We read 100 merchant posts and comments about AI shopping across r/shopify, r/ecommerce, r/SEO, and r/bigseo. Four worries dominate: can I turn it off, what is the commission, who eats the return, and do I still own the customer. Here is what the documents say, including where the community has it wrong.
The new shopping assistant is not a chatbot on a retailer's website. It's ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini — and a growing share of consumers now open one of these before they've ever visited a store.
The marketing funnel that brand teams have used for two decades was built around human-driven behavior. In agentic commerce, most of that active behavior is no longer done by the human.
There's a purchase happening right now that started in ChatGPT, not on Google. The shopper didn't scroll an Instagram feed or type keywords into a search bar. Here's what that means for your brand.
Walk through this journey with me: someone wants to send a housewarming gift. They don't open Google. They open ChatGPT. At what point in that journey did your brand have a chance to appear?