research from Minty, conducted at a 97% confidence level across U.S. adults, puts numbers to what many Asian marketers are already sensing. The data is blunt: brands are showing up late.

Pre-Purchase Planning Now Drives the Majority of Shopping Decisions

The numbers from the Minty research are hard to dismiss.

65% of shoppers say advance planning is central to how they save money. Nine in ten use digital savings tools as a regular part of how they shop. Among those who use digital deals, 85% use them specifically to stretch their budgets before deciding where to buy.

These shoppers are not browsing passively. They arrive at your website with a plan already formed, a consideration set already narrowed, and expectations already set. The moment of influence that brands have traditionally relied on, the product page visit, happens after the real decision work is done.

60% of shoppers describe their style as focused on finding the best value rather than brand loyalty. That's not indifference to brands. It's a deliberate, pre-purchase evaluation process that happens before brands even know the shopper exists.

The AI Visibility Gap Brands Are Not Tracking

The shift into AI tools is accelerating the problem. Shoppers are now using AI to compare products, find deals, and validate purchase decisions in one conversational flow. Research, comparison, and deal-finding that once required multiple browser tabs now collapse into a single interaction, and that interaction happens before any visit to your website.

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For Asian brands, the stakes are particularly sharp. 53% of APAC consumers are already using AI to search for personalized product recommendations, according to a 2026 Tech Edition report. Yet only 12% of brands in the region have embedded any form of AI-driven brand discovery capability.

That gap is the visibility crisis. If a shopper asks an AI tool which brand offers the best value in your category and your brand doesn't appear in the answer, you haven't lost the sale at checkout. You were never part of the consideration.

Across global brand rankings, 73% of brands have zero mentions in AI-generated responses despite ranking on Google's first page. A high search ranking no longer guarantees presence where shoppers are actually doing their research.

A New Metric, A Closing Window

The Minty research introduces a metric most Asian marketing teams haven't started tracking: Share of Model. It measures how often and how accurately your brand appears in AI-generated answers to the questions your customers are actually asking.

Think of it as the AI-era version of share of voice. Unlike paid media visibility, it isn't built through ad spend. It's built through authoritative third-party presence, structured content that AI systems can retrieve cleanly, and integrations that surface your value signals where shoppers are actively researching.

The Minty data offers a small but important counterpoint to the doom loop. 82% of shoppers say they would engage with a relevant offer from a browser extension at the right moment. The window to influence a decision hasn't closed entirely. It has simply moved earlier.

Marketing Budgets Are Still Wired to a Shopper Who No Longer Exists

The implication is structural, not tactical. Marketing budgets built around owned channels and bottom-of-funnel conversion were designed for a shopper who arrived open to persuasion. That shopper is increasingly rare.

The more valuable opportunity is earlier: when shoppers are still exploring categories, comparing options, and deciding which brands are even worth considering. Shopping in APAC is moving from keyword search toward conversational, AI-driven interactions, and brands that solve the data-readiness problem first will own that discovery layer.

"The marketing funnel as we know it is obsolete," Minty's research concludes. "Decisions are happening elsewhere."

For Asian marketing leaders, elsewhere is no longer a vague concept. It's savings apps, deal aggregators, and AI conversations. The question is whether your brand shows up in any of them.