ChatGPT is now the world's second e-commerce destination, with 500 million buyable products for the holidays
When Walmart announced its ChatGPT Instant Checkout integration on October 15, the biggest question for sellers was whether third-party marketplace inventory was included. In a media interview days later, a Walmart executive vice president overseeing AI acceleration confirmed it is.
The numbers are staggering: roughly 75 million first-party SKUs plus 420 million third-party SKUs, minus about two million fresh food items, puts some 493 million Walmart products into ChatGPT. Add Shopify's integration, estimated at 10 to 50 million more SKUs, and the grand total tops 500 million buyable products for Holiday 2025. No platform in retail history has scaled that quickly.
New data from Euromonitor International explains the confidence: ChatGPT has quietly turned into the most-visited e-commerce destination after Amazon. It processes 2.5 billion prompts a day, about 2 percent of them for purchasable products, which works out to 52.2 million daily product-intent prompts. Until now those shopping opportunities generated no captured value; Instant Checkout changes that.
A 12-month academic study of 973 websites with 20 billion dollars in combined revenue, spanning upward of 50,000 ChatGPT transactions next to 164 million from conventional channels, shows the current limits: ChatGPT traffic converts far worse than other channels, affiliate traffic has an 86 percent greater likelihood of conversion, and LLM traffic in total runs about 200 times below Google organic, at less than 0.2 percent of all traffic. ChatGPT accounts for more than 90 percent of LLM sessions. Crucially, conversion rates from ChatGPT keep getting better as shoppers grow comfortable trusting AI picks, and that was before Instant Checkout.
The old journey, click a link, land on a site, find the product, check out, enter payment, killed conversions. Instant Checkout compresses it to one button inside the conversation, while OpenAI collects one to five percent for access to more than 52 million daily product searches. As the study's authors put it, none of this looks the same a year from now.
For third-party sellers, Walmart's bet opens a huge discovery channel with more daily traffic than most conventional platforms, just as consumer behavior adapts. This holiday season will provide the first real answer on whether 52 million daily shoppers will actually buy through a one-click conversation.
Elsewhere in marketplace news, Amazon is testing a Price History button that shows historical pricing directly on product pages for the first time, with no third-party extension needed. For sellers the implications are significant: pricing transparency becomes mandatory, inflated list prices followed by markdowns get easier to spot, consistent honest pricing becomes a trust advantage, and pricing consistency may grow as a Buy Box factor.
Amazon Marketing Cloud, open to all sellers for only a few weeks, is being called a hidden goldmine. Unlike standard reports that use last-touch attribution, crediting only the final ad clicked before a purchase, its Path to Conversion report shows every touchpoint. Sellers can now build hyper-specific custom audiences with natural-language prompts instead of SQL, then layer them onto Sponsored Products campaigns with bid adjustments, targeting, for example, shoppers searching a term who also bought five Lightning Deals last month and only buy discounted products in a specific region.
Amazon is also planning a major automation push, according to leaked internal documents reported by a major US newspaper: avoiding 600,000 hires over the next decade as sales double, automating 160,000 US roles between 2025 and 2027 for 12.6 billion dollars in projected savings, roughly 30 cents per item, with an ultimate goal of automating 75 percent of operations. Amazon says it is actively hiring and that savings expand employment elsewhere. Sellers could see operational changes across the fulfillment network as a result.
And in a sign of how the sector's events calendar is evolving, a major seller conference set for Nashville next April is rebranding around AI-driven e-commerce, promising more than 700 sellers, on-the-spot problem solving, podcast rows and admission starting at 497 dollars when tickets go on sale January 1.
