Now that consumers can make direct purchases within ChatGPT, marketers and retailers must reimagine the customer journey once again.

“We have to rethink the journey of a customer when they’re trying to discover products,” said Fabio Fiss, vice president of technology at full-service agency Mod Op. “You need to get to your customers where they’re at, the same way that it happened with mobile and the same way that it happened with social. This is an evolution of that, but now it’s a much more sophisticated approach.”

The era of the AI marketplace

ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout uses the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open-source standard developed by OpenAI and Stripe. OpenAI has also announced partnerships with Shopify, Walmart, and Etsy, allowing users to buy individual items seamlessly through the platform.

This open approach could create a new generation of interoperable AI-powered marketplaces, where consumers move seamlessly from discovery to purchase inside a conversation.

• But it also presents marketers with the challenge of maintaining brand identity within a non-branded environment.
• “You’re not going to necessarily see the website if you’re going through the chat interface,” said Fiss. “So you really need to think about how you’re communicating your brand in the same kind of checkout experience within chat to kind of still delight your customer with your brand voice.”

Something old, something new

On the technology front, brands need to consider how to send the right signals to AI platforms.

“You really have to think about the data and the metadata and the schema markup and how these products need to be organized so you can actually pass the right information to the bot,” said Fiss, noting that this is essentially just an evolution of the work brands have been doing with SEO.

But for measurement, the playbook is still being written, according to Fiss.

“You’re not going to necessarily have that product detail page to the cart to the checkout to measure,” he said. “You’re going to have to know what the signals are that are coming from that particular narrow experience of AI search, and try to measure the success based on that intake.”

Trust the process

Despite the excitement, trust remains a critical hurdle.

“We don’t know what delights customers necessarily, right, until we see one experience,” Fiss said. “There needs to be two things to happen. One is hallucinations with purchases cannot happen. And the second thing is building trust that customers have the decision power.”

He compared this moment to the early days of mobile innovation.

“Uber or Airbnb existed because we had a mobile phone with GPS. If it wasn’t for that, those experiences wouldn’t exist. We haven’t seen that app yet,” he said. “Once we build that trust… that’s going to work.”

This was originally featured in the Retail Daily newsletter. For more retail insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.