TL;DR
Walmart, Ulta Beauty, Wayfair and others are reworking their sites so products surface in chatbot answers, while resisting pressure to let purchases complete inside AI platforms. The reason is data. What someone browsed, what they put in a basket and what they bought before is what drives the next sale, and none of it accrues if the transaction happens elsewhere.
The traffic is real
Around £6bn ($8 billion) will be spent this year by shoppers pointed at retail sites by AI assistants, on Juniper Research’s estimate. Adobe Analytics put generative AI use for online shopping at 41% of US consumers in June, and found visits originating from AI services produced 41% more revenue apiece than those arriving by conventional routes.
The mechanics differ from search. A chatbot answers a detailed question rather than ranking pages against keywords and links, which forces retailers to rewrite how products are described and how a brand gets found at all.
Ulta’s digital and e-commerce lead, Josh Friedman, was pragmatic about the cost. “We always want to be wherever our guest is,” he said, noting that engaging customers on someone else’s platform has always carried a tax and that this is no different. The chain reports conversion and purchase intent roughly doubling among shoppers who arrive via Gemini or ChatGPT, and is working with Google to bring carts and its rewards scheme inside Gemini — while still preferring the purchase itself to finish on its own site.
The argument for holding the relationship
Vince Koh, who leads digital commerce globally at AWS, framed the case: finish the purchase on the brand’s own site and the retailer keeps a direct line to that customer. AWS is pushing clients, Tapestry’s Kate Spade among them, to market through AI platforms while keeping their own storefront the place people actually buy. Wedding platform The Knot takes the same line, chasing visibility in ChatGPT while steering bookings back through its own site on the strength of three decades of data.
Looking forward
For now the retailers hold the stronger hand. OpenAI shut down Instant Checkout in March and refocused on discovery, pointing merchants and marketplaces towards their own payment flows. Etsy sees the same behaviour: shoppers who discover a product through a chatbot generally come back to Etsy to complete it.
UK retailers face this tension with an added edge. Any arrangement routing customer data through an AI platform is a controller-processor question under UK GDPR before it is a commercial one — an analysis far easier to do before the integration than after.