AI Agents Revolutionize Online Shopping: From Search to Checkout

Zero-Click Search Comes For Checkout: Agentic Commerce Automates Retail's Next Frontier

Agentic commerce is spreading. OpenAI just launched Instant Checkout, akin to Perplexity's Buy With Pro, offering shoppers conversational shopping from curiosity to checkout without redirecting consumers to merchants' sites. Instant Checkout enables free and paid ChatGPT users across the US to purchase directly from Etsy sellers on ChatGPT's interface. A partnership with Shopify merchants is forthcoming. Zero-click search's application to shopping means that consumers can now buy from answer engines' results pages without having to click through to merchants' owned and operated properties. The protocol powering this experience - OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol - accelerates answer engines' arms race to win agentic commerce. Unlike Google's Merchant Center (which is free and subsidized by Google's ads) and Perplexity's Buy With Pro (which is reserved for paid subscribers), OpenAI requires merchants to pay a small fee to gain access to high-intent audiences. Merchants remain responsible for shipping, customer service, and returns, and payments and chargebacks are processed by OpenAI's launch partner, Stripe. This is a big step towards OpenAI becoming a Rakuten-like affiliate network and Amazon-like marketplace for third-party sellers. By monetizing via affiliate links and diversifying revenue sources, OpenAI won't have to sell ads as soon as possible. Zero-Click Search And Shopping Minimizes Time-To-Value For All Kinds Of Buyers The launch of OpenAI's Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol acts on leading indicators of consumers' desire to shop via answer engines. A quick pulse check using Forrester's Market Research Online Community revealed that 18% of adults in the panel already use ChatGPT to shop for discretionary products. Many do so because answer engines like ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode minimize shoppers' time-to-value while making them more informed. And it's not just consumers; it's business buyers, too. According to Forrester's Business Buyers' Journey Survey, 2025, 28% of business buyers who used genAI to inform their purchases report spending less time doing research as a result of genAI. Nonetheless, 57% of respondents consider more or different vendors due to genAI tools. As shopping increasingly begins and ends on answer engines' results pages, ad dollars will, too. Eventually, ChatGPT will feature ads in the vein of Perplexity's sponsored follow-up questions and Google's to-be-released search ads in AI Mode. Seventy percent of US B2C marketing execs already say they would shift spend from retail media networks like Amazon and Walmart to answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, per Forrester's Q3 2025 CMO Pulse Survey. There are nearly 275 retail media networks around the world, but that market will shrink as answer engines siphon commercial intent from retailers' owned and operated properties. Answer Engine-Powered Commerce Benefits From Past Pioneers Answer engine-powered commerce off merchants' sites builds on the foundation laid by commerce's digital transformation. First, ecommerce taught merchants how to reduce shopping's friction and advertisers how to harvest commercial intent. Then, social commerce demonstrated how compelling creative can visually persuade broad audiences and compress the funnel. Voice search highlighted the challenge of creating commercial intent where audiences merely seek information. Now, answer engines are applying these lessons to develop commerce that is stickier, fuller funnel, and more intuitive than its antecedents. Marketers are already responding. Per Forrester's Q3 2025 CMO Pulse Survey, 92% of US B2C marketing execs are developing strategies for agentic commerce. Strategies dictate tactics like cleaning and structuring product data to ensure engines are fed accurate, detailed information, and optimizing content's authority and indexability to enhance brands' visibility across answer engines' digital shelves. Stay tuned for our upcoming report on answer engine-powered commerce, the proliferation of ads and affiliate links across answer engines, and best practices for how to adapt content, websites, and measurement for the zero-click world. Book a guidance session to get ahead of the curve.

Are you ready for AI agent-powered shopping?

The world of online commerce is preparing for significant disruption as the use of agentic AI for shopping grows. A recent example of this is SaaS e-commerce platform BigCommerce announcing a rebrand driven by the need to address agentic AI. It has launched a new parent company, Commerce.com, unifying its BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift businesses under a single brand name, Commerce. The company's strategy is developing rapidly to service a world where AI acts on behalf of consumers to research, recommend and even transact on their behalf, while merchants adapt their businesses with the necessary data infrastructure and intelligent storefronts to enable this. I spoke with Sharon Gee, SVP Product AI for Commerce, to find out more about AI agent-powered shopping. Commerce recently ran a survey of 1,000 consumers across the US, UK and Australia/New Zealand. The research, developed in partnership with Future Commerce magazine, found that Gen Z shoppers are nearly as likely to use AI platforms (33%) for product research as they are search engines (37%). The report, New Modes: How AI is Shaping New Commerce Contexts and Expectations, also found that for Millennials, the gap widens with 26% choosing AI platforms compared to 40% preferring search engines. Meanwhile, just 13% of Gen X and 3% of Boomers prefer to use AI for product research. Beyond research, the report reveals that large language model platforms are building credibility with shoppers, as 23% of Gen Z and 27% of Millennials reported they are starting to trust AI platforms more than people for curated product recommendations. It concludes that Large Language Model (LLM) platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are becoming part of the go-to tech toolkit for shoppers, with 41% of all respondents using them daily. Gee explains that: One of the things that is most interesting about search which merchants cannot ignore is AI consumer apps. ChatGPT was adopted faster than any app before taking two months to get to a 100m users. This is changing search and impacting a lot of things for retail infrastructure. For example, we have all learnt to use short terms to find what we are looking for on Google or Siri or Alexa - we have learnt to talk in a way that machines understand. But with the ubiquity of LLMs, we can now have natural human conversations with machines and as the Google product shopping team have noticed, our queries are getting longer as we provide more context. Queries are ballooning in size. In other words, we can chat to AI agents explaining exactly what we are looking for, and why and then agentic AI can recommend things based on these queries with zero latency by interacting with merchant agents. However, currently all these queries with shopping intent (around 15% of daily ChatGPT queries) are not supported by merchant data. Gee clarifies what this means, "manufacturers need to take control of that by ensuring that product specifications can answer a query, otherwise the brand will be tarnished by AI slop collected by the AI channels. Merchants need to analyse their catalog data and understand what is involved. For example, if you list your product as being cerulean in colour, it will not be picked up by AI apps looking for 'blue'. Gee says: AI apps are not designed to understand ad programs, and they are getting no decent answers from the brands as they are just scraping content from websites. This is a really big change as merchants are now losing 30 - 40% of traffic because search and discovery is happening in AI apps. The question is, is your data available for these channels? Merchants need to improve the data on their website because data is the new storefront and the customer is in the cloud. Both structured and unstructured data needs to be made available and the more mature your data is, the more trusted it is by agents. So, manufacturers need to send quality data to put into the agent feed. This is how search has changed and the feed has to be everywhere your data is, including YouTube scripts. Commerce works with companies to get their data ready and enrich it. Its Feedonomics data feed optimization service surfaces, categorises and improves the data using generative AI to populate known destination schema, driving better agentic commerce outcomes. Gee thinks that we will have agent-to-agent commerce before year end in the US, using Google A2A protocol. This is why trusted data is crucial as both merchant agent and shopper agent need to be able to securely identify each other by receiving data handshakes over the Internet. The next step is for agent-to-agent transactions to enable checkout payment. So, are retail websites doomed? Gee thinks not" Websites are still important for shopper configuration and delivery options and as a browser experience later in the consumer journey, but they do not serve the same purpose as before. What about the role of creative agencies in the new agentic AI era? Gee sees them as transformational consultants: There are levels of data and the role of agencies is to break down the data silos in client organizations, pulling together data from product, engineering, advertising, marketing and IT teams. They all need to talk to each other and BigCommerce and Feedonomics provides a way for all these channels to share data. Agencies need to act like consultants and provide change management services, as well as providing ongoing optimisation and testing the outcomes. Agencies need to look at what the new problems are. Brands will need to act quickly to stay abreast of this agentic AI revolution in online shopping so that they can control the full buyer journey, by ensuring product feeds are optimized for discoverability. Agencies need to get ahead of the disruption and step up to the transformative, change management role as Gee suggests.

From Search to Checkout, AI Agents Rewrite Retail's Rules | PYMNTS.com

For merchants, the implications are stark. If they cannot adapt to the way agents filter and transact, they risk vanishing from the shopping journey altogether. Discovery is no longer about keywords and endless scrolls. In the AI agent era, queries become contextual and conversational "a black dress for a summer cocktail party by the water" and the agent returns just a few options. As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote, the challenge is no longer about being indexed but about being shortlist-eligible, which requires structured catalogs, clean metadata and semantic alignment. Google is already reshaping the front door of discovery. Its new AI Mode lets users describe products naturally and receive visual grids of results, while its Conversational AI Shopping Agent allows retailers to deploy branded assistants that guide customers through a digital aisle. For merchants, the bar has risen, incomplete attributes or poor image data no longer mean lower SEO rank they mean exclusion from the agent's response. Online marketplace eBay is trying to keep smaller sellers in that game. Its AI Activate program with OpenAI gives 10,000 U.K. small businesses access to ChatGPT Enterprise and training, helping them upgrade listings, marketing and operations. For eBay, which said the program is worth 3 million pounds, it is not just seller support but platform defense. If AI agents ignore the long tail of sellers, the marketplace itself risks being hollowed out. Being shortlisted is only half the battle. AI agents must be able to complete the purchase without friction, which raises the stakes for payments and fulfillment. Any glitch in checkout, delivery or returns can result in permanent exclusion from the AI agent's pathway. PayPal is responding by reinventing Honey as more than a coupon tool. It now surfaces products in response to agent queries and routes purchases directly through PayPal's payments rails. In effect, it collapses intent and transaction into one flow, positioning PayPal not just as a processor but as an orchestrator of agentic commerce. OpenAI, meanwhile, has launched Instant Checkout, letting U.S. consumers buy Etsy products directly inside ChatGPT, with Shopify merchants soon to follow. A "Buy" button lets users confirm details and complete a purchase without leaving the chat. While fulfillment, returns, and service still sit with the merchant, the transaction itself happens entirely within the agent's interface. These moves highlight how execution is becoming the decisive factor in agentic commerce. Merchants must not only be discoverable but also seamlessly transactable in the environments where agents operate. AI agents are no longer a test case on the margins of retail. They are already shaping which products consumers see, how purchases get executed and where payments are trusted. This holiday season will reveal the scale of that influence against a backdrop of slower spending growth. Mastercard expects retail sales ex-autos to rise just 3.6 percent year over year and the likelihood of a post-holiday chargeback surge. And retailers are already bracing for disputes to spike 45 to 60 days after December as AI-enabled fraud and "friendly" chargebacks pile up.