Walmart and OpenAI just announced an new partnership to make Walmart’s products shoppable … and buyable right in ChatGPT
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The “Buy Now” button is coming to ChatGPT, and Walmart is a big part of that. Walmart says it is enabling AI-first shopping experiences via a new partnership with OpenAI, the massive AI company behind ChatGPT. The alliance is a shot across the bow of e-commerce giant Amazon, which owns about 40% of the entire U.S. retail e-commerce market, compared to only 6.4% for Walmart.
The move is strategic on multiple levels.
AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT are rapidly becoming the go-to entry point to the internet for younger people when they have questions that need answers. This displaces Google, to an extent, and disrupts search engine optimization tactics that have long driven e-commerce traffic and revenue. While Amazon is a massive product search engine in its own right, the user experience is getting worse and worse as ads occupy most of the top Amazon product search results and prices rise thanks to the platform’s fees on sellers.
So Walmart is attempting to capitalize on emerging consumer behavior changes to capture more market share.
“For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement. “That is about to change.”
Walmart is betting that people want to ask ChatGPT what is the best dishwasher or hair dryer, or even ask ChatGPT to order them some toilet paper or oranges. While the last two might require additional cultural shifts, the first two are getting more and more commonplace.
“ChatGPT drives ~52 million daily purchase-related conversations,” Shelfsight founder Joe Murphy said recently, citing a study released last month titled How People Use ChatGPT.
People already use ChatGPT for product search and comparison.
John Koetsier
They’re asking questions like “what’s the best laptop under $1,000,” or “which protein bar has the highest rating,” or “what’s a good streaming service.”
“ChatGPT is quickly becoming a new front door for product discovery,” Murphy says. “For brands selling at retail, this trend is impossible to ignore.”
Walmart says this will be a native AI experience: multimedia, personalized and contextual. That means you’ll be able to get video, audio, and images along with your searches, and then links to purchase right inside ChatGPT once you’ve linked your Walmart’s account.
The Walmart-OpenAI tie-up does open up a Pandora’s box, of course.
Will the product results you see in ChatGPT still be the best ones available, or will that be influenced by how much money ChatGPT can make if you buy one? Will they show up as promoted or sponsored results, or will they look exactly like all the other answers?
And, of course, Amazon will not be defeated so easily.
Besides its status as the e-commerce king, Amazon ties its customer tightly to its services via available free delivery with Amazon Prime. And, given that Amazon has heavily invested in its delivery services–including with experimental drone delivery–it’s not just about free delivery but fast, reliable delivery.
What this foreshadows, however, is the future of commerce: my AI agents talking to e-commerce agents about products I want, and negotiating a price, delivery, and all the other details.
Walmart has made a smart strategic move. Amazon has plenty of available responses.
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