Frenzy of Big Agentic Commerce News+Updates Drop During Shoptalk.. Let's Catchup on Everything...
Gemini, Meta and ChatGPT all have new features and Agentic commerce innovations out in the last week. We detail those plus a great BCG Report and Adweek covers the big Shoptalk Agentic debate!
There was so much Agentic Commerce news dropping at Shoptalk, it was easy to miss all these interesting changes and non Shoptalk news items that rolled out while a big chunk of the industry was conventioning it up in Vegas. We have all the big updates summarized here so you can get caught up. We’re going to take them by company, but before we jump into that, here’s a great article summarizing our big debate from Adweek…
Adweek Covers First ShopTalk Debate
Adweek had a great piece summarizing the debate. Note if you missed it, we released the audio last week here. Here’s a good summary of Ekta’s take:
But Ekta Chopra, chief digital officer at e.l.f. Beauty, believes that, despite being at the beginning stages, AI answer engines are already fundamentally changing the way that people buy things.
Chopra has noticed that people are now talking to search engines in the same way they talk to answer engines.
E.l.f. now must work harder to stay visible, she said. Detailed product data, relevant to many scenarios and consumers, must inform answer engines, and not just the basics.
Gemini Updates
Google Gemini “Sponsored Store” Ad Unit Spotted In the Wild
Back on Feb 11, Google’s VP/GM of Ads and Commerce, Vidhya Srinivasan, posted this blog post and announced a new ad unit called “sponsored store”.
At the time, we questioned how this will work, is it basically going only be sponsored stores on this listing or will there now be ‘tiers of stores’? A sharp-eyed X user found a live example in the wild.
In this example, Gap is the only merchant with the offer, so they are effectively listed twice. If we pretend that StoreX also had this item, but wasn’t sponsored, they would be listed either above or under the ‘All stores’ designation. This is a pretty valuable ad unit, it’s way up top, very delineated and basically doubles your shelf space. It will be interesting to see how it’s priced and how retailers are going to be thinking about the ROAS on this one.
We tried in a variety of accounts to try to replicate this one, with no success, so it maybe a A/B test only exposed to a small flagged audience. If you want to try it:
AI Mode
“I am looking for gap men’s chinos”
GAP and Google Partner for UCP and Agentic Commerce
Tuesday, on-stage at Shoptalk, the GAP’s EVP and CTO, Sven Gerjets was on stage with CNBC’s Gabrielle Fonrouge and they announced that they are the first major fashion brand to jump in feet-first with Gemini/UCP.
“It’s not just keyword search anymore, right? It’s conversations, and so we need to be relevant to that,” Gap’s chief technology officer, Sven Gerjets, told CNBC in an interview. “Is it, you know, ‘I’m trying to figure out what to do for a wedding, what are the things I should be looking at?’ Or, ‘I’ve got a job interview, are there some styles I should wear?’ All of those things we need to become relevant to.”
“We’ll continue to evolve the experience and bring the things forward that the customers want, so that is definitely the roadmap and the future,” said Gerjets. “It’s a very first experience in, I think, a journey that we’re all on to really nail what agentic commerce is for the customers.”
“This space is moving so quickly ... We’re all evolving and learning together, and who knows what the space will look like in five years, who will be crowned the victor, or how fragmented the space will be?” Gerjets said. “For us, it’s important that we work with all of them, because we really want to meet our customers where they want to be.”
I think this is spot-on and really echo’s what Ekta said in the debate on the same day - consumers have a new way for researching and eventually finding and buying products, the forward-looking retailers and brands should be leaning into these experiences, testing and trying everything and keep an open mindset. I think Sven’s mindset here is spot-on and bodes well for GAP’s future in Agentic Commerce.
The article does say the checkout isn’t live yet, but ‘imminent’ - we’ll be keeping an eye on this one and see if Google and the GAP use this big launch as an opportunity to show off the four new UCP features announced March 19th:
Multi-item cart capability
Enhanced catalog endpoint
Loyalty program integration (via a capability called ‘Identity Linking’)
The launch of a self-service merchant center
In true Retailgentic style, we’ll let you know when it launches!
They did release a screen shot which is here. Note there’s a partnership with a sizing company called bold metrics.
Here you see a typical variation picker (color/size) and then the size picker. The size thingy pops in there and tells the user that it’s a high confidence match which is a clever addition to the checkout flow and illustrates how flexible and customizable this can be with the right underlying investment in infrastructure.
META Updates
While on the surface, this group of announcements covered by TechCrunch are really AI additions to traditional ad formats, I thought this ‘one click checkout’ shoppable ad unit was interesting→
A couple of things stand out about this and I think we’re going to see this ‘treatment’ showing up in Meta’s Agentic Commerce Offering. Here’s some observations:
It let’s you pick the variations (beige/medium) in the ad. Therefore, this is an ad unit tied into variation-level inventory - that is no easy feat.
This is a merchant-of-record purchase - notice the clear messaging that the shopper is buying from “Wind & Wool” both on the button and under in the Ts+Cs
This ad unit keeps the user in the instagram app. In the old format, where you may ‘click out’ from Instagram to a Shopify checkout and not come back into the app.
Techcrunch credits this on: “built in partnership with payment providers Stripe and PayPal, which allows consumers to complete the purchase in just a tap”. Notice that Shopify isn’t mentioned, their “checkout register” did not ring on this one. 🤔
This would be a great way to further compress the Research/Find/Buy cycle - imagine this in a product card, where you click and for certain items, you can checkout right in the product card.
More Evidence of Meta Joining the ACP Alliance?
Last week, we highlighted speculation that Meta would pick ACP over UCP. This week, Joe our Agentic Commerce Chief Sleuther, found that on github, this user ‘ihwa’ works a facebook and has some fresh pull requests (indicating they have resources working on the protocol and now actively making code contributions).
Will see an official announcement soon? Q2 ends tomorrow, therefore we’re < 45 days from earnings and META has a history of dropping this type of news on that cycle.
Big ChatGPT Agentic Commerce Updates
To recap the big picture, early March saw a diversion of paths between ChatGPT/ACP and Gemini/UCP:
March 4th - Information drops piece that ChatGPT is focusing on discovery over checkout and then there was a bit of a dramatic Walmart breakup around the checkout
March 11th - Conversely, Gemini stays the course with in-line checkout via UCP and announces the 4 things that address the obvious shortcomings with everyone’s first attempt at a hosted checkout: loyalty, multi-cart, self-service merchant center and improved discovering capabilities.
I think this is a good thing for the industry because we now have one of the big players really focusing on this checkout to see if it can be solved and we have another one really experimenting a lot with discovery. In the Google updates above, you see them refining this with the ad unit and picking off one of the big fashion brands to be an early ‘anchor tenant’. In this section we’ll update you on all the things ChatGPT has been doing since that March 4th announcement. There’s so much going on here we’re going to lightening round this one with fast short updates
ChatGPT Apps Refresher
The ChatGPT Apps UI is, to be kind, a bit hard to navigate. We receive tons of messages from readers that get lost in the UX. Here’s how it works on desktop:
Steps to Add an App:
You may have to start by Selecting the ‘+’, then go to “… More” and then click on ‘Add Sources”
From there (as pictured) in step 1, you choose apps and then ‘Connect more’
that takes you to the apps section of your settings (you can also enter this through settings BTW) - in there you see your existing apps and click the ‘Add more’ button on the top.
From there now you are in the ChatGPT apps ‘discovery’ experience - there’s a browse experience and a search experience (box in upper right).
ChatGPT and the Sephora App
First up, at Shoptalk, Sephora took the stage and announced the Sephora App. It’s unfortunately not live yet, but here’s the features:
The Sephora ‘Beauty insider’ loyalty program will be completely integrated
You’ll do discovery on ChatGPT and then ‘finish’ in Sephora. You’ll see an example of this in a second.
You’ll be able to ‘at or ‘@’ the Sephora app and ask beauty questions
While the press release and coverage states the app is live, there’s no indication of it anywhere I can find and no screenshots -we’ll keep an eye out for this one.
I thought these quotes were interesting→
“At Sephora we are passionate about assisting our customers with the best beauty advice and curation, wherever and whenever they want. Today this means piloting the Sephora app on new intelligent channels such as ChatGPT. We are proud to introduce this experience in the US market, with the goal of expanding this globally”, said Anca Marola, Global Chief Digital Officer of Sephora.
“Beauty clients around the world are increasingly open to AI-powered guidance, as many use technology to discover brands, trends, and routines. By blending our digital retailer expertise with new AI tools, we are creating new seamless and conversational experiences that are not only efficient but helpful for beauty consumers”, adds Nadine Graham, Sephora North America General Manager of e-Commerce.
“ChatGPT is increasingly becoming a starting point for how people discover products and make decisions. This new experience with Sephora explores how beauty discovery and shopping can be more helpful and personalized inside ChatGPT,” said Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI
ChatGPT and the Walmart App
Walmart is on the record as saying that conversions from ChatGPT were 1/3 their on-site conversion rate and the app will solve that. In this video I take it for a spin and illustrate how it works→ (~7mins)
To summarize the two use cases:
Pecan pie ingredients - Not a great experience, unlike the integration with Instacart’s app, this is cumbersome and the walmart app doesn’t “listen” to the instructions I’m giving it through ChatGPT.
Big Screen TV - Same feedback, the whole point of having Walmart is everyone (in my neck of the woods) is < 10mi from a Walmart so it’s perfect for the urgent in-store stuff. How come that basic use case isn’t supported? Gemini and ChatGPT checkout support/supported that so we’ve taken a step back IMHO.
ChatGPT’s Shopping Discovery Becomes More Opinionated
Joe the Agentic Commerce Sleuth put together this great ‘before and after shot→
Three Big ChatGPT Discovery Changes:
New layout - First, a much cleaner, more visual, cleaner result peppered with product cards (3x3 carousel in the OG and now 8 in the new)
Best Overall - At the top, ChatGPT has actually given a more firm recommendation vs. just showing you the pros and cons- we’re calling this the Best Overall Reco. This is, obviously, where you want your products to be (how? ACO people! Product-level Content and Context are the keys - search our archives for ACO if you are new).
Top Four Grid - Finally towards the bottom, you will see a top four comparison matrix that’s very handy and completely personalized. If you told ChatGPT about your stride, and other things important to you as you look for shoes, those will be the rows in the matrix. Welcome to the Matrix!
ChatGPT’s Pinterest-ey Wall (or Browse All)
Joe doesn’t show it in the above screen shot, but now frequently at the bottom of either the conversation or after you click on a product card and see the offer card and scroll down, you’ll see either a 5 product card carousel with one marked “Browse all” or an “Explore more” section like this→
Once you click on this you are taken to a ‘Pinterest-esque’ view or an ‘Endless Aisle type display. What’s happening here is we now have an ability to look directly into ChatGPT’s core catalog and poke around. This is super helpful for, you guessed it, canonicalization! But let’s not go there today.
Sometimes you even get what we’re calling the “Browse All View’s Filtering System” at the top that lets you filter what shows up in the product wall based on various attributes provided (I’ve popped down the color menu in this Dyson Airwrap example
Here’s a short video that shows you just how ‘endless’ the endless aisle is.
ChatGPT’s New Product Offer Card Content and Context Expansion
Tons to go over here, some of it we knew was coming because we saw it being tested, but it’s all live now. First, there’s a ton more information on the product card, it’s so long now I had to chop it up into 4 pieces to show you:
The new sections of the Offer Card are:
Offers - The Offers are sorted by ChatGPT’s proprietary algorithm (but easy to decode 😁)
What to know - An ai-generated tight paragraph about the product and who it was built for (product-level storytelling - see, we predicted this!)
What people are saying - Here you start with a summary of the reviews starting with positives and then any concerns. After that, somewhere between 2 and 10 reviews are presented - usually with a mix of positive/negatives. There seems to be some new filtering to take out the ‘reddit crazy’ - those reviews that are just written by someone, well, on reddit.
Explore more - As mentioned above, this is a gateway into the new pinteresty wall - kind of an escape hatch - if you made it this far on this SKU and it’s not what you wan’t this allows you to go back up to ‘Find’ or even ‘Research’ from the Buy part of the funnel.
Follow-up - This we saw in preview and it’s cool to play with now that it’s live. Here’s an example→
In this example, I’m looking for a Dyson Airwrap and got confused about which accessories come with this SKU. When you click on Follow-Up, it has this hovering pop up chat that has ‘selected’ in it (see red box) the SKU in question - a visual clue we are asking about this specific product’ and I ask my question. Then the answer, also in the hovering box is presented. This is pretty cool to see in practice and I now want to put 3 of them in there like Rufus and Gemini have and see how that works. It seems like the comparison matrix would be a great place to put some check boxes and when you check them it puts them into this type of setup.
ChatGPT Offer Card: “Best Price” Badge
This one is harder to produce but we’ve had enough people send it to us we feel confident it’s not just a test, but probably here to stay (at least for 2 weeks haha)
Here’s an example we found in the wild:
Here you’ll see are two offers Poshmark at $30 and Mercari at $35 and Poshmark has the new “Best price” call out. Note that it does seem to take into consideration pricing and only showing up if the price difference is well north of 10% savings. I’m sure this will be tweaked a lot over time.
BCG: Agentic Scenarios Every Marketer Must Prepare For
I thought this BCG article was pretty interesting and had some thought provoking scenarios and likely conclusions for how Agentic Commerce plays out. Here’s an example - they have this diagram detailing four possible agentic futures→
… in which you have Super-App in the upper quadrant where you have AI purchase decision and high market concentration.
You’re Caught Up!
Now you’re caught up and ready for more news, let’s see what the next week holds for us!