Commercetools CEO on shopper traffic from sources like ChatGPT

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Commercetools CEO Andrew Burton is candid enough to acknowledge that enterprise-level commerce is not easy. However, the head of the e-commerce platform—which powers retailers like Sephora, PetSmart, and Ulta Beauty—has partnered with fintech giant Stripe and OpenAI to launch an “agentic commerce protocol” to make it easier to do business on the platform.

Burton said in a statement that Commercetools will help clients implement new transaction standards without the stiffness of legacy tech models that want to retain vendors within their own ecosystems with lockins or walled gardens. “Partnering with Stripe on ACP extends that advantage,” he said, “giving enterprises the composable foundation to move at the speed of their business, not the speed of their vendor.”

Commercetools has also launched a new shopping assistant, Cora, which provides seamless conversations with customers, whether they start chatting on a website, mobile app, or WhatsApp, the company said.

Burton spoke to Retail Brew about why conversational commerce is the next big thing and other holiday trends, as the company prepares to go public in the next few years.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk about the recent Stripe collaboration?
The joint work we did with Stripe and now OpenAI is really the first time ever that we as an industry have created a standard for how commerce transactions can be done in this new agentic and AI-enabled world. Defining a standard by which people can have transactions occur in this rapidly emerging world is exciting because now it’s going to open up a whole new set of experiences and conveniences.

As shopper queries get longer, what do you think about the potential of conversational commerce?
This shift from searching to having conversations is really a shift from having a transaction to having a relationship. Think about the brands we love and know. Those are brands that you have a relationship with. You trust them. You expect them to show up a certain way. So, the reason I’m so excited about conversational commerce, and I do think it’s the next big thing, is it remembers what I know, how to interact with me, it remembers where I was, maybe the last time we had an interaction. And it then begins to tailor things for me.

Customers are really trying to figure out how to maximize the share of the wallet with their consumers. And it’s less about just getting more; it’s about really valuing and creating [that] ongoing relationship. And conversational commerce fits in that perfectly.

What trends are you seeing going into the holidays?
There absolutely is a lot of excitement about the shift that’s occurring, where people are now tracking, and they have hard metrics of traffic now that is occurring of customers engaging with them on the LLMs, on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft—Microsoft a little less so. But there is definitely tracking, and a reallocation or reprioritization of what channels people are coming in on. It’s still small, but it’s growing quite quickly. That’s the first major trend that we have seen, and that has gone from a curiosity to now it’s a core part of their business.

How do you think the definition of promotions has evolved over time?
I would say we’ve gone from promotions being a one-off or an event, or a transaction of “Hey, I’ll put this promotion in place and hopefully some people will come by and take advantage of it.” People are tailoring it to the journey of their customers and these are not generic journeys. What I’m seeing now is people really segmenting and sub-segmenting customers so that they can transact or buy more if it’s valuable.

I think what we’re seeing now is this elevation of how promotions are being used in the context of a customer life cycle.

Any update on the IPO?
I’ll share a couple things. The first is probably the most exciting for us: we’re just north of about $45 billion of commerce that we’re processing. 

I believe $100 billion of GMV [Gross Merchandise Value] is that next major milestone for us. We’ve got north of a billion-dollar valuation. We’ve got north of $100 million of ARR [Annual Recurring Revenue]. Those are more secondary metrics to us, because I believe when we’re helping our customers grow and expand their commercial volumes that we can also do well.

We did crossover profitability, that was earlier this year, and that allows us to innovate securely and innovate in ways that give us a lot of flexibility. In terms of the IPO, once we get to that $100 billion point, then we’re going to be at something that’s really unique. For us, it’s really getting there first, and then we’ll be able to evaluate the next steps for the company.