Everyone is talking about “AI agents replacing ecommerce.”
Everyone is talking about “AI agents replacing ecommerce.”
Reality check: the first real experiment didn’t go well.
Walmart tested letting people buy products directly inside of OpenAI's ChatGPT through a feature called Instant Checkout.
They made about 200,000 products available.
The result?
Conversion rates were 3× worse than sending users to Walmart’s website.
That’s a massive drop.
So Walmart is already changing strategy.
Instead of completing purchases inside the chatbot, they’re embedding their own assistant (Sparky) into AI platforms and sending checkout back through Walmart’s own system.
There’s a useful lesson here for business owners thinking about AI.
AI changes discovery, not necessarily transactions.
People may ask an AI:
What product should I buy?
Which option is better?
What are the pros and cons?
But when it’s time to spend money, trust matters.
People want:
a familiar interface
reviews and comparisons
clear pricing and shipping
a checkout flow they recognize
In other words: context and control.
AI will likely become the front door of the internet.
But the businesses that win will still own the experience where the decision actually happens.
This is the same pattern we’ve seen for years:
Search → website
Social → website
AI → website
New discovery layer.
Same need for a strong owned platform.
The companies that forget that will optimize for the wrong thing.