FLASH: The Damn Breaks: Walmart and Salesforce Embrace ChatGPT Instant Commerce and ACP

As predicted, the ecommerce World is aligning with ChatGPT Instant Commerce and ACP. What's this mean for Amazon?

The big breaking news drops in Agentic Commerce continue to accelerate (welcome to exponential living!) and we had two exciting items break over the last 24hrs:

Walmart Embraces OpenAI

After the market closed, Walmart dropped a bomb on the market via a WSJ exclusive - they were not only going to sell on ChatGPT, use ChatGPT Instant Checkout and thus adopt ACG. There was some news that they will use OpenAI to power sparky, but I haven’t verified that, and want to focus on ACP for now.

Walmart Selling on ChatGPT Agentic Marketplace

Think of Walmart as a collection of two pools of inventory. In my marketplace world we call these 1P and 3P. 1P, or first-party is what Walmart sells directly via a wholesale relationship. Everything you see in a Walmart store is 1P. Then you have 3P which is the Walmart marketplace, or third-party. To put it in perspective online there are 75m 1P SKUs and 420m 3P SKUs

What’s not clear from the press today is: does this deal include 3P. I’m guessing it doesn’t, but this one’s a coin flip and I’ll explain why. Even if it’s 1P, that’s a LOT of new inventory coming to ChatGPT Checkout!

Here’s what the WSJ says on this matter:

“Within the next few months, U.S.-based ChatGPT users will be able to buy Walmart products instantly and directly in ChatGPT. The products will include nearly everything available on Walmart’s website, except for fresh food. Walmart+ members will still get their benefits such as free shipping when making purchases through ChatGPT.”

The bolding is mine because to my ear that clearly says ‘1P only’. But the reporter obviously doesn’t understand this nuance and didn’t clarify. I’ve seen other articles say they will be selling 3P, but they aren’t sourced and this WSJ is the only article, so I’m guessing they are reading it differently than I am and don’t have a hard clarification. I have questions into friends there and will relay back when I know.

The Walmart press release says

Timing

The release says ‘soon’ - we’ve setup monitoring on this and will let you know when it goes live.

Doug McMillon Mic Drop Quote

I’m a fan of McMillon’s leadership style and this quote is baller.

For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change. There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual. We are running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with Sparky and through partnerships including this important step with OpenAI,” said Doug McMillon, President and CEO, Walmart Inc.

GAM Tri-opoly (Google, Amazon, Meta) vs. ‘All Ya’ll’ (ChatGPT, Walmart, Shopify, etc.)

For the last 15+ years merchants and even the Worlds largest retailer, Walmart, have had to live in a world where to acquire customers they had to not only pay a tax to the GAM triopoly, but they had to deal with some really heavy-handed anti-merchant behaviors.

What ChatGPT/OpenAI is quickly doing is assembling all of those players into a new fourth option. While for smaller merchants it may just how be a ‘quad-opoly’, it feels different. The merchant-friendliness, Sam saying: “most ads get in the way and don’t ad value” is huge, we all know that, but Google and Amazon, because they can, continue to slop up the user-experience.

This is the most interesting time in the history of ecommerce and I think we’re going to see this better user experience really accelerate things. The most interesting question is, what’s Amazon going to do? I have more thoughts and more predictions! on this that I’ll be sharing soon.

Marc Benioff/Salesforce ❤️ Agentic Commerce and ChatGPT ACP!

It’s Dreamforce week and yesterday, Nitin Mangtani, SVP and GM Salesforce Commerce Cloud + Retail Cloud posted on LI:

There’s a press release here.

Who the Heck is Nitin?

Let’s back up a step, who is Nitin Mantani? Nitin is a huge force of nature in the ecommerce world. I met Nitin in 2011 when he reached out to us at ChannelAdvisor because Google, super-secretly 🤫 who had rebranded their product discovery piece from Froogle to Google Product Search, was going to elevate it and call it Google Shopping(which launched in 2012). Turns out there was a new PM on the project, Nitin, that wanted to really upgrade the experience. To do that, they needed better product data, and so they called us at ChannelAdvisor (it’s weird how the past echoes into the future isn’t it?). Nitin is whip-smart, has a vision and is able to move large organizations to fulfill that vision. Also, he 100% gets ecommerce and understands all the intricacies.

Nitin left Google in 2013 to found PredictSpring, which Salesforce acquired in September of 2024 for $210m.

I don’t know what happened in there, but before long, Benioff, cleverly and correctly, realized they had a very talented individual here and he is now running their ecommerce initiatives. That raises another question→

Why does Salesforce, a CRM, matter to Agentic Commerce?!

If you’re new ecommerce world, he’s a brief catchup:

• Demandware was a Boston-based startup that was one of the first companies to come out with a SaaS/hosted ecommerce platform - this is before Shopify - it focused on

• Salesforce acquired Demandware in 2016 for $2.8b because they wanted to expand into ecommerce enablement and rebranded it Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SCC)

• SCC has some very large retailers on the platform with a concentration on the fashion/luxury/athletic apparel/footwear category.

Aftership has this list of the top 100 retailers using SCC, I have no idea how valid it is, but on a scan it looks right.

More News Later Today…

At dreamforce today at 5pm ET, Nitin has a keynote that we’ll be watching and since I’m filling your inboxes a lot, will put some notes over on my Linkedin.