DEV-TOOLSMarch 19, 20261 min read14 views

Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

Walmart found that conversion rates for purchases made directly within ChatGPT were three times lower than its website, leading the retailer to pivot toward its own integrated AI shopping experience.

Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

After testing 200,000 items in ChatGPT, Walmart found sharply lower conversions and will use its own integrated shopping experience.

Walmart said conversion rates for purchases made directly inside ChatGPT were three times lower than when users clicked through to its website.

Why we care. This suggests agentic commerce isn’t ready to replace traditional shopping. Sending users to owned environments still drives higher conversion rates.

The details. Starting in November, Walmart offered about 200,000 products through OpenAI’s Instant Checkout. Users could complete purchases inside ChatGPT without visiting Walmart’s site.

Daniel Danker, Walmart’s EVP of product and design, said those in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions.
He called the experience “unsatisfying” and confirmed Walmart is moving away from it.

Goodbye, Instant Checkout. Instant Checkout was designed to let users complete purchases directly inside ChatGPT without visiting a retailer’s website. However, earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed it was phasing out Instant Checkout in favor of app-based checkout handled by merchants.

**What’s changing. **Walmart will embed its own chatbot, Sparky, inside ChatGPT. Users will log into Walmart, sync carts across platforms, and complete purchases within Walmart’s system.

A similar integration is coming to Google Gemini next month.

The WIRED report. Why Walmart and OpenAI Are Shaking Up Their Agentic Shopping Deal (subscription required)

Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

Source: Hacker News

More in this category

dev-tools

OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation

OpenAI and Hugging Face detailed a security incident where an AI agent exploited vulnerabilities during internal cyber capability evaluations, underscoring the critical need for advanced safeguards as AI models gain sophisticated technical capabilities.

dev-tools

The State of Simulation for Physical AI: An Overview

Data availability is the primary bottleneck for Physical AI. GPU-accelerated simulation platforms solve this by generating scalable synthetic datasets to train, test, and deploy next-generation robotics systems.

dev-tools

Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

Farid Zakaria shares his journey of proposing a patch to the Linux kernel to support relocatable binaries in Nix, which evolved into a powerful eBPF-based solution for binfmt_misc.

dev-tools

Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

A Nikkei study reveals that off-balance-sheet debts at five major US tech companies have surged eightfold to $1.65 trillion, driven by massive AI investments like data center leases and GPU contracts.

dev-tools

Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral

Two developers successfully built a custom CPU from scratch at the logic gate level, deployed it on an FPGA, and optimized its memory architecture to run the classic game DOOM.

dev-tools

Incremental – A library for incremental computations

Incremental is a library designed for building complex computations that update efficiently when inputs change. Inspired by self-adjusting computation research, it is highly useful for large-scale calculations, GUI views, and data synchronization.