Agentic Shopping News for the Week of 7/13-7/19 (week 29/52)
What a week: Perplexity Comet drops, Alexa Plus first week, ChatGPT Checkout leaked, ChatGPT Shopify and Amazon block agents, etc
In 5 years when we look back at 2025, July will stand out as the start of the Agentic browser wars. That was the big news, but there was a lot of other really interesting news items and articles, let’s dig in!
ChatGPT Releases Agents (Operator+Research=Agents)
Thursday (7/17/25) ChatGPT had a livestream at 1pm ET where they introduced the world to Agents. It’s pretty short (<25mins) and worth a watch→
In the demo, they show ChatGPT Agent doing:
Planning travel to a wedding
Shopping for an outfit for the wedding - complex, multi-task shopping task
Creating a powerpoint
Creating a spreadsheet
I’ve had one day with ChatGPT Agent and, while it’s early, for these tasks, I’ve found Manus to be better at the powerpoint/spreadsheet creation and Perplexity Comet to be better at the travel/shopping. ChatGPT moves fast and I’m sure they will move this along rapidly.
If you want to see more of ChatGPT agent in-action, check out their Youtube channel that has about 10 videos now showing more use cases in detail.
Perplexity Comet and Alexa+ Live Demo Replay
In case you missed our livestream Tuesday, the recording is here→
In the demo, I had 4 Comet browser windows up and simultaneously showed them doing 4 things:
Amazon Reorder (with a twist) - I had Comet check my amazon order history, find some dog treats, check the price on Amazon and other sites and order from the cheapest. turns out that current Walmart (it checked ~10 sites!) was the best deals.
College Kid Target Haul - My daughter is going to college, Comet loaded up my Target cart and then I gave it the dorm and it checked the cart against the dorms details. 🤯. How long would that have taken you?
Shoe email discovery, research, reorder? - I ordered some Cloud shoes I love and forgot the specifics (real story) - Comet checked my email, found the receipt (turns out it was Backcountry), sadly they are out of stock in my size and color, but Comet found it on a site I never heard of. This one isn’t urgent, but I now know I either have to go long-tail to get the same ones again or change it up.
Bonus Email automation - After a week with Comet, I’ve found the biggest win is in more mundane tasks email, scheduling, etc. In this example, someone sent me 5 possible meeting times, Comet, found the earliest opening, created a cal appt, invited them, and sent an email saying I’d take that time and had sent cal appt. I do this 10 times a day and it saved me 20mins - so that’s 200m/day (ok seeing if you’re paying attention, I’m exaggerating, but seriously this is a game changer for me - yes i’ve tried calendly, doesn’t fit this use case).
Surprise Guest: Alexa+ Early Experience!
Fellow Alexa enthusiast, Jason Goldberg, alerted me to a Prime deal where if you bought certain Alexa devices, you could jump the Alexa+ beta wait line -SIGN ME UP! I’m about a week into Alexa+ as well and I’d say it has exceeded my expectations. I’m also a week into this experience and learning more about the capabilities.
We’ll be putting out more in-depth posts coming up with walk-throughs for both Comet and Alexa+ and some amazing use-cases that are pushing the bounds of Agentic commerce!
Retailgentic ChatGPT Checkout Post Goes Viral! 🦠
About once every 2yrs one of my social media posts or made up words (Shipageddon wins the record - got that on the Today show) goes viral. The ChatGPT story this week really resonated and this LinkedIn post got a lot of attention. When posts have enough of an audience, there’s a lot of great content in the comments. Here are the top three comments (by engagement).
At some point you get enough anecdotal data that it stops being anecdotal, this quote matches many many conversations and feedback I’ve received that people have left Google (usually for ChatGPT or Perplexity). I’m curious if we’ll see this show up in Google’s Q2/Q3 results - stand by.
My answer to Allan on this one is it’s not ads - they don’t care what you buy if it’s a 8% take rate. Altman has been on the record several times (example 1 being Stratechery which I quoted in the OG substack post). I think Sam realizes they are disrupting ads (google/amazon/etc.) and you don’t disrupt it by going back to it. I think they can make their revenue goal without ads. I’ll say that Ben Thompson at Stratechery feels strongly they need to get into ads. We will see!
Yes - spot on - as I talk to more and more brands and retailers, your data is the asset now, sales data, customer data, etc. the LLMs are going to chew into some of this, but I think you’ll be dealing with a friendlier partner than Amazon has been, but it will feel less friendly than Google Ads.
Shopify “Blocks” Agentic Shopping Agents
This was so well covered and so much else was going on that I didn’t cover it in a separate piece, but want to include it here so everyone knows what’s going on.
Modern Retail has a great summary of what’s going on here. Around July 11/12, Shopify updated all their 2.5m live operational global ecommerce stores, added to the robots.txt specific language that tells bots/agents not to crawl the store and instead to access shopify through an API. Our good friend Juozas Kaziukėnas broke the news - GO JOE! Give him a follow, he’s broken many marketplace/shopify stories like this.
Shopify Mis-aligned with the Rebels?
Shopify has long had a catch phrase that they are ‘arming the rebels’. But these kinds of wholesale changes from your ecommerce platform can create misalignment. If I’m a shopify store and want as much traffic (and sales) as possible without the high hurdle rate of an API integration (and we don’t know the economics/terms/gate keeping on that), I, the Shopify customer, want to choose, not have the choice made for me. Let’s see how this plays out.
As Jyn Erso famously said:
Agentic Shopping Goes Mainstream and SMB in Entrepreneur Magazine
As new technologies work from the bleeding edge to more general adoption, you can watch the topics move from the pages of super vertical tech news outlets (FN/business insider/Information) and get into more mainstream pubs. This week Entrepreneur had a feature piece by an exec at Visa that introduced to their huge SMB audience the idea of Agentic Commerce. I thought they did a great job and now there’s a huge new audience aware of the trend.
Amazon’s Secretive Starfish Project
Both Amazon, eBay and I’m sure many other marketplace operators have had this vision and attempted to build it 2-3 times each over my time in e-commerce. The dream is to build a super-duper-mega-meta giant catalog of all the worlds products to make it insanely easy to sell anything on <insert marketplace>. This sounds good and if it existed, it would be awesome, but also, it’s way harder (like $10b+ hard) than you think it would be and they usually make it 5% of the way and realize it’s a huge massive project.
Business insider is out with a story here, that is behind a paywall, but here’s some high level info:
Starfish initiative was estimated to add an extra $7.5 billion in sales this year.
The project aims to use AI to enhance and increase product listings on Amazon's Marketplace.
But the project has much broader ambitions.
We’ll see if it sticks this time.
Great Analysis of Changing Consumer Behavior using AI to Shop - 60% adoption rate and more!
Here’s a great article that was derived from a paper written by a professor at the UVA Darden School of Business. Some interesting stats from this one:
77% say that AI helps them make faster decisions
46% of consumers trust AI more than a friend for clothes recos
I also learned some cool new lingo around the psychology of AI shopping:
Augmented decision making - when you offload the mental load of all the choices we face in modern living (to ai in this example)
AI is like a personal shopping companion — one that learns over time and anticipates our needs. It won’t just respond to commands; it will suggest things before we even think to ask.
AI as gatekeeper - “At the same time, AI will increasingly act as a gatekeeper for brand messages. In that world, brands won’t just be building trust with consumers — they’ll also need to earn the trust of the algorithms that decide what those consumers see.”
Favor to ask readers…
Professor Luca Cian is the prof and I’m trying to get him on the pod - give him a connect and say ‘pls come on Retailgentic pod’ 🙌
That’s a Wrap
Only 15 weeks till halloween, I can ‘feel’ all the players pushing hard to get their offerings out to consumers before Holiday 25 which will start kicking off after Halloween. It’s going to be a wacky ~4 months! 🚀