🚨FLASH: Exclusive First Look 👀 at ChatGPT's Imminent Cart Agentic Commerce Functionality!
Looks like ChatGPT Instant Cart is Single-merchant, Multi-item, or is it?
RETAILGENTIC EXCLUSIVE!!
Exciting news Retailgentic’ers. Our official ‘Agentic Commerce Sleuth’ Joe took our tip last week that ChatGPT’s cart functionality is imminent and with some deep digging and was able to get ChatGPT to reveal more about the code that’s waiting to be activated by activating it.
Items and Cart Matrix
Before we dig in, a quick backgrounder on items and carts so you know our vocabulary here. Here’s a 2x2 Matrix of how this works in ecommerce-land:
Let’s go through these:
(bottom left) Single Merchant, Single Item- known as ‘buy now’ in ecommerce, this checkout experience is offered by most merchants (Walmart’s is pictured) to give buyers a one-click checkout experience. They want one item, the cart gets in the way - fire away.
(Upper left) Single Merchant, Multi Item - Known as ‘add to cart’, this is the classic experience we all know and love. There’s usually a persistent cart icon (upper right) and an ‘item added’ message - you know the drill.
(bottom right) Multi Merchant, Single Item - Right now, in Agentic Commerce all four players have achieved Level-3 - Multiple merchants, but single item. Because we ship things in ecommerce, this is a bit of a death quadrant, or as Amazon would call it - Can’t Realize a Profit (The CRAP quadrant).
(upper right) Multi Merchant, Multi Item - The Holy Grail, often sought, never achieved. Will ChatGPT be the first to the holy grail? Let’s see.
Your Exclusive First Look
Thanks to Joe, here’s your exclusive first look (this is a 5 second video)
In the video you can see the cart functionality working. We find an item with Instant Checkout activated from Glossier, then we click add to cart! Unfortunately the back-end isn’t wired up yet to then go and see the cart.
Let’s dissect it:
Discovery 1: The Add to Cart Button
Discovery 2: The “Added to cart” treatment
Discovery 3:
Looking at the code, it’s clear that the current iteration is Single Merchant / Multiple Item - meaning you would have a Walmart cart, an Etsy cart, a Glossier cart and while you can technically shop multiple merchants, multiple items, we’re not going to get to the holy grail with this cart it seems.
Speculation: “Cart Ad Unit”
This has me thinking with simultaneous Cart release and work on ad units. You know what would be maybe the most killer type of ad every invented for ecommerce? An add unit that targets carts. Here’s an example:
I’m Target and I know that a $150 cart is a huge margin win for me. What if I could target (see what I did there?) carts over $150 that I have all the items in stock. What would you pay for that? If the standard take-rate is 4% would you pay an additional 5%? maybe…
I mention this because I’ve been talking to brands and retailers about where we see the intersection of Agentic Commerce and ads going and it’s about to get really wild!
We’ll have ad units in this era we couldn’t even begin to imagine just 6 months ago.
Conclusion
We learned a lot today! Let’s summarize:
The front-end code is rolling out.
The back-end code has been seen by some.
ChatGPT Instant Cart is very far along and I would say we’re days away.
We can see how the front-end will work, looking at the code, it’s most likely the case this is NOT the holy grail Multi Merchant / Multi Item, but the first Agentic Commerce provider to make it to Single Merchant /Multi-item.
Open questions:
When will this ship?
Will they push for the Multi Merchant Multi Item Universal Cart or stop here?
Will there be a bunch of innovative ad units wrapped around these experiences?
Stay tuned and Happy Agentic Commercing!
P.S.. Thanks Joe!
