Agentic e-commerce is a HUGE deal
Plus, it might save OpenAI
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Just prior to Thanksgiving (2025), OpenAI quietly launched its Shopping Agent, which can be described as “a deep research for shopping” or a “background agent that researches what products to buy”.
Unlike normal deep research, it will interactively ask you questions to further qualify your criteria, and run for longer. Effectively, it feels like a personal shopper in a digital form.
After trying it, I am convinced that agentic shopping is here to stay, and grow into a massive funnel for e-commerce revenues, eclipsing social media as a traffic source for categories like electronics and home improvement.
The numbers also confirm that chatbots are quickly gaining ground as the TOFU (top of the funnel) for e-commerce:
According to Adobe, referral traffic from chatbots to e-commerce sites increased 1,300% in 2024, and 520% in 2025).
Shopify confirmed that AI chatbot referral traffic 7x’ed YTD, and Tobi Lutke is “all in” on riding this wave, with the Shopify-OpenAI partnership
In particular, OpenAI and Gemini are well positioned to capture this distribution shift, while Amazon needs to muster a stronger response than suing Perplexity for scraping its product catalog. Amazon (and other e-commerce companies) losing control of product discovery to ChatGPT is not priced in, at all.
That said, agentic commerce isn’t necessary bearish for incumbent e-commerce platforms, since AI agents have their own issues with conversion (which I’ll get into).