ChatGPT is coming for e-commerce - Where does that lead us?

At first, it may seem that shopping through ChatGPT means the end of e-commerce sites, but there are plenty of signs pointing to the opposite. Agentic commerce may bring a new boom to e-commerce, benefiting customers, merchants, and providers like Shopify. 

First and foremost, agentic commerce might bring a truly personalized shopping experience for customers. In their announcement, OpenAI explained how purchasing through ChatGPT will work: a user can ask a simple question, such as “best running shoes under $100,” and the agent will provide recommendations based on information found on the internet. Furthermore, users will be able to purchase the product directly from ChatGPT, without needing to leave the chat. 

Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, also highlighted this as a great opportunity in their own announcement of the development. She said, "This will let our merchants show up naturally in those moments and give shoppers a way to buy without breaking their flow. It's a really exciting shift for commerce."

More personalized shopping than ever

With time, this solution might lead to a more personalized shopping experience than ever before. Agents will learn the needs of their customers with time and will be able to bring better recommendations by the day. Building on the running shoes example provided by OpenAI, it’s easy to see how ChatGPT can follow up with questions about a person's exact needs, including their size, gait, surface they run on, speed, experience, and goals. An experience close to walking into a store and talking to an expert, and then buying a product. An agent can also remember all this information and recommend new or different products when the time comes, without needing to ask the same questions again, and always provide the best recommendations to the user.

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Can it be fairer than search ads? 

If agentic commerce truly lives up to the promise above, it may bring a significant change in how people purchase products online. A great chunk of commerce is still driven by search engines and ads paid by the click. Google, Meta, and others are relying on these ads to drive their revenues. Although all these companies claim to show the most relevant results to their users, in reality, they often favour advertisers with the highest budgets. Simply put, their goal is to show an ad the most times or get the most clicks. They are significantly less motivated in an actual conversion on a merchant’s website. An AI agent, on the other hand, will not be motivated by CPCs, but by actual sales, since they’re taking a cut of the sales price. If agentic commerce is successful, Google and Meta will have to think carefully about how to develop a similar solution, as merchants will focus more on satisfying AIs rather than spending money on paid ads. 

E-commerce sites will stay relevant

Somewhat counterintuitively, this also means that high-performing e-commerce sites will be more important than ever before. Although a significant portion of the sales process may be conducted in ChatGPT, the agent will obtain its information from websites and product descriptions. Merchants will need a system that is easy for an AI to understand, while still allowing them to manage their inventory, handle shipping, and perform other tasks. E-commerce solutions, such as Shopify, will undoubtedly have a significant lead over other, smaller, or niche solutions, as their solutions are highly standardized and easy for AIs to crawl, utilizing metafields, schema markups, and all the necessary structures that are preferred by AIs.. 

A new era for webshop optimization

Well-written and detailed product pages are already important, but making them satisfactory for AIs will bring even more focus on these crucial parts of a webshop. This might bring on a new era of (AI) SEO, where merchants will focus on how to optimize their webshops and product pages to get the best results with LLMs. The quality of the uploaded data will be just as important, and merchants may need to take an additional step with their product pages by adding relevant, well-written, and user-centric content beyond the official descriptions that everyone can access.

User voice will be even louder

Just as with product descriptions, reviews will also become increasingly important for merchants, and obtaining them will be worth even more than they are now. Merchants will also need to focus on building good relationships with trustworthy review sites and influencers, as there’s a great chance that AI agents will also consider their opinions. We already know that one of the most important sources of information for AIs is community sites like Reddit, which feature very specific, product-related forums where users engage in high-quality conversations about products. Sticking to OpenAI's example, there are several running and running shoes specific subreddits that have users around the world sharing opinions. Focusing on these communities will also be very valuable for merchants. 

Google, Meta, and Amazon must step up their game

This announcement also puts a lot of pressure on others, mostly Google at this point. They already have shopping integrated into their search engine, and they do have a direct ChatGPT competitor with Gemini. They will have to integrate the two, because they can’t risk being left behind and losing revenue to OpenAI. With the integration, Shopify might also be able to challenge Amazon more if they don’t try to integrate these solutions quickly into its systems.

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