FLASH: ChatGPT Secretly Previewing Checkout Feature - Plans to "Take Cut of ChatGPT Driven Sales" (eg. BECOME A MARKETPLACE! 🤯)

Is ChatGPT set to leapfrog Level 3 Agentic Shopping and go right to Level 4?

🚨Big news today! 🚨

If you were able to catch my livestream with Wall St analyst, Scott Devitt, one of the discussions we got into is: Scott asked where Agentic Shopping goes in the next 2-5yrs and I predicted that over time the AI Shopping Engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, CoPilot, Anthropic, xAI) become marketplaces. In my definition of marketplaces, the transaction is ‘pulled up’ into the AI Shopping Engine. Here’s the difference of where we are today (agentic checkout) and where I think we’re going (agentic marketplace).

This seems innocuous in this little table, but it has very HUGE implications. We’ll get into those late in the post.

How’d you guess this?

I got to this prediction through two datapoints. First, take a gander at this chart showing ChatGPT’s revenue ambitions leaked from one of their investor pitches:

The 2026-2029 curve of Other, Agents and New Products slope freaks me out as founder, they need **BIG** pots of $$ to fill that whole. Where do those pots of $$ sit today ChatGPT can grab? Amazon and eBay’s marketplaces and Google’s commercial ad revenues. There’s an ‘easy’ $50B to go grab in there and that’s what they need.

The second breadcrumb is this except from Sam Altman’s interview with Stratechery (Ben Thompson)

Well, turns out I was right, but as with most of my AI predictions, I was on ‘pre 2022 time’ and now we’re on ‘AI insane time’ and what I thought would take 12-18 months is probably coming before holiday 2025! Buckle up, it’s going to get interesting.. Here are the details→

Financial Times with the Scoop!

This is behind a paywall, but here’s some tidbits:

• Merchants will receive and fulfill ‘paid for’ orders (marketplace!)

• OpenAI will take a ‘cut of sales’ (in marketplace-land we call this a Take Rate or Success Fee). Some people erroneously (to me) call this an affiliate fee. In my vocab, affiliate fees happen when you send traffic to the retailer site for the most part.

• It seems pretty far along - they have made many presentations and discussed financial terms.

• Shopify is somehow involved, it’s not clear if they are powering the COMPLETE checkout (Shop Pay), or the convos are just with shopify’s existing merchants.

To me this is the first domino to fall, let’s think about what is next…

AI Marketplaces Shockwaves of Disruption

Here’s my thought experiment - you are Sam Altman, you’ve signed up for that revenue chart. The good news, you have all the usage data for what your 800m WAUs are doing. I think what you do is build verticalized solutions for the top use cases you see happening already (strong intent signal) and figure out a monetization path for all of those on top of the $20/m consumer sub you are getting already.

This yields these X predictions for what happens next:

1. Step 1: ‘pull up’ the transaction into ChatGPT - ✅

2. You know that Amazon and eBay, maybe even Walmart and Target won’t participate in this. BUT what about their marketplace sellers. Here’s my pitch: Hey! We sent you $X in sales down on the <insert marketplace incumbent> marketplace through our ChatGPT shopping feature, our analysis shows that if you listed your products DIRECTLY on our platform you’d see a 50%+ lift in GMV. Oh yeah, you are currently paying 14-17% of sales, we’re going to charge 10% - and no listing fees or any of that mess. You’ll increase sales and profits, want to sign up? 🚀

3. Everyone thinks of Shopify as a SaaS company, but of their ~$9B/yr in revs, 75% are merchant services. The biggest piece is payments. Yes they arm the rebels, but most of the rebels don’t realize they are paying Shopify $6.7B as a payment processor. (yes 70% of Shopify’s revenue comes from this). You know who needs $6.7B by 2026? You know who knows a lot about payments? This guy who founded Worldpay. 🤔

4. As ChatGPT blazes a trail here, I expect it will be natural and ‘table stakes’ for Perplexity, Anthropic, Copilot and XAI to draft off this model - so they will all become marketplaces too and have their own checkouts/payment systems.

5. Hey we have a lot of products, if you want to standout, we have this new ability called sponsored products that, without changing the LLMs recos at all, when you do show up, it gives you the ability to stand out a bit and say more to the audience. We call it ChatGPT Retail Media Network. (RMN is $60b for Amazon and there’s another $100b rattling around)

Summary of Who is in the AI Commerce Disruption BLAST Zone 🔥

• Google - ChatGPT is taking the hearts and minds (and searches) of consumers at a rapid pace and they are stuck in the Innovator’s Dilemma ($270b/yr)

• Marketplaces - Amazon MP($160b), eBay ($10b), Walmart MP(? $20b?) , Target MP ($5b)

• Shopify - $7b/yr

• RMN Industry- $160b (Amazon is biggest chunk)

That’s ~$600b on the table and a LOT of market cap AI companies can gobble up as they work to hit those crazy revenue goals (to pay for the GPUs)…. what’s crazy is this is just the ecommerce vertical! Travel, Coding, GTM, who knows what other verticals will get disrupted.

Stay tuned - as we learn more, you’ll hear about it here first!