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When OpenAI announced its Instant Checkout feature last fall, retailers sprang into action. Etsy , Walmart and Shopify quickly lined up to let users buy merchants' products directly within its ChatGPT chatbot. Suddenly, the e-commerce world was fixated on shopping agents, the artificial intelligence tools that can make purchases on behalf of users. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein called it the "new frontier" for online retail. Several months later, OpenAI and its retail partners have headed back to the drawing board. The AI startup is moving away from Instant Checkout and is now working with retailers to create dedicated apps within ChatGPT. This approach will reroute users to the retailer's own website to complete a purchase, giving those companies more control of the customer experience and the transaction process. "OpenAI underestimated how difficult the enablement of transactions was going to be, which, on the one hand, is a little surprising, but on the other hand, it's not easy for retailers," Bob Hetu, an analyst at Gartner, told CNBC in an interview. An OpenAI spokesperson said it is prioritizing better search and product discovery in the chatbot, two areas where it has seen some early traction in user adoption. "Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases can happen more seamlessly," an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. The Information was first to report OpenAI's pivot. The change in strategy has raised questions about whether tech companies and their retail partners oversold shopping bots' readiness. It also highlights the challenges AI startups can face as they attempt to alter the e-commerce landscape that's dominated by incumbent giants like Amazon . OpenAI, while racing to keep pace with rivals like Google and Anthropic, released a flurry of new offerings and experiences last year in an effort to expand its market share and build out new revenue streams. As shoppers have turned to ChatGPT to ask questions about products, e-commerce emerged as a potentially lucrative opportunity. While OpenAI tries to figure out its commerce strategy, competitors like Google aren't sitting still. On Thursday, Google released new updates to its shopping agent platform that enable its systems to load real-time product data, preventing mishaps like out-of-stocks and pricing errors. It also lets users add multiple items to their carts and connect loyalty memberships— two features OpenAI hasn't yet fully cracked.
Agentic stumbles
OpenAI initially billed Instant Checkout as the "next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn't just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it." The company said it would collect "a small fee" on each transaction, but declined to disclose any additional financial details. OpenAI said at the time of the announcement that products from U.S. Etsy sellers would be available to buy directly in ChatGPT, and it expected to add items from "over a million" Shopify merchants at some point. Onboarding merchants turned out to be an arduous process, and Instant Checkout was prone to errors, said Emily Pfeiffer, principal analyst at Forrester. As of last month, she said, roughly 30 Shopify merchants were available via Instant Checkout. Walmart made about 200,000 products available for purchase inside ChatGPT, the company confirmed. It's unclear how many Etsy products made it onto the service. OpenAI could scrape some retailers' websites to obtain data on products surfaced in ChatGPT, but that meant information about whether items were still in stock, estimated delivery timing, or shipping costs could be inaccurate or out of date, Pfeiffer said in an interview. "Crawling and scraping is inadequate to get the full breadth of product data that you need to do a good job of commerce," Pfeiffer said. "I think that it was not an ideal shopping experience, but it's not like the death of agentic commerce," she added.
'Adoption takes time'
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