That doesn't seem terribly surprising, a human can quickly look through a grid of shirts to find one they like. ChatGPT would be guessing what they might want and the human would probably get a bad experience there with some regularity.
What if they made instant checkout actually instant? You ask ChatGPT to setup a website and it instantly purchases web hosting and sets up the website there. You can't beat a 100% conversion rate by actually checking out instantly. If you didn't like that host you can ask it to find it alternative and ChatGPT would automatically attempt a refund and then purchase from someone else.
The experience is a lot like when you are talking with a friend, then they decide to ask siri or google a question using voice. The result is always imprecise. Meaning they either have to repeat their query, or end up typing it anyway.
If you want to buy a Walmart product, the easiest way is to go to Walmart. Why add an imprecise middle man in between?
Do you have any examples? Because from Amazon to Uber, they're not great from an end user perspective. It's not like people who like the website will stop using it because of chatgpt, this would be attracting people who complain about the website/app. People are always complaining about amazon for example, i don't like the experience but I haven't had all that much bad product experience from them, but people who keep saying they're getting bad products on Amazon can maybe use chatgpt, talk to it so it understands what they're looking for in natural language, in a way the search bar can't and keep their patronage.
I just had a horrible thought. Maybe online stores will just take away the ability for customers to see the full inventory and force you to go through the chatbot. This will allow them to fully control the shopping experience even more.
If you want running shoes, you have to go through their chatbot.
Amazon might already have the monopoly power to do this. They would just need to swap out the search bar for a chat box.
I feel the opposite. It's inconvenient having to type (or voice) anything.
How much text do you have to type into Amazon when shopping? Usually just a product category, and then you just scroll and click around. A lot of the optimizations, like showing related products, or saving payment or shipping info, are essentially reducing text entry.
Last year they couldn't draw fingers on hands properly, this year they can't convert at checkouts, I wonder what they'll be failing to do a year from now.
> Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.
It turns out when you step outside of “hard tech” problems like building GPT6 there are all of these details others have solved already. E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
OpenAI is new to it, and if I had to guess, not that interested in getting good at it.
A lot of the AI companies visibly suffer from the engineer's disease. It's kind of interesting to look at them through that lens, and of course, the claims they make about the future.
> Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust
Does anybody else just feel the aloof out of touchness just oozing from that sentence? "Trust", as if this is just any old metric they merely have to work to increase.
This is what I want from a purchasing agent: I make a list of items that I repeatedly buy (mostly household supplies), and that I keep roughly updated with my inventory / need. The agent tracks prices and sales across all web stores, making appropriate purchase decisions based on which is the least expensive, combining shipping, taking advantage of sales to stock up, etc. For other one-time purchase items, I input what I am looking for and can create a persistent pan-site shopping cart that once again minimizes costs and shipping fees. Being very explicit here: the main goal of an "agent" should be to represent and carry out my own interests.
And these functionalities have been straightforwardly doable without "AI" for the past few decades, except for the glaring incentives against them! It is in every web store's interest to undermine customers' ability to obtain semantic pricing, shop around, create a cart independent of their site, etc. These incentives are why when you visit any web store these days, the very first thing they do is hassle you with CAPTCHAs (and the bad ones keep doing it throughout the session!) - they want to make sure you're an actual computationally-unassisted human sitting there, wasting your personal time with their bloated pages that take tens of seconds to download and render, so that you don't spend that time being a more efficient market actor.
Now, does "AI" have the capability to go against these trends and enable user-centric algorithmic shopping and purchasing? Perhaps, and I hope so! But it's certainly not going to be led by these popups on web stores nagging me if I want to chat instead of doing the thing I went there to do (which when you think about it, this is just the latest instance of these stores trying to make you waste your time on their site). Rather, it will come from completely third party services (or ideally software) setting out to act in customers' interests, and performing adversarial interoperability to achieve this!
> E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years
Sort of, but there's a ton of middlemen between "resources in the ground" and "product in my hand". For example, how much utility is there in a "store" to thee consumer at this point? Let me buy from the manufacturer.
Perhaps clickthrough is worse because there are fewer dark patterns involved and people are mostly just browsing and occasionally buying only what they need.
They didn't really seem to specify the "why" of it with any research. And weird that OAI wasn't supporting them to see wha the issue was.
> Walmart will embed its own chatbot, Sparky, inside ChatGPT. Users will log into Walmart, sync carts across platforms, and complete purchases within Walmart’s system.
It's probably stuff like this along with investor pressure that will make AI companies slowly make their AIs more profit maximizing (and the long term reason ilya etc was so against even going down that path)
The idea that AI will suddenly solve e-commerce demonstrates a lack of understanding on everything that has happened in this space over the last 25 years.
There’s a lot of this going on in AI at the moment. New folks come in thinking they have a magic solution and then produce a total train wreck as it turns out domain expertise is still a thing.
You can either have AI be honest or AI become a marketing tool. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.
How many people tried for the novalty with no intention of purchasing? It being a thousand times worse conversion wouldn't matter if they are additional sales???
Yeah this article is very lacking in detail. If they A-B tested it though (which seems like an extremely basic thing to try before making a decision like this) I think that would satisfy your objection.
I'm not promoting "ChatGPT Checkout", however, just because something sucks now doesn't mean it will suck forever. I'm confident they'll iterate and improve. I say this because my 14-year-old niece's entire world seems to be ChatGPT; it's pretty much the only way she interacts with the internet. I don't think she's alone - all her young peers are like this, too. Retailers know this, so they've got no choice but to improve the experience of purchasing crap through an AI chat system.
I disagree, walmart's website isn't nice. a lot of commerce sites are cancer!
if i can just ask chatgpt or gemini to shop I'd love that.
Just navigating their sites for items is a pain, I can imagine an LLM being great at finding items, and facilitating the browsing experience. My only concern would be having to chat with it a lot, and any dark patterns coercing impulse purchases.
These interactions really don't get the testing they need.
When they aren't designed, how do you know how to test?
Over the weekend, I was directed to file a police report with a chatbot and could not complete it because it was asking for information that did not exist and did not apply to my case.
(I'm sure somebody is going to say that this can be solved by having LLMs role play as victims and have an LLM observe and decide what's a failing test case and what isn't.)
I’ve been running e-commerce systems for 30 years (tech, marketing, etc). This was going to fail from the start for one reason: intent.
Most people using AI chat are exploring ideas and solutions. They’re doodling, not shopping. Or in old timey parlance, they’re looky-loos or tire kickers at best.
Anyone who’s had to justify ad spend in e-commerce can tell you that some sources produce huge traffic with absolutely terrible conversion. Reddit and Pinterest pretty much blow for this reason, with limited exceptions. It’s also why TikTok and other influencer platforms really work.
Conversion requires a mental shift from discovery to demand.
Also, really hate summaries like this without the actual source so here are the main points from the actual source (WIRED https://archive.is/7DuEV):
1. Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT performed poorly, with conversion about one-third of Walmart’s normal site.
2. The experience failed largely because it forced single-item purchases instead of letting users build a cart.
3. Walmart is shifting to embedding its own assistant, Sparky, inside ChatGPT and keeping checkout on its own system.
4. ChatGPT is still valuable because it’s driving significantly more new customer traffic than search.
5. Purchases that did work were mostly practical, problem-solving items like supplements and tools.
6. Fully automated “agentic shopping” is still unlikely in the near term because people want control over purchases.
7. OpenAI is moving away from in-chat checkout and focusing on helping users research while merchants handle transactions.
In short, AI is useful for discovery, but traditional e-commerce flows still outperform it at closing sales.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 52.6 ms ] threadIf you want to buy a Walmart product, the easiest way is to go to Walmart. Why add an imprecise middle man in between?
A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
By the way, who names their AI "rufus" (amazon!)
If you want running shoes, you have to go through their chatbot.
Amazon might already have the monopoly power to do this. They would just need to swap out the search bar for a chat box.
How much text do you have to type into Amazon when shopping? Usually just a product category, and then you just scroll and click around. A lot of the optimizations, like showing related products, or saving payment or shipping info, are essentially reducing text entry.
> Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.
It turns out when you step outside of “hard tech” problems like building GPT6 there are all of these details others have solved already. E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
OpenAI is new to it, and if I had to guess, not that interested in getting good at it.
Does anybody else just feel the aloof out of touchness just oozing from that sentence? "Trust", as if this is just any old metric they merely have to work to increase.
This is what I want from a purchasing agent: I make a list of items that I repeatedly buy (mostly household supplies), and that I keep roughly updated with my inventory / need. The agent tracks prices and sales across all web stores, making appropriate purchase decisions based on which is the least expensive, combining shipping, taking advantage of sales to stock up, etc. For other one-time purchase items, I input what I am looking for and can create a persistent pan-site shopping cart that once again minimizes costs and shipping fees. Being very explicit here: the main goal of an "agent" should be to represent and carry out my own interests.
And these functionalities have been straightforwardly doable without "AI" for the past few decades, except for the glaring incentives against them! It is in every web store's interest to undermine customers' ability to obtain semantic pricing, shop around, create a cart independent of their site, etc. These incentives are why when you visit any web store these days, the very first thing they do is hassle you with CAPTCHAs (and the bad ones keep doing it throughout the session!) - they want to make sure you're an actual computationally-unassisted human sitting there, wasting your personal time with their bloated pages that take tens of seconds to download and render, so that you don't spend that time being a more efficient market actor.
Now, does "AI" have the capability to go against these trends and enable user-centric algorithmic shopping and purchasing? Perhaps, and I hope so! But it's certainly not going to be led by these popups on web stores nagging me if I want to chat instead of doing the thing I went there to do (which when you think about it, this is just the latest instance of these stores trying to make you waste your time on their site). Rather, it will come from completely third party services (or ideally software) setting out to act in customers' interests, and performing adversarial interoperability to achieve this!
Sort of, but there's a ton of middlemen between "resources in the ground" and "product in my hand". For example, how much utility is there in a "store" to thee consumer at this point? Let me buy from the manufacturer.
Maybe if they burn more tokens the answer will become clear
Perhaps clickthrough is worse because there are fewer dark patterns involved and people are mostly just browsing and occasionally buying only what they need.
They didn't really seem to specify the "why" of it with any research. And weird that OAI wasn't supporting them to see wha the issue was.
I sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
The enshittification is upon us.
The latest AI is trained on the average citizens social media output. Iq 90.
That’s why AI seemed smart. The bar will not be raised again. We’re cooked.
Your product has to be a 10x improvement over the incumbent to be competitive.
In AI speak it would be the “extra-bitter” lesson I guess?
You need to add 10x resources to beat a product that’s already solved with mature tech.
There’s a lot of this going on in AI at the moment. New folks come in thinking they have a magic solution and then produce a total train wreck as it turns out domain expertise is still a thing.
You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.
Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong, where handing over payment details in another chain.
Just let me buy my stuff in peace. Shopping is not the 'killer app' for GenAI.
It sounds like you're excusing AI, what other systems is AI not suitable for?
if i can just ask chatgpt or gemini to shop I'd love that.
Just navigating their sites for items is a pain, I can imagine an LLM being great at finding items, and facilitating the browsing experience. My only concern would be having to chat with it a lot, and any dark patterns coercing impulse purchases.
When they aren't designed, how do you know how to test?
Over the weekend, I was directed to file a police report with a chatbot and could not complete it because it was asking for information that did not exist and did not apply to my case.
(I'm sure somebody is going to say that this can be solved by having LLMs role play as victims and have an LLM observe and decide what's a failing test case and what isn't.)
Most people using AI chat are exploring ideas and solutions. They’re doodling, not shopping. Or in old timey parlance, they’re looky-loos or tire kickers at best.
Anyone who’s had to justify ad spend in e-commerce can tell you that some sources produce huge traffic with absolutely terrible conversion. Reddit and Pinterest pretty much blow for this reason, with limited exceptions. It’s also why TikTok and other influencer platforms really work.
Conversion requires a mental shift from discovery to demand.
Also, really hate summaries like this without the actual source so here are the main points from the actual source (WIRED https://archive.is/7DuEV):
1. Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT performed poorly, with conversion about one-third of Walmart’s normal site.
2. The experience failed largely because it forced single-item purchases instead of letting users build a cart.
3. Walmart is shifting to embedding its own assistant, Sparky, inside ChatGPT and keeping checkout on its own system.
4. ChatGPT is still valuable because it’s driving significantly more new customer traffic than search.
5. Purchases that did work were mostly practical, problem-solving items like supplements and tools.
6. Fully automated “agentic shopping” is still unlikely in the near term because people want control over purchases.
7. OpenAI is moving away from in-chat checkout and focusing on helping users research while merchants handle transactions.
In short, AI is useful for discovery, but traditional e-commerce flows still outperform it at closing sales.