🚨FLASH: Exclusive ChatGPT Merchant Center FIRST LOOK and Claude/Anthropic Entering the High Stakes Agentic Commerce Arena!
There's never a boring week in Agentic Commerce-Land, we have all the fresh scoops and the hot tea 🫖 and then start thinking about what and when is next🤔...
Anthropic Reveals Plans for Claude to Enter the Agentic Commerce Arena
First, tip of the hat to our friends at Agentic payment startup, Nekuda, for drawing our attention to this one.
In a blog post last week, that was largely about not doing ads and tied to their big Super Bowl ad push (we didn’t cover that because it’s not really our wheelhouse) Anthropic slipped in this important tidbit into the blog post (highlight is ours) →
Another Prediction Falls?!
Back in our Jan 8 Eleven 2026 Agentic Commerce Predictions post, one of our craziest predictions was:
Which is now looking very likely! It’s right there in a blog post.
Prediction Tracker…
So far out of the 12, predictions, these have fallen/or are likely to fall:
(2) Explosion of ad experiments
(3) Someone comes out with a cross-agentic system - one protocol to rule them all (UCP)
(5) Google comes out with a next generation (gen1 was buy for me) agentic commerce -gen2 - gen2 is UCP
(7) Claude/Anthropic come out of nowhere to get in the game ✅✅
(10) Meta enters the fray
That’s 5 out of 11 only one month into this. I’ll echo what I said in that post - the logarithmic nature of AI is really messing with my time perception (and guessing windows are compressing like never before!)
It’s going to see what kind of wild checkout experience the Claude-sters can dream up. I’m going to predict it will be a UI created on the fly vs. a more static approach the others have done. (Note to any Anthropic people reading this - I really really want a Thinking hat - help an agentic commerce brother out!)
Speaking of ChatGPT…..
Exclusive: ChatGPT Merchant Center FIRST LOOK
In ecommerce when a consumer platform wants a product catalog from a brand or retailer (Merchant) we stand up a Merchant Center. The Merchant Center gives them a user-interface to sign-up, then see the datafeed specifications, upload data feeds, come up with permissions to keep it all secure. Sometimes it includes a sandbox to try a datafeed, etc.
The more advanced datafeeds will enable a multi-merchant technology partner (like my company ReFiBuy) to manage multiple merchants. Sometimes brands - like Steve Madden, may have 4-10 interior brands and, because each one has a different URL, they may want to upload those as 4-10 different Merchants.
What does this mean for the average merchant?
What this signals to us in the industry is:
Phase I - ChatGPT’s ACP/Instant Checkout has been a super-closed program and only Walmart, Etsy and select Shopify stores had access. They were the design partners basically - they hit all the speed bumps and ChatGPT learned ouw to move onto Phase II→
Phase II - Once you understand the Merchants needs you build a Merchant Center and start opening the program up more. Probably still ‘gated’, but you 10-20x. In AI-time, maybe you 100X it.
Phase III - Ultimately, like a great ad system, you want this to be totally self-service - anyone can sign up , get a login to the merchant center and START SELLIN!
In the ‘olden days’ (2019) , I would say 3-5yrs is a good timeframe for all this. In AI time, I believe ChatGPT and most others will be into Phase III well before Holiday 26 (11/1/26 - mark your calendars 📅)
As an industry insider, I can tell you there is a land rush right now to get products into these engines, properly mapped (canonicalized), catalogs gussied up (enriched with more content an context) and start optimizing against product card’s competing offers because everyone is running as hard as they can to capture as much of the Agentic Holiday 26 as possible. 🎅
Deep Dive for the my 🤓 (ecom nerds and geeks) friends
Our sleuthing friend Joe was able to get the front-end of the ChatGPT Merchant Center to display and we have our first look at what this is going to look like. It’s a long page so we split it into two screens shots:
Top of the Merchant Center:
Bottom of the Merchant Center:
This is super-de-duper-ecommerce-nerdy and if you made it this far, the sub-sections here make sense to you, so I won’t spend space explaining them. What’s cool is even though the back-end feature flag is turned off you can exercise the UX around multiple merchants like this→
Until you sadly get the “Feature not enabled” notice - womp womp.
What’s Next?
Looking at the 2026 Calendar, and looking at what we learned at NRF I think we will have some of the players just releasing stuff as they build it - at least small stuff like Merchant Center, but the opportunities for big announcements are:
Feb 12-14 - Valentine’s day shopping season
March 24 - Show: Shoptalk Spring (AI Themed!)
April - Mother’s Day Shopping season
May/June - Dads-and-grads shopping season
July/August - Back-to-School shopping season
Sept 17 - Show: Shoptalk Fall
Sept 22 - Show: RetailClub (AI Conference)
We’ll be tracking all this and let you know when we find out more!
P.S. Thanks (again) Joe!
