Editorial note: Here in central-NC, thankfully, we had less snow and ice than predicted. I hope our friends in the deep south and NE are doing well. If you’re without power, but still on your phone, here’s an unusual Sunday post because the news just dropped and in the age of Agentic we favor speed. Special thanks to the folks working around the clock to get everyone’s power back on. Thanks for reading and stay safe and warm everyone! Now here’s today’s breaking news:

Instacart ChatGPT app integration is a Multi-item Instant Checkout

When I recorded the Instacart APP live demo, I pointed out that when you use ChatGPT to ‘talk to’ Instacart and build a cart, then it checks out through Instant Checkout. When I saw that, I had an inkling that in Q1 of 2026 we’d be seeing a multi-cart of some kind come out.

Universal Cart: Long Time Coming

Before we talk about the details, I’ve been in ecommerce since 1999 and in that time I’ve seen at least 10, maybe as many as 20 startups and big companies attempt the holy grail - A universal merchant-friendly cart that works across more than 5 merchants. Many have tried, all have failed. What’s different this time is that we have many new building blocks:

LLMs - their ability to apply inference intelligence to our industry creates a special ability to dramatically compress the pipeline
Credit card tokenization and vaults - This is the underlying technology that allowed ChatGPT, Stripe to create ACP and have what I think of as the first third party marketplace with a merchant-of-record checkout. Without this incredibly merchant-friendly huge step, we wouldn’t be talking about a universal cart.
Open source standards - We used to have 'Standards’ with a capital S. In today’s world, you can create an open-source standard (note the small ‘s’). You publish it on github, open it up, and it’s off to the races.

Evidence the ChatGPT Universal InstantCart is Coming…

LLM beta feature tracker TestingCatalog has a report from a user this weekend that is seeing in their ChatGPT user interface a “Cart” section.

Here’s what the ‘carts’ section looks like when you click on it:

What this is implies is we are going to (very soon) have the ability to:

Have a persistent cart. While you’re chatting with ChatGPT, you’ll be able to throw several items into a cart,
Multiple carts - The (0) and word ‘carts’ in that second screenshot is the giveaway here. There will be multiple carts and..
Named carts - I suspect they will be named. Imagine a world where you have carts like: weekly groceries, pet items, xmas gifts,
Multi-merchant carts - You’ll be able to throw an item in the cart from etsy, chewy, and X other merchants and check out once.

I’m somewhat giddy with excitement over this for these reason:

This is super-hard technologically, I can’t wait to try it out and see how they pulled it off.
This is the big unlock on Agentic Commerce - everyone knows single item carts aren’t profitable, that’s being solved early. We’re going to have an epic Holiday 26.
‘ChatGPT Instant Universal Cart’ removes the last finger hold the Agentic Commerce Naysayers are holding on to. They frequently will point out: Agentic Commerce won’t get any momentum with uni-cart. Multi-cart is too hard or they would have done it at launch, blah blah blah. Universal Agentic Cart will finally knock down the last argument most naysayers have (but the definition-based arguing Naysayers are holding out for full autonomy still).
My 11th prediction was that that ChargPT would make it to ‘Level-4’ first. This gets them there.
Finally, I predict this is going to be the foundation of many cool new features - ChatGPT and others are going to pack 7 typical years of Agentic Commerce features into 2026 and the cart functionality will play a huge role in this.

New Merchant Center Launching?

Readers of Retailgentic will like this one:

TestingCatalog didn’t source this one, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but so far their leaks are undefeated, so I’m going to roll the dice they are onto something. I read this as saying that with the new cart functionality or soon after, ChatGPT is going to move from a ‘gated permission’ marketplace model to a self-service model and really open the floodgates.

Game on! What do you think? Let us know in comments→

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🚨ALERT: ChatGPT Agentic Commerce "Universal…