Walmart and OpenAI just announced a new partnership to make Walmart’s products shoppable… and purchase directly 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’s enabling AI-first shopping experiences through a new partnership with OpenAI, the massive AI company behind ChatGPT. The alliance is a shot in the arm for e-commerce giant Amazon, which owns approximately 40% of the entire U.S. retail e-commerce market, compared to just 6.4% for Walmart.
The move is strategic on multiple levels.
AI-powered answering machines like ChatGPT are quickly becoming the entry point to the internet for young people when they have questions that need answers. This is displacing Google to some extent and disrupting the search engine optimization tactics that have long driven e-commerce traffic and sales. While Amazon is a huge product search engine in its own right, the user experience continues to improve getting worse as ads take up most of Amazon’s product search results and prices rise thanks to the platform’s fees for sellers.
So Walmart is trying to take advantage of emerging changes in consumer behavior to capture more market share.
“For many years, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” said Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart, in a statement. “That’s going to change.”
Walmart is betting that people will want to ask ChatGPT what the best dishwasher or hair dryer is, or even ask ChatGPT to order them some toilet paper or oranges. While the latter two may require additional cultural shifts, the first two are becoming increasingly common.
“ChatGPT drives ~52 million daily purchase-related conversations,” said Shelfsight founder Joe Murphy said recently, citing a study published last month titled How people use ChatGPT.
People already use ChatGPT to search and compare products.
Johannes Koetsier
They ask questions like ‘what is the best laptop under €1,000’, or ‘which protein bar has the highest rating’ or ‘what is a good streaming service’.
“ChatGPT is quickly becoming a new front door for product discovery,” says Murphy. “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 can get video, audio, and images in your searches, and then links to purchase directly in ChatGPT once you link your Walmart account.
The collaboration between Walmart and OpenAI obviously opens a Pandora’s box.
Will the product results you see in ChatGPT still be the best available, or will that be affected by how much money ChatGPT can make if you buy one? Will they appear as promoted or sponsored results, or will they look just like all the other answers?
And of course, Amazon won’t be defeated so easily.
In addition to its status as an e-commerce king, Amazon ties its customers closely to its services through the available free delivery with Amazon Prime. And since Amazon has invested heavily in its delivery services — including with experimental drone delivery — it’s not just about free delivery, but fast, reliable delivery.
What this portends, however, is the future of commerce: my AI agents talking to e-commerce agents about the products I want, negotiating price, delivery, and all the other details.
Walmart has made a smart strategic move. Amazon has plenty of available answers.
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