Let’s talk about the checkout that takes your customer somewhere you can never follow.
For the last year the pitch has been simple. The assistant does the work. You tell it what you want, it finds it, compares it, buys it. No tabs, no carts, no abandoning the order on the shipping page. Shopping gets effortless.
Then somebody actually ran the numbers.
Walmart put about two hundred thousand products into ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout. Real customers, real carts, real money. The results came back, and purchases completed inside the chat converted roughly three times worse than the ones where the customer clicked through to Walmart’s own site. Three times. Wired had it first, CNBC followed, and OpenAI is now phasing Instant Checkout out in favour of “merchant-controlled” checkout — which is a polite way of saying the experiment didn’t hold.
Picture a person who makes something. Runs a small shop. Sells to people who like the thing and come back for the next one. One morning she opens the order log and half the sales are there. The money’s fine. But she can’t tell you who bought anything. No name she recognises, no email she owns, no way to reach them next month when she makes the next thing. The orders came in through an assistant, and the assistant kept the customer.
That’s the whole game.
Here’s what’s actually happening, and it’s worth being precise about it.
The assistant layer has figured out it wants to be the storefront. Google launched something called the Universal Commerce Protocol — UCP — and it’s genuinely open-sourced, genuinely co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Target, Walmart, Wayfair, and endorsed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Amex, Adyen and a long list of others. One integration, and every AI agent can talk to your store. That sounds like the opposite of lock-in. It sounds like the thing we keep asking for.
But it does something else too. UCP’s first reference implementation is Google’s, it powers checkout inside Google’s AI Mode and the Gemini app, and to play you need a Merchant Center account. Read the architecture as an incentive instead of a feature and it says something clear: we run the discovery, we run the identity, we run the payment rail — and you, the brand, run fulfilment. You keep the returns and the goodwill and the reputation you spent ten years building. You give up the part where you know who your customer is.
AlixPartners put it about as bluntly as it can be put. As discovery, evaluation and checkout shift into agent channels, retailers risk getting cut out of the customer journey entirely and reduced to “a supply chain role: fulfilling the order, but no longer owning the customer relationship.” Their words. Invisible fulfilment channels inside somebody else’s ecosystem.
Now, this is the part most people get wrong. They hear a retail story and file it under e-commerce. It’s the same move we’ve watched for twenty years, one layer higher. First the platform owned the app. Then it owned the feed. Then it owned the search results, and now it wants to own the transaction. Each time it looks like a service, and each time the merchant wakes up as a tenant.
And the reason it’s working is subtle. The strange part is that in-chat checkout doesn’t even convert better. It converts worse. The reason it still matters is that discovery has already moved. One survey this year found that 63 percent of AI-assisted shoppers hadn’t picked a brand yet when they turned to the assistant. The decision — which one, from whom — is happening upstream, inside a conversation the brand isn’t in. By the time the sale lands, the merchant was never in the room.
So the smart merchant looks at this and does the only sane thing: one foot in the new channel, both feet on the direct relationship. Uses the agent as a channel. Guards the list. Owns the email, the repeat order, the return, the relationship. Because the moment your discovery layer becomes your identity layer, you don’t have customers. You have a supply contract.
There’s a harder truth underneath, and it’s the one I’d want you to keep.
Consent and a relationship are the same shape. Both are two-way, and both need the other side to be able to see you. A machine standing between you and the person who bought your thing is a wall, not a window. It works fine until the day the platform changes its cut, changes the placement, changes who gets surfaced — and you discover you never owned the front door. You were renting it, and you never got a copy of the key.
Forrester’s data says consumer adoption of agentic commerce is still low and flat, so nobody has to panic this week. Which is exactly why this is the week to decide what you’re building. Not the feature. The position.
The principle worth defending is not clever. The right to know who your customer is, and the right to be reachable by them without going through a company that can switch you off. The next AI problem was never going to be productivity. It’s identity, consent, and proof — including the identity of the person on the other side of your own till.
You’ve got this.
Keep your list. Keep your front door. Everything else is someone else’s plumbing.