Agentic Commerce News: ChatGPT Leaks, Data and We Spill The Shopify and BigCommerce Tea🫖

Are we seeing the signs Agentic Commerce is accelerating Ecommerce's growth? Bank of America says....YES!

Good morning Weekend Retailgentic’ers!

We haven’t published one of our popular “Agentic News” since Mid December 25 because 99% of the news has been recaps of news you were already aware of months ago and didn’t meet our super-high quality bar. It took over a month to clear out that noise and now we have some ‘signal’ - finally some juicy news that’s worthy of your valuable attention. Let’s jump in, these are Spicy! 🌶️

Agentic Joe is Back with Two ChatGPT Instant Checkout Leaks

These next two ChatGPT are compliments of Joe, our official Agentic Commerce Sleuth. He’s been poking around in the ChatGPT binaries, doing some reverse engineering and he was able to extract two user tests that are either live or coming soon…

Two Leaked Features:

It starts with this screen grab of what we call the “Product Offer Card” - this is the right-hand pane that pops up when you click a ‘Product Card’. Here’s the screenshot that is the kick-off for the two features: ‘What to Know’ and ‘Follow up”:

ChatGPT Agentic Leak 1: Detailed Product Info Card (“What to Know”)

One criticism of the ChatGPT Agentic Commerce User Interface I’ve heard people say is: “I would never buy something with so little information.” This feature in test that I will call a ‘potential feature’ for short solves that by tucking underneath the ‘offer list’ a narrative description of the product, a ‘What people are saying’ area.

Here’s what they look like in detail for this pair of shoes→

(What people are saying continued)

What Does This Mean for Consumers?

For consumers, you can see ChatGPT is starting to add more value. This view is super helpful to consumers because it pulls in:

• A tight narrative about the product - “Why does this shoe exist, what problem does it solve?, Who is it designed for?”

• A tight summary of reviews from “Reviewers”

• A summary of a review from Reddit that is positive

• A summary of a review from Fleet Feet that is positive

• A summary from Run4it that is positive

What Does This Mean for Merchants?

At ReFiBuy, we are working with Merchants that are on the bleeding edge of ChatGPT Instant Checkout and one of the answers we are working on cracking is: In the event the offers on a card have a ‘tie’ on price, how is ChatGPT deciding who shows up first? This is what we have coined ‘owning the Product Card’. We believe the new information available in the “What to Know” section now give us important breadcrumbs for figuring that out.🤫🕵

How Does This Compare to Gemini/AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity?

Let’s compare this treatment to what we see on the other Level-3 Agentic Commerce experiences:

Here’s Gemini/AI Mode→ (It’s so long to save you a lot of scrolling I’ve zoomed out)→

Here’s Copilot→ (also zoomed out because it’s even longer)→

Now here’s Perplexity’s Product Info Pane→

(It has much the same information as the others, you can run it yourself and see - omitted to save space, you get the idea)

Conclusion: What to Know

This potential feature makes a ton of sense for the consumer side and the competitive side. I believe that we’ll see three impacts for merchants from this change should it ‘permanently ship’:

• Fewer clicks - Assuming Instant checkout becomes more prolific (which it will), it will result on fewer clicks to the merchant’s page - IMHO this reality is inevitable at this point.

• Higher value remaining clicks - On Retailgentic, we’ve presented an endless set of datapoints pointing to the very high conversion rates of traffic from ChatGPT.

• The biggest value - Ability to unpack the Agentic Commerce Optimization Algorithm. IMHO, by Holiday 2027 ChatGPT will be an ‘Agentic Channel’ on the scale of Amazon or Walmart and being able to optimize this channel will determine who wins and loses in Agentic Commerce.

ChatGPT Agentic Leak 2: “Follow up”

This demo is best illustrated in a short video:

Basically, what’s going here is you can ‘narrow the discussion’ and say in shorthand to ChatGPT: “I have narrowed it down to the Nike Alphafly 3 and now all my prompts are about only this product.”

This is a feature I call ‘narrowing’ that is implemented on Rufus, but a bit different and can include multiple products (maybe ChatGPT’s interface here allows this, not sure yet).

ChatGPT: The Four Leaks Recap:

Here are the four Agentic Commerce enhancements we now know ChatGPT is working on:

1. Single-Merchant, Multi-item cart (covered here)

2. Self-service Merchant Center (covered here)

3. What to know - More product information to help increase on-ChatGPT Instant Checkout conversions (covered above)

4. Follow up - Narrowing the conversation to one (or maybe more) products (covered above)

I believe by Holiday 26 we are going to see this list of enhancements grow 2-4X and the Agentic Commerce Naysayers are going to be blown away by the impact ChatGPT Instant Checkout has on retail. Speaking of which, that’s a great segue into this article…

BofA: Agentic Commerce is Driving Ecommerce Acceleration!

The core reason I’m extremely excited about Agentic Commerce is that I believe it will provide a better digital retail consumer experience than we haven’t seen before and that will not only drive a ‘% of ecommerce moving to Agentic Commerce’, but also accelerate online vs. offline which has slowed down for the last 10yrs. The only other source I can find that shares that prediction is Morgan Stanley as detailed here.

Well….Bank of America was out last week with a report (BofA clients only: “BofA on USA: Weekly spending update through Feb 14) that caught my attention.

The overall theme of the piece is that based on the BAC proprietary aggregated credit card data they are seeing a material acceleration of ecommerce since early 2025. They offer a couple possible reasons and one jumps out→

They then included this chart that has Brick and Mortar spending (the light blue line) and Online spending (the dark blue line). Note: The Green ‘trend line’ and the emoji are my additions to this otherwise unedited chart.

I’ll leave it to ya’ll to make your own opinions, but the same day I read THIS, I also read this article from Kiri Masters:

I think not only is Kiri spot on - that Agentic Commerce is having an immeasurable huge ‘assist’ impact, but we also have a measurability problem on ‘direct’ impact. More on this at a future data. What this means is Agentic Commerce is already accelerating online spending and it’s hiding under the surface, but it’s going to get so large soon, it will be obvious ‘something changed in early 2015 and when everyone starts thinking about the timelines, they will come to the same conclusion.

Another way we’ll know soon is when ChatGPT, Gemini/AI-Mode, Perplexity and Copilot have wider adoption of Agentic Checkout, the transactional volume WILL be 100% measurable.

Reddit Enters the Agentic Commerce Party

On Feb 19, Reddit announced via a blog post they are testing a new AI Product Search Experience. Here’s two views of how it looks and works:

Today this links off to retailers for the transaction, or, what I call Level-2 Agentic Commerce: “Research/Find”, but no “Buy” (that’s Level-3), but how long until they wire this up to ACP/UCP or build their own protocol and you can buy products right from Reddit?

What do we call this? Previously I had used a framework where we have Horizontal Agentic Shopping (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) and Vertical (DayDream, Gensmo, etc.) but now what do we call this implementation? Content driven? Community-based? IDK, but we’ll be watching it very clearly and it indicates that Agentic Commerce is going to explode out into areas and implementations we can’t even imagine yet.

If you want to read more: TechCrunch and TechBuzz have good articles.

Big Commerce Clients see Dramatic Decrease in Traffic, Causing Them to Miss Numbers

Thanks to an industry insider who wishes to remain anonymous for letting me know about this one.

Big Commerce competes with Shopify and that hasn’t been going well for them. They went public in 2020 and enjoyed a marketcap of ~$7B at that time. Today the market cap is $250m - that’s a 96.4% decline.

Shopify has cleaned Big Commerce’s clock on B2C Merchants and they are pushing into B2B to differentiate (this is relevant to the quote coming up).

With that background, on Feb 12,2026, Big Commerce ($CMRC) had their Q4 2025 earnings release and Wall St conference call. On the call, Wall st analyst at RJA. Brian Peterson, asked a question about Agentic Commerce essentially asking if it played a role in the quarter’s surprisingly low forward guidance and the overall continued deceleration of the business. Big Commerce CEO, Christopher Hess’s answer is the first public datapoint that the ‘path to zero clicks’ is having a material impact, or, as he calls, it ‘collateral damage’

Trouble between Shopify/ChatGPT? Or: What’s this ACP You Speak Of? 🤔

On Feb 11 in the morning before the market opened, Shopify announced their Q4 2025 earnings. Since 2021, Tobe hasn’t led the earnings calls and has handed the Investor Relations (IR) reigns over to Shopify’s President, Harvey Finkelstein. I’ve probably seen Harvey ~100 times and you would be hard-pressed to find a smoother IR executive.

How to Handle a Hard IR Question.

As part of going public, executives spend hours in training with seasoned IR professionals on how to lead public company conference calls. Hundreds of hours are spent on refining the prepared remarks and practicing hard questions. One of the training elements they teach you with the hardest of questions is the strategy that was described to me as: “Answer the question you want to answer.” If someone says, why is the sky blue, you answer: “Great question Bob, we spent a lot of time considering this and colors and decided the grass would be best if it was green. Next question. That one’s obvious, but if you get good at this, you can steer it away from the question so subtly most won’t notice it (unless they’ve had the same training ;-). When I hear people on conference calls, I’ll yell out: “Answered the question he wanted to answer!”

The way it works on these calls, is the Wall St. analysts get in a queue and get to ask you one question. After they ask their question, their microphone is frequently turned off by the moderator so, unlike a free-style interview with a journalist on ‘their turf’ you can control the order of analysts, who talks when, etc. This setup makes this strategy especially effective, because the one person who knows you are doing it is the question asker, but frequently they can’t blurt out: “Ummm, that’s not the question I asked.”.

Gossip: Trouble Between Shopify and OpenAI?

Industry scuttlebutt is there is something that happened between Shopify and ChatGPT to cause some kind of riff. Some say it was Shopify’s full throated, ‘co-founder’ status with UCP, other say something happened with the economics between the 4 parties in ACP: Stripe, Shopify, ChatGPT and that 4% got sliced too thin for Shopify or ChatGPTs liking.

I’m not sure we’ll ever now, but it’s important background coming into the call. Ok, now with all that background let’s look at this part of the transcript from the Shopify Q+A.

Here’s the section of the conversation that piqued my attention the most - it was an answer to the question by Keith Weiss. It’s long-ish, but I want to include it all→

Dog Not Barking🐶

Do you see it?

Let me put the question here in text with some bolding to highlight the question→

And Harley, you're definitely right. All the focus is on Agentic Commerce for this conference call. And I'm going to continue on that vein. Can you help us understand the UCP versus ACP, the other standard that OpenAI and Stripe are putting forward. Are these overlapping standards? Do they compete? Are they complementary in any way? And what does this do to the timing of adoption of Agentic Commerce? Does it confuse the market? Is this like a VHS versus Betamax type thing or that it has to be resolved first before you have mainstream adoption?

Text Book: “Answer the question you want to answer.”

Here Keith is clearly asking for Harvey to help understand - is Shopify agnostic - supporting both (which is what the market previously has been told) and to help Wall St. understand the comparison. What are the pros and cons of BOTH.

Harvey’s answer is a 100% “Answer the question you want to answer.” situation (yes I said it out-loud when listening to the call).

In fact, Harvey’s answer only makes sense if Keith asks the question:

“Harvey, tell me all the awesome stuff about UCP and why you love it so much - use 3 paragraphs to really dig in, and whatever you do - DO NOT MENTION CHATGPT or ACP! Also, tell us if you are friends with Google?

UCP vs. ACP Scoreboard:

You could claim I cherry picked this one.

Let’s look at mentions in the Shopify conference call:

• UCP: 21

• ACP: 1 (in a Keith’s question, 0 from Shopify)

• ChatGPT: 4 - 1 question, 3 Harvey and always in a list format.

• Google: 10

• Gemini: 2

Final Observation

I’ve never heard or seen Harvey get frustrated on a call, but here’s what happened:

The first 3 questions were about Agentic Commerce, asking about it in different ways. Wall st. is clearly concerned with the economics of these deals, what happens when you are a store platform and nobody clicks from google to stores any more. Plus Lovable, Cursor and Claude Code all have demos of people creating entire storefronts in seconds - infinitely faster than using the Shopify SaaS toolset.

On the fourth question that had the exact same questions, but restated from the first 4 (because Harvey somewhat dodged those too, but not as blatantly as the ACP question),

Harvey said:

“So I think I covered it, but I’ll just repeat it. I mean for Shopify merchants, the economics are the same as if the transaction happened on the online store when it comes to Agentic. Specifically on something like ChatGPT, which requires Shopify Payments, monetization is through payments. It’s the same as if it occurred in the online store. And in terms of some of the other applications as well, if you’re a Shopify merchant, it will default using Shopify Payments. So that is how monetization occurs.

I just want to sort of go back because I suspect I’ll get more questions on this around Agentic and Checkout. So I said this earlier, but I’m going to repeat this. LLMs do not bypass Shopify’s Checkout. Checkout is really 2 parts. Think of it this way. You have a front end that’s the user interface that buyers interact with and the back end that processing everything server to server. So if you think about a Shopify store today, Shopify runs both the front end and the back end.”

You can’t heare it here, but when he said “Look” in the question before this, he was clearly frustrated for the first time I’ve ever heard and then on this one, when he says: “I’ll just repeat it” - there was a tone in there that was, well, also frustrated with the repeat questions.

I’ve clipped this one for brevity because it was a LOONG answer, but what’s funny is yet, again in there he pivots to….yep, his favorite topic and favorite company now→

Now in terms of what we’ve done even since the last call, we co-developed UCP with Google, which now standardizes how these AI agents transact with any merchant.

We launched that in early January. We also launched Agentic Storefronts, which allows these merchants to very simply syndicate their products to Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot.

Even when listing them, Google gets double front billing (UCP 😘, Google 🤗, Google+UCP 🥰)and the ACP😡 folks are slumming it at the back of the list👿 .

Conclusion

IMHO, there’s definitely something going on here. This one had a Shakespearean “I think Harvey doth protest (answering agentic commerce questions) too much.”

I’m not alone on this one, I had no fewer than 10 inbound calls and messages from folks asking what I thought. One even framed it - OMG, Harvey totally LOST IT on that call, what the heck is going on?

Summary

Now you’re caught up with all the 🌶️ behind the scenes drama, we’ve given you a first early look at ChatGPT Agentic Commerce features that are brewing, and perhaps most exciting, there’s early indications that Agentic Commerce is starting to materially accelerate digital retail growth. Plus Reddit - didn’t see that one coming!

Stay tuned for more, if anyone wants to tell me anonymously what’s going on between ChatGPT and Shopify - dish! You know how to find me.