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Imagine wanting to buy something online and simply asking your phone to do it. An AI chatbot shows you some options, you ask some clarifying questions, choose one, and then it’s taken care of.
No web search, no applying filters or comparing models on a website, no signing up for accounts or putting in card information. That’s the future suggested by OpenAI’s new shopping features in ChatGPT.
We’re not there yet of course; the new feature merely gives the existing ChatGPT the ability to show you products and link you to where you can buy them. But it’s enough to present a credible threat to the current paradigm of product research via Google, and it could transform how retailers do business online.
In the future, a quick conversation with your phone could let you buy anything.Credit: Pexels
There are already platforms, including Shopify, that online stores use to process sales. If one were to integrate with ChatGPT, or if OpenAI were to develop a system itself, customers could find products and make purchases across any category from the one chat.
If folks are to transition away from standard search engines to AI chat, we’re in the very early stages. Google still gets 26 times more visits than ChatGPT overall, and it dominates the online shopping research and advertising spaces.
But ChatGPT traffic is almost doubling each year, and chatbots in general (including Google’s Gemini) are expanding in a way that could let them perform any internet function based on your intent, context and a brief conversation.
As it exists today, the shopping experience within ChatGPT appears only in certain circumstances, and fairly infrequently. This contrasts with Google’s offering, which can seem to appear across the top of the results for almost every search. ChatGPT also offers more context than Google, sticking to its usual conversational format.
For example, I told ChatGPT I was looking for an art deco mirror for my home, and it chose nine Australian retailers that sell them. It provided a visual card for each one, and below that, nine dot points explaining its choices.
ChatGPT focuses on giving context rather than a list of prices and links.
In other conversations, ChatGPT didn’t automatically show product links, but it added them if I asked a follow-up question like “could you show me where to buy those?“.
The tech is clearly quite early, and it still suffers from the same old generative AI problem of often being confidently incorrect. The mirror it recommended as the best value and most affordable, for example, was $500. Many less expensive options were found via Google Search and even within ChatGPT’s other recommendations. It also sent me to some very dubious auction site results, and it lapsed pre-order pages.
Tim O’Neill, co-founder of AI consultancy Time Under Tension, said the current dynamic of customers visiting retailers’ websites wasn’t going anywhere in the near term. But he said AI was already augmenting the process.
“Currently shoppers looking for a particular product will browse on a retailer’s site through traditional navigation, and via site search. These work very well if you know what you’re looking for. Where conversational commerce can play a fantastic role is a step before this, at the research stage,” he said.
“For example, upload an image to ChatGPT and ask which shoes would go well with this outfit. Or, describe the shoes you are looking for, and ask for recommendations. You could do this by typing, or even with the voice mode.”
Chatbots can be more context-aware than traditional search, and they can also adapt their recommendations. For example, some queries are best served by offering specific products, while others by recommending retailers or asking for further clarification.
At this stage, since ChatGPT and others rely on navigating the web and sending users links, the existing infrastructure (including Google) is still a vital part. But O’Neill said the chatbots would evolve to outgrow it.
“Future iterations, and Perplexity Shopping already does this in the US, will have the chatbot also include the cart and purchase steps,” he said, leaving merchants to worry about fulfilment only. OpenAI has hinted that it will also go in this direction.
“This raises huge implications for retailers. Currently, it’s a ‘black box’ how to rank your products in chatbots. There is no best practice, and some merchants will win while others lose.”
So what are retailers to do? O’Neill said they should understand what’s happening in the chatbot space, but that advice is generally the same as it has been for Google; maintain a well-structured web presence, search engine optimisation and advertising. All of those things will potentially increase your chances of being recommended by a chatbot.
“Chatbot shopping is starting from a base of 0 per cent market share, and will take years to grow to a meaningful slice of the pie,” he said, adding that ChatGPT itself only has a tiny fraction of search usage compared to Google.
“So I don’t think retailers need to panic yet, but there will be advantages in the future for first-movers.”
A cynic might compare this brave new world of chatbot shopping to the early days of Google-powered e-commerce, where the search engine generally surfaced results according to relevance and quality, before gradually becoming bogged down by advertisements and pay-for-play content.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said ChatGPT Shopping will be monetised at some point, although he has traditionally opposed the bot serving straight-up ads. O’Neill said sponsored content appearing on the services was inevitable.
“If [OpenAI] does ads, I think it might be a reinvention of how we think of ads on sites like Google. Other chatbots might take a different approach. For example, Perplexity Shopping offers advertising placement,” he said.
“So far, Google has been quiet about Gemini Shopping, but I would be surprised if we don’t see this in 2025.”
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