Walmart becomes the latest retail giant to check out with ChatGPT

Sponsored by

You can’t predict market shocks. But you can prepare for them. Rithum can help you strengthen your operations with better data accuracy and smarter automation. Streamline your commerce ops.

This week, Walmart said it is joining forces with OpenAI to take shopping to the next level. This fall, Walmart and Sam’s Club customers will be able to shop directly within ChatGPT. The new AI-driven shopping experience is being touted as an effort to meet shoppers where they are, as referral traffic from AI sources like ChatGPT to retailer websites peaked this summer.

In September, Shopify announced a similar partnership with ChatGPT in which its merchants will be able to sell directly in ChatGPT conversations. “Shopping is changing fast,” Vanessa Lee, VP of product at Shopify, said in a statement. “People are discovering products in AI conversations, not just through search or ads. This will let our merchants show up naturally in those moments and give shoppers a way to buy without breaking their flow."

Indeed, conversational commerce is becoming a hot topic among retailers as shopper queries become longer.

In a LinkedIn post, Justin Urso, co-founder at Triive, an AI-first retail tech company, described the Walmart-OpenAI partnership as a “watershed moment.”

“This move removes the ‘go to a site → search → filter → checkout’ steps and brings shopping closer to where people already are—in conversation, in context,” Urso wrote. “In integrating directly with ChatGPT/Instant Checkout, Walmart is inserting its commerce layer into platforms where users spend time and instead of forcing users to exit and ‘go to Walmart.’”

As Retail Brew previously reported, Walmart has been “integrating newer technologies into its e-commerce plan as part of a larger reset,” and while the Walmart-ChatGPT checkout is not live yet, execution and rollout of the feature will be crucial to determine its success.

Both Urso and Lee point to the same trend: Shopping is moving beyond traditional search and into more conversational, context-driven experiences.

Meanwhile, Ranjeet Bhosale, VP of digital product management at Target, said recently that the “best metric” for winning within AI-driven search is when “search becomes invisible”—a sign of a seamless customer experience.

“We are getting ready for a world where the guest may not be directly coming to Target.com but they may be using a shopping assistant externally to browse Target on their behalf,” Bhosale added.