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Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
Posted by on March 23, 2026 at 3:29 pmAfter testing 200,000 items in ChatGPT, Walmart found sharply lower conversions and will use its own integrated shopping experience.
Walmart said conversion rates for purchases made directly inside ChatGPT were three times lower than when users clicked through to its website.
Why we care. This suggests agentic commerce isn’t ready to replace traditional shopping. Sending users to owned environments still drives higher conversion rates.
The details. Starting in November, Walmart offered about 200,000 products through OpenAI’s Instant Checkout. Users could complete purchases inside ChatGPT without visiting Walmart’s site.
- Daniel Danker, Walmart’s EVP of product and design, said those in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions.
- He called the experience “unsatisfying” and confirmed Walmart is moving away from it.
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1 Reply
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Good
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Ironically, the post is written by chatgpt.
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What does “three times worse” or “three times lower” mean? Is that just “a third” of the baseline conversion rate?
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Language is already one of the worst deterministic models we have. Now combine that with the fact that there’s several similar products and several regional slang terms. It gets even more complicated.
And now add on LLMs are inherently inaccurate to an extent because they work on series of probabilities, it’s not really a surprise that clicking a button would be easier (and also faster and cheaper)
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I mean obviously large retailers don’t want people to pick what they need and leave. They want to upsell, cross-sell and advertise and get you to buy more than you wanted in the first place. Amazon was already blocking people using AI to shop on their site because of that reason.
This is one of the cases where using AI actually helps people fight off these marketing patterns. (As long as they don’t advertise to you as well)
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it makes sense it would be worse, more options and info is available via GPT than their site. once you are on/in walmart’s experience that’s all there is so of course conversions are higher.
once we get to the point of the masses not leaving the llm of their choice walmart will be right back.
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Why is this a problem? They should be incremental sales. Users want to buy on ChatGPT, and walmart just won’t let them? lol I wonder if they’ll lose to amazon AGAIN because of this thinking.
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