What Makes a Sale? Rethinking End-to-End Seller--Buyer Retail Dynamics with LLM Agents

TL;DR

RetailSim is a comprehensive simulation framework that models the entire retail process with diverse agents and interactions, enabling better evaluation of retail strategies and behaviors.

Contribution

The paper introduces RetailSim, a unified, high-fidelity retail simulation environment that captures cross-stage dependencies and realistic economic patterns.

Findings

RetailSim reproduces demographic purchasing behaviors.

It models the price-demand relationship accurately.

It demonstrates utility in strategy evaluation and persona inference.

Abstract

Evaluating retail strategies before deployment is difficult, as outcomes are determined across multiple stages, from seller-side persuasion through buyer-seller interaction to purchase decisions. However, existing retail simulators capture only partial aspects of this process and do not model cross-stage dependencies, making it difficult to assess how early decisions affect downstream outcomes. We present RetailSim, an end-to-end retail simulation framework that models this pipeline in a unified environment, explicitly designed for simulation fidelity through diverse product spaces, persona-driven agents, and multi-turn interactions. We evaluate RetailSim with a dual protocol comprising human evaluation of behavioral fidelity and meta-evaluation against real-world economic regularities, showing that it successfully reproduces key patterns such as demographic purchasing behavior, the price-demand relationship, and heterogeneous price elasticity. We further demonstrate its practical utility via decision-oriented use cases, including persona inference, seller-buyer interaction analysis, and sales strategy evaluation, showing RetailSim's potential as a controlled testbed for exploring retail strategies.