ChatGPT now drives a fifth of Walmart's referral traffic as Black Friday's crown fades
ChatGPT now accounts for 20 percent of Walmart's referral traffic, one of the clearest signs yet that AI assistants have become a mainstream shopping channel, with tens of billions of product searches running through the chatbot each month.
The shift accelerated this week as ChatGPT began letting users buy products directly in chat, starting with Etsy and expanding to more than a million Shopify merchants. The system runs on Stripe's open Agentic Commerce Protocol and is deliberately merchant-friendly: sellers keep the customer relationship, buyers purchase directly from them, and merchants control order approval, payments and fulfillment through their existing systems.
The contrast with other approaches is notable. Where some platforms insert themselves between buyer and seller, this design keeps the merchant at the center of the transaction, and the open standard behind it could become the default protocol for AI commerce.
The value of experienced exit advice is also in focus this month, with a profile circulating of a veteran e-commerce deal advisor who sold his own brand in an eight-figure exit and has gone on to advise on upward of 600 million dollars in completed deals, over 80 percent of them closed at above-market premium multiples. His framework pushes founders to move from being valuable to being value-able, built on three moves: build value, capture it, then extract it.
Seasonal sellers offer their own lessons. The operator of a 50 million dollar Halloween costume business captures about 15 percent of annual revenue in just the four days before the holiday, a case study in how concentrated surges reward sellers who prepare their supply chains and ad budgets far in advance.
A practical image workflow is also gaining traction among sellers: design a master product image or infographic in Canva, link the account through ChatGPT's connectors, then prompt the chatbot to produce targeted variations for different customer segments, for example budget-conscious shoppers, premium buyers, gift givers and first-time users, with headlines, benefit callouts and color accents adjusted per audience while brand consistency holds. After a final polish in Canva, the variants deploy to listings, A+ content and ad campaigns, and the same approach works for seasonal campaigns and international localization.
Meanwhile, Black Friday's dominance continues to erode. The shopping weekend that captured nearly 10 percent of fourth-quarter online orders in 2019 has fallen to about 7 percent in recent years, as promotions stretch into a Black November running from October through December. Black Friday still draws more shoppers than Cyber Monday, even though Cyber Monday rings up the larger total. Nearly half of consumers call excitement their primary feeling about the weekend, but younger shoppers increasingly report stress and overwhelm, and almost 60 percent of holiday shoppers now start buying in October or early November.
For merchants the playbook is shifting accordingly: sustain urgency without discount fatigue, typically landing on markdowns of 20 to 29 percent that convert without destroying margins, launch early to sidestep peak-season shipping premiums, and personalize offers to turn holiday shoppers into year-round customers.
In brief: TikTok Shop has passed 500,000 US-based sellers, Amazon listings have lost visibility in Google search, AI search visits are surging through 2025, Amazon is rejecting applicants whose names contain FBA from its service provider portal, and the average user now spends 108 minutes a day on TikTok compared with 63 on Facebook and 48 on Instagram.
