Agents are great at shopping. They're terrible at checkout. AI is sending better
By Toddpie · April 25, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Agents are great at shopping. They're terrible at checkout.
AI is sending better buyers to your store. But when AI tries to BE the store, it falls apart.
Walmart tested native checkout inside ChatGPT. It converted 3x worse than Walmart.com. Same quarter, Criteo found that traffic referred by LLMs converts 1.5x better than any other referral channel.
Read those two numbers together.
OpenAI launched Instant Checkout for Shopify merchants. Six months later,
about 30 had activated it. Thirty. Out of millions. Then they killed it.
Walmart pulled out too. Replaced it with Sparky their own assistant,
deployed inside ChatGPT, but routing the actual purchase back to Walmart's
checkout. That gets them to 70% of their normal conversion rate. Still not
great. But 3x better than letting ChatGPT handle the transaction.
Meanwhile Shopify's AI assisted orders are up 15x. They didn't build a
consumer-facing agent either. They built the pipes that let agents find products and send buyers to merchants who already know how to close.
The pattern is obvious if you look at the data instead of the press releases. Again, agents are great at shopping. They're terrible at checkout.
So the move isn't to hand your transaction to an AI platform. It's to make
sure your product data is clean enough that agents recommend you, and your
checkout is good enough to close when they send someone over.
Constructor ran the numbers, brands with properly structured product data saw
a 52% lift in ATC rates from AI-referred traffic. 52%!
The brands winning right now are building the thing agents send people to. Breakdown on my blog.