The 'Where to Buy' Button Grew Up and Learned to Talk to Robots

Somewhere on the website of a brand you buy - a coffee maker, a bag of dog food, a flat-screen TV - there is a small button that says "Where to Buy." You click it, a list of retailers appears, and you get shipped off to whichever store actually has the thing in stock. That button looks trivial. For 20 years it has been quietly making money for a company in Irvine, California, that most shoppers have never heard of.

That company was called PriceSpider. As of July 2025, it is called Wayvia. The rename is not a fresh coat of paint on a tired brand - it is a bet on who, or what, does the shopping next. Founder and CEO Anthony Ferry thinks the answer is increasingly going to be a machine, and he has spent the last two years wiring two decades of shopper data straight into it.

01 / What it doesThe plumbing between "I want that" and "sold"

Wayvia sits in the awkward gap that has always haunted consumer brands. A company like Purina or Bosch doesn't sell to you directly - it sells through Amazon, Walmart, Target, a thousand regional grocers and electronics chains. The moment a shopper leaves the brand's website to go buy, the brand goes blind. It doesn't know where the sale happened, whether the product was in stock, whether the price was right, or whether a rogue discounter was undercutting everyone.

Wayvia's job is to close that gap. Its shoppable "Where to Buy" widgets route buyers to a retailer that actually has inventory. Its data platform then watches the shelf: pricing, stock availability, product content and market share across a network it says spans more than 32,000 validated retailers and 7 million product pages. The pitch is simple - turn every shopper decision into measurable retailer revenue, and stop guessing.

02 / The customersWho is actually paying for this

This is enterprise software, not a consumer app. Wayvia's buyers are the brand managers, shopper-insights teams and e-commerce leads inside large consumer companies. The names it references read like a supermarket run: L'Oreal, Purina, Mars, Samsung, Bosch, P&G, Hisense, Char-Broil. The company says it serves more than 2,000 brands.

The results it advertises are the kind that get a software contract renewed. One hardware brand added one-click "Add to Cart" to its Where-to-Buy button and reported a 70% lift in leads and sales. L'Oreal is cited with a 15% increase in retailer coverage and an 87% revenue increase. Hisense calls the platform its "single source of truth for retail sales attribution." Those are the brand's own figures, but they point at the same thing: the boring layer moves real money.

03 / The problems it solvesPhantom stockouts, price cheats, lost trails

Three unglamorous problems sit at the center of Wayvia's business. The first is availability: a product that's out of stock at the retailer a shopper lands on is a sale that quietly evaporates. The second is pricing integrity - the discounter who blows past a brand's minimum advertised price and drags the whole category down with them. The third is attribution: the brand that spends millions on marketing and then can't prove which retailer the sales actually went to.

Wayvia's answer to the second problem has a name: Prowl, its MAP-monitoring and brand-protection engine, built on the technology it acquired from ORIS Intelligence and relaunched under the new brand. It hunts down price violations in near real time - one case study claims a 21% reduction in MAP violations.

04 / The AI betWhat "Wayvia MCP" actually means

Here is the part that made retail-tech people look up. Most companies in this category sell dashboards - screens full of charts a human logs in to read. Wayvia's flagship launch is the opposite. Wayvia MCP is an enterprise implementation of the Model Context Protocol, the emerging standard for letting AI systems plug into external data. In plain terms: it lets a brand, or a brand's AI agent, ask a question in natural language - "where are we losing the buy box this week?" - and get a live answer from two decades of commerce data, without dashboards, SQL or a data analyst in the middle.

It is a genuinely different framing of the market. If shopping increasingly starts inside an AI chatbot rather than a search bar, the question of "where can I buy this, in stock, at a fair price" becomes a machine-to-machine query. Wayvia's wager is that it already owns the answer - and that being the data source an AI agent trusts is a better position than being one more dashboard a human ignores.

05 / How it got hereA company that bought its rivals

Wayvia did not grow purely by out-marketing the competition. Backed since 2018 by growth-equity firm Frontier Growth, it grew partly by acquiring companies that owned pieces of the same puzzle. ORIS Intelligence brought pricing-integrity and brand-protection data. Commerce Connector and Amsterdam-based Hatch brought European "where to buy" technology and a wider international retailer network. Stack that on top of PriceSpider's own two decades of shopper data, and you get a moat that is genuinely hard to rebuild from scratch.

06 / The founderThird act of a downturn builder

Anthony Ferry is a serial founder with a habit of building through bad markets. He started Neudesic during the dotcom bust; it was eventually sold to IBM. He has founded four companies in all, across e-commerce, AI and enterprise software - and, by his own telling, is a father of six who pays attention to how younger generations actually shop. PriceSpider, now Wayvia, is the venture where the two threads - decision data and consumer behavior - meet. Jon Pfortmiller, a fellow founder, serves as Chief Strategy Officer.

07 / Where it fitsThe digital-shelf wars

Wayvia plays in the crowded "commerce intelligence" and "digital shelf" category alongside names like Profitero, Salsify, Syndigo, DataWeave, Wiser and Bazaarvoice. Its distinct angle is the combination it owns end to end: the shoppable widget that creates the click, plus the data layer that measures what happens after it - now with an AI-native access point on top. With an estimated ~$25 million in annual revenue and a team of roughly 240, it is not the biggest player in the room. But owning both the button and the data behind it is a narrower, stickier position than selling either one alone.

The 2026 launch of a Professional Services division suggests the next move: not just selling software, but selling the people who help brands actually use it. That is the classic path for enterprise platforms that have run out of easy features to ship and want to grow account value instead.

Whether AI agents really do become the shoppers of the next decade is an open question - and Wayvia's whole rebrand is a bet on the answer being yes. If it is right, the company that spent 20 years building the internet's "Where to Buy" button will have quietly built the place those agents go to ask.