Today’s news outlets and blogs are filled with the news; OpenAI rolls out the new age of agentic commerce in partnership with Shopify and Etsy. It’s fair to say most fintech circles in North America were buzzing about this today.

Google is also investing a lot of resources into this new frontier, partnering up with Paypal to advance its agentic commerce efforts.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce sounds like a dream come true for most; you do not need to jump from marketplace to marketplace, you don’t need to worry if there is a better option, or if you have seen all the options. Your GPT can show you the best options across the integrated partners and you can complete the purchase with a single click! It already has your card information, your address for shipping and all the rest.

My Personal Experiment in Canada Today

Although OpenAI’s press release states the Buy feature is only available to U.S. users, I gave the “find me a product” prompt a chance with my ChatGPT Plus account today just for the sake of experimentation.

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PS: This is a one of one experiment, so take everything with a grain of salt.

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I asked it to find me some “high heel knee high black boots” and it created a product carousel for me. Here’s how it went; https://chatgpt.com/share/68dc5721-0870-8011-a79a-d6dd986bc879

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TL:DR — Across six iterations, the carousels degraded in quality: duplicates reappeared, some products had no heels, others were in the wrong color. What started strong quickly went downhill.

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So, what went wrong? From what I can understand, it was only able to offer me products from a very limited number of stores. But I can easily filter out all the criteria I gave GPT on one of the stores it suggested items from, see the list here: https://www.samedelman.ca/en/search#sortCriteria=relevance&f-primarycolor=Black&f-materialdescription=Leather,Smooth%20Leather&f-heelheight=Mid&cf-categories=Boots%20and%20Booties,Knee%20High

I guess at this point, in Canada at least, there is no real “happy path” for product search within ChatGPT. There might be multiple factors affecting the accuracy of the results, but my bet would be on the product XML feeds possibly having inconsistent formatting and attributes, as well as retrieval constraints.

Payments & Policy Questions Raised

As someone who has grown up in a country that has experienced multiple financial crises and banking / financial frauds, I immediately start thinking about what potential issues might arise from any new technology.

From agentic commerce, the most obvious open questions for me are;

• Legal ambiguity — When a user buys something through their GPT, is it the user buying or the AI agent? Is the AI agent acting as an intermediary to the transaction? Who is the “Buyer” in the Terms of Sale? Do those terms need to be redefined in the age of agentic commerce? And what is the legal standing of the AI agent that completes the purchase?
• Impulse Buying Increase — This is a real problem for so many, which will definitely increase in effect with the implementation of one-click-checkout process.
• New wave of fraud — Although there’s no way to know for sure, I’m guessing a substantial percent of the users who are using ChatGPT are using SSO options to login. That means if your account gets compromised, attackers could initiate unauthorized purchases, even if raw card details remain tokenized. Combined with low adoption for 3DS, this opens up a new path for fraud.
• Increase in refund rates — Potentially selecting wrong product variant or wrong product entirely will surely cause an increase in the refund and void requests. Impulse buyers who regret the purchase will contribute to this too.
• Increase in chargeback requests — No mandatory or regulatory enforcement for 3DS over a set amount in the U.S. and Canada (unlike EU’s regulatory framework PSD2) which causes low adoption rates and the legal ambiguity will surely contribute to this.

Guardrail Suggestions for Better Adoption