Agentic Shopping News for the Week of 9/14-9/20 (week 38/52)
Crazy week! RetailClub Recap, Walmart news, Google Announces AP2, ChatGPT checkout, plus Browser Wars Update: Claude for Chrome and Gemini in Chrome
Agentic Commerce is Heating Up!
Lots of big news this week to share. We’re well after Labor Day and if you look at those 8 weeks between LD and Halloween which in Retail-land is ‘go time’ where we have to wrap up everything, get all our digital and physical shelves and inventory and infrastructure ready and then 11/1 we hit the pause button on everything.
Because of this timeline, these weeks are always the busiest of the year. You have all the trade shows jammed in there, vendor product launches and the big players jockeying to get their new releases announced and launched.
It’s a lot to handle, but we have gone through everything and picked the biggest most meaningful stores for you. Let’s jump in - the week kicked off with RetailClub…
RetailClub Splashes Onto the Retail Show Scene
This week I had the pleasure Sun-Tuesday to attend, exhibit and speak at the first RetailClub.
When we were first pitched on the idea of RetailClub, it was so different that I had a hard time wrapping my head around it:
It’s going to be smaller and intimate and focused on ‘Retail Retreats’.
What’s that mean? Well it’s going to be in different areas than Vegas/Chicago. For example, the first is in Huntington Beach, CA and literally right on the beach.
It’s going to be focused on GenAI, Agentic Commerce and all things AI+Retail and bring in the top AI folks from the largest brands and retailers to share what they are seeing and thinking.
No panels (yeah! I have #PanelFatgiue) and instead we’ll have meaty keynotes, fireside chats, workshops and more in-depth content really looking at strategies and tactics that are working.
Different plus the founders of Shoptalk? Sign us up! At ReFiBuy, we went all-in and decided this would be the event we’d really invest in every year and launch our first product.
RetailClub: The Results
The show was a smashing success. I’ve never seen such a high ratio of retailers/brands to vendors and the conversations, people and content, as predicted, were exceptional.
Here’s a photo gallery to give you a feel for the vibe of the event:
Takeaways from the event
It was great to meet so many Retailgentic readers! I appreciate all the feedback and am glad the substack and pod are achieving our goal: Distilling all the noise and ‘techspeak’ of GenAI into the important trends for leaders in Digital Commerce.
There were a lot of smart tech-founders of startups that presented their view of a variety of frameworks and protocols all vying to become the new ‘Agentic X’ standard: payments, authentication, trust, agent-to-agent protocols, group buying, price negotiations and more. We’re going to go through some chaos here until the standards go from concept to usage and we see which big players land where on these topics. More on this concept in the ‘Google and PayPal AP2’ news later.
I’d say the conversations were split evenly into these thirds:
1/3: GenAI and operations - Using GenAI as a way to optimize Retail/Brand operations: pricing, fulfillment, supply chain, store operations, etc. These capital ‘P’ Projects are big, long, complex and have a lot of risk of failure.
1/3: GenAI ‘behind the homepage’ - Retailers are trying lots of new solutions that I call ‘conversion enhancers’. They are leveraging GenAI/LLMs to improve the prior generation of solutions focused on: on-site search engines, recommendation engines, PDP page content (e.g. GenAI generated landing pages, images, etc.), email marketing and more.
1/3: Agentic Commerce - These were conversations that Retailgentic readers know and love. Are websites going the way of the dodo bird? What are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, Microsoft, Apple and all the big players doing? How do we get our
As with any show, the best information comes from the hallway (beachway?) convos behind the scenes ‘off stage’.
Here’s a flavor of the hallway ‘whisper’ conversations from RetailClub
Everyone knows ChatGPT Shopping Checkout is coming and it’s going to be big. Many large retailers have seen information under NDA. All I’ll say here is I’m staying by my prediction that we’re going to see whatever it is ChatGPT is doing in the next 5 weeks. If you missed it, we did evidence we’re getting closer here.
Everyone is freaking out about organic traffic plummeting. It’s going to get worse because eventually Google is going to either have to expand AI Overviews to the meaty commercial terms or flip the switch on AI Mode as the default and not an option. When that happens, it’s going to get ugly.
Product Catalog is the new battleground - Lots of good discussions around the renewed importance of Product Catalog in an Agentic world. Back at ChannelAdvisor we realized that product catalogs are both a hot mess and also the foundation for selling on marketplaces. Looks like Agentic is going to be similar, but amplified even more due to GenAI’s insatiable desire for ‘more content + more context’.
Another topic that came up because it dropped while we were there was this big Walmart datapoint…
Google and Paypal (and more) Announce AP2: Agent Payments Protocol
Google, PayPal and like 80 partners announced AP2 this week. It’s ‘Yet Another Standard’ that is vying to be the way that agents pay each other securely. If you want to learn all the details, the announcement is here and the open-source github repo is here.
AP2 Overview: The Problem
The problem that AP2 seeks to solve is we have a huge merchant ecosystem with ecommerce companies, digital goods, micro-content, travel, tickets - all the things that can be sold commercially, even, eventually b2b2 transactions. On the other side we have a complex payment ecosystem. You’ve got your traditional card rails, your BNPL, your crypto and stable coin options, currency conversions and all that.
In the middle is the agent trying to negotiate all this.
AP2 Overview: The Solution
AP2 is built on the concept of ‘Mandates’. Mandates are little contracts that cyptographically sealed so they are super secure. Here’s a good workflow that shows a scenario we’re familiar with - buying a pair of shoes→
The human user gives the agent an ‘Intent Mandate’ - think of this as a little contract that says - agent if you can find the shoes I want for under $100 you have my permission to pay. The agent does it’s work, finds the item and creates a ‘Cart mandate’. This part is tricky to me, I don’t see every retailer changing their checkout to create ‘Cart Mandates’.
Anyway, the intent and cart mandate come together and check out (yes these are the shoes and yes the user has pre-approved via intent mandate buying this) and the payment mandate clears.
While it’s impressive so many companies have signed on to this, it feels a little too complicated to me. We’ve already solved a lot of this in e-commerce, why are we redoing it all again? Even marketplaces already have a third-party in the middle model that could be an agent for all intensive purposes.
We’ll keep track of how AP2 and other standards develop, what’s going to be most important is who implements them and what type of usage in the real world do we see?
ChatGPT is 20% of Walmart’s Traffic?
One of the sharpest minds in marketplaces is my good friend Joe (aka Juozas Kaziukenas). He founded a company called Marketplace Pulse that quickly became the standard in marketplace data and statistics. It was recently acquired and Joe is between gigs.
I believe that like me, Joe is seeing many parallels between the ‘marketplace era’ and the ‘agentic commerce era’ and has been posting some interesting thoughts on LinkedIn (He’s a great follow strongly recommended). He made a splash Tuesday with this one:
As Joe points out, while referral traffic to the big guys is small, to see ChatGPT show up so high and so fast is interesting and points to the ‘why’ ChatGPT would want to have a checkout - to monetize this ‘free’ traffic they are sending downstream.
I’ll also point out that Amazon blocking all the Agentic Shopping Engines has been a huge win for Walmart. Part of the game with GenAI is content and thanks to marketplaces, Amazon and Walmart have huge massive catalogs.
Think of this as ‘surface area’. let’s put some data on this:
Amazon:
Amazon 1P: 12m
Amazon 3P: 588m
Amazon Total: 600m
Walmart:
Walmart 1P: 20m
Walmart 3P: 400m
Walmart Total: 420m
Amazon pulling out of the agentic game has removed a massive 600m SKU surface area that normally smothers everyone else due to it’s sheer size and now Walmart can slide their smaller, yet still massive by any other retail standard 420m SKUs into the ChatGPT super catalog.
On any given day I run at least 20 Agentic shopping searches manually and as a company, well, what I’ll say is we run many many orders of magnitude more than that and I’d say Walmart has a solid 80%+ coverage of the ‘Agentic Digital Shelf’ meaning they always show up behind the product cards, mostly with 3P inventory.
Agentic Browser Wars Update
This week Google announced ‘Gemini in Chrome’ - their entry into the browser wars. I’ll do a full post this week on this, but the spoiler alert is it’s extremely underwhelming.
I was also able to get off the waiting list for Claude for Chrome and it exceeded my expectations.
We now have these tier 1 competitors: Comet, Edge, Claude, Gemini with the only contenders MIA: ChatGPT, Xai, Meta and Apple. I don’t think we’ll see anything this year from X, Meta or Apple, but everyone knows ChatGPT is working on something. Will we see it in 2025? I don’t have a prediction on this one.
ChatGPT Reveals What People are Prompting
Both ChatGPT and Claude had interesting reports on their usage this week. Let’s dig in.
ChatGPT: How People Use ChatGPT
ChatGPT gave access to data from research scientist at Duke and Harvard and they produced this paper. I highly recommend flipping through it as it’s fascinating.
In our world of ecommerce, this chart tells the start of a story. You’ve probably seen some version of this in your timeline.
At a first glance, you will have a hard time finding ‘Shopping’, but if you’ll look in the red ‘Seeking Information 21.3%” you’ll see at the bottom is ‘Purchasable Products 2.1%”
That seems, well, embarrassingly low. But remember. ChatGPT is fielding 2.5B prompts a DAY, at 2.1% that’s 53b shopping prompts a day. I’m also curious could some of our queries be up in the ‘Specific info’ category that one seems like it could be hiding some retail prompts as does ‘practical guidance - health, fitness, beauty’. In any case if we do some math on this.
I think a standard conversion rate would be 5%, but intuitively LLMs convert at a much higher rate, let’s say 20% to give us a bracketed range. The other algebra in e-commerce is the AOV let’s go with a safe $80.
Low-end estimate: 50m * 5% = 2.5m orders * $80 AOV = $200m/day * 365 = $73B/yr
High-end estimate: 50m * 20% = 10m orders * $80 AOV = $800m/day * 365= $292B/yr
Mid-point: $182B/yr
If ChatGPT throws a 8% take-rate on that: $15B in revenue. 🤔
That 2.1% doesn’t seem so small any more 😁
One last comment - this data is from May and June 2025 - ChatGPT dropped in August and I’m expecting we’ll see a huge leg up in traffic, so these numbers could be low.
Phia: Vertical Agentic Shopping App Makes a Big Splash This Week
The Silicon Valley media is giddy over Phia - founded by Phoebe Gates (yes THAT Gates) and Sophia Kianni, this week Phia raised $8m in funding. Phia is another entry into the larger category I call Vertical Agentic Shopping Apps (vertical meaning focused on one category) and also in the fashion/apparel sub-category. Now we have an increasingly crowded field with Daydream, Wizard, Noli, EveryHuman, Helloava, Myavana, Gensmo and Haut.ai.
Phia’s Angle
Phia’s angle is refashion- save money and save the planet. By shopping used goods, you reduce waste and it’s cheaper. They have a browser extension that while you shop (presumably for new stuff?) pops up and says - “Hey Sarah, you can get this item used for 30% off” or something like that. I haven’t had time to try it - if a Retailgentic reader wants to guest write a series of posts where you take us through your first hand experience with all of these, that would be super interesting as I think there’s a lot to learn in these different approaches.
Glowzy Also Enters the Vertical Agentic/Fashion Arena
At the same time a new product raced up the charts at Product Hunt this week. Product Hunt is the very niche/geeky site that is mostly B2B offerings, but occasionally a consumer app will pop up.
Glowzy allows you to grab any item and virtually try it on. It also allows you to scan your closet and the AI wardrobe planner/stylist helps you match outfits.
Endcap: Claude Commercial:
This week Anthropic started a huge campaign to raise awareness for Claude and I’ve now seen the commercial several times live in the wild. Check it out:
That’s a Wrap! Coming up this week on Retailgentic
We’re staying alert to any big news as it’s very likely we’ll get something this week. On top of that Tuesday, we’ll go deeper into the new browsers and give you some real-world shopping examples. We’ll wrap the week with a killer pod.