OpenAI is taking the ‘first steps towards agentic commerce in ChatGPT’ with the launch of its Instant Checkout feature, but its path is by no means a straight road.
Instant Checkout allows users in the US to purchase products directly in chat. For now, users can only make single-item purchases from US Etsy sellers, but OpenAI has shared plans to introduce multi-item carts and expand the feature to other regions in the future. The company has also reported that over a million Shopify merchants will soon be available to purchase from, including Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx and Vuori.
OpenAI’s largest study of ChatGPT usage to date — published on 15 September — showed 52% of its users are women, which explains why the above brands are among the first in the queue.
But even if brands enable Instant Checkout, OpenAI reports that ChatGPT’s product results are ‘organic and unsponsored’, meaning that there is no way for merchants to ensure that their products appear in a search.
According to OpenAI, its LLM considers ‘availability, price, quality, whether a merchant is the primary seller, and whether Instant Checkout is enabled’ when ranking merchants that sell the same items. If a merchant does appear in search results and if they do make a sale, they will also have to pay a small fee to OpenAI.
But whether the market wants or needs agentic commerce as much as the LLM companies need sources of revenue is a live question.
For Kate Scott-Dawkins, president of global business intelligence at WPP Media, it comes down to the cost-benefit analysis of how much time and energy it saves consumers.
But the supply side of the equation is potentially a bigger sticking point, say analysts Eric Seufert and Andrew Lipsman, who argue that agentic commerce is ‘a hype cycle’ and that it has one ‘fundamental flaw’ — big retail platforms, such as Amazon, do not want it.
The online retailer has already blacklisted multiple third-party AI bots that could crawl its pages and sell its products. Seufert and Lipsman also note that Amazon and Shopify represent about 50% of the e-commerce market, and if Amazon blacklists AI crawlers, then consumers cannot trust that AI agents will make informed purchases since they’ll lack visibility.
Seufert and Lipsman added that shopping on platforms like Amazon is already a simple process, requiring only two clicks. ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature similarly requires only two clicks, but it does not own the transaction, meaning that consumers will still need to get in touch with the merchant if they have queries about their order. In other words, ChatGPT will be a third party that risks complicating, rather than simplifying, sales.