After the last two posts, many have reached out to me, and we have had some good discussions. Thank you for all the feedbacks and sessions.
One question that keeps coming back to me in all those meetings was “How will this impact the current retail ecosystems?”
That question inspired me to write this piece. In this article, I won’t dive deep into each system & scenarios, but rather provide insights and pointers on what actions to take and which areas are likely to experience change.
With Open AI Apps, the potential scenario we are going to face with e-commerce in the near future is :
More and more companies will start using ChatGPT as another channel for selling their products, which means most of the retailers will be forced to go into that channel. So if you decide to go down that route, your current e-commerce echo systems and architecture are going to have some impacts or changes.
As we transition from click commerce to context commerce, your content becomes the decisive factor — it will either make or break your success.
The conversational customer journey could be like this:
Conversational Product Discovery
Customer opens ChatGPT and asks: “Hi <Brand:> Find me a black running shoe size 10, under $120.”
ChatGPT will show the shoe size 10 that are less than $120
Customer: “Show me the blue one.”
ChatGPT will look at your product feed and search data from RAG and see if you are selling blue shoes, and present that to the customer.
Customer: “Add this to cart, size 10”
ChatGPT will call the backend to create a cart and show that to the customer.
Customer: “Checkout this”
ChatGPT calls the backend, it calculates the taxes & shipping, returns a hosted payment session URL or a Stripe PaymentIntent (if card entry required).
Customer: Enters the card details, and the purchase is completed.
In order to achieve the above customer journey, we need to do the following things:
Authentications & Cart Merges
This will be the first touch point of change, and it’s not a biggie, but it’s a change that has to be thought through.
Similar to how you authenticate the users from the website and apps, you need to map the ChatGPT sessions with the site/app sessions. You will have to manage the guest users, existing users, and existing users with an active cart scenarios etc.
Commerce Orchestrator
Worth thinking about creating an event-based commerce orchestrator with an MCP that dictates how your commerce flow should be. Some of the key responsibilities of this layer could be :
- Product feeds to LLMs and other systems
- Creating /Merging cart & Checkouts with different channels
- Payments
- Inventory & Price feeds
- Personalization
- Updating & retrieving from Knowledge Base
Product Feed
Most of the retailers should expect a change in the product feed because,
The traditional product feed from ERPs or your existing PIMs will not work for LLMs. I am not talking about the format of these feeds, instead it’s about the extra information, the information that is traditionally not part of product feeds from these systems( for eg: Including Inventory along with the product feed, Tax as final value based on regions etc)
So you could expect a change in the way you create this data and how you send this data to LLMs.
Knowledge Base
Simply put, this is the way you can expose your products, data, and services to the RAG. This is a must, and none of the retailers have this right now. I have touched upon this in the article: SEO & AEO: Any Different?
This is a change not just in your tech echo system, but almost every department in the business has to work together to figure out all the questions they have over the period of time, create a strategy, structure it, and publish this as content on the website.
This will call for a change in the way you create content in CMS; you will have to update the product content, and it is going to be a continuous process.
Reducing Hallucinations
New term for you ? Don’t worry, it just means that RAG will read the data, and based on that data, the LLMs might hallucinate and give you a reply that is slightly off. For eg:
While chatting, the customer might ask, “Is this an all-terrain shoes ?”. The LLM will reply saying: “Yea, it’s an all-terrain shoe ”
Customer: “Is it waterproof?”
LLM: “Yes it is “
The last answer is a hallucination of the LLM, Based on your data, it started thinking that since it is an all-terrain shoe, it should be waterproof.
To stop these hallucinations, we have to write system prompts like :
“Do not invent product features or availability. If unsure, respond: ‘I can’t confirm that — check this product page’ and provide link/doc reference.”
We call these Evals. This helps LLMs from hallucinations
Don’t worry, there are tools out there that we can easily plug in and do this quite easily. If you are going to use Agent from OpenAI, you can easily input your evals into that.
Payments
The new evolution of AI-enabled commerce is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a new, merchant-friendly open standard codeveloped by Stripe and OpenAI.
Your payment platforms will also soon release this. It’s not rocket science for Service Integrators because most of the work will be done by your gateway. You just have to call it in the right way:
How it works is :
After the customer chooses their preferred payment method, your payment gateway will issue a Shared Payment Token (SPT), a new payment primitive that lets applications like ChatGPT initiate a payment without exposing the buyer’s payment credentials.SPTs are scoped to a specific merchant and cart total. Once issued, ChatGPT passes the token to the merchant via API. The merchant can then process the transaction through your gateway.
Personalization
You can build this along with your commerce orchestrator or if you have a personalization engine, then pass this information, like session history + browsing + purchase history to surface products.
Expose getRecommendations(session_id, product_id) as a tool for ChatGPT to call. Keep your customers’ privacy in mind and only share the IDs and small metadata.
Above is not a comprehensive list of impacted areas, but it covers almost all the basic areas that will have changes. I tried to keep it to the basic impact level so that everyone can build on top of this.
The impact of change will be different for different retailers and is solely based on your current architecture. Your imagination and budget also plays a role in this , we could even think about adding an agentic layer in your architecture and much more.
The great thing about the new agents being rolled out across all LLMs is that development will become much faster. You’ll be able to test creative ideas more easily. I believe that in this new world, imagination will face far fewer limitations due to technological constraints.
What do you think? If there’s a specific area you’d like to discuss, feel free to leave a comment or reach out — I’d love to continue the conversation.
Trooming 