In the space of 4 days, Etsy announced it would make sellers’ items available for purchase directly on Microsoft Copilot Checkout and in Google Search AI Mode, coming just 3 months after it made a similar announcement when it integrated with Open AI’s chatbot, saying at the time, “ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it.”
It’s been that kind of week for AI agentic shopping, going well beyond Etsy. On Thursday, Microsoft announced its checkout feature for Copilot at the CES trade show, and on Sunday, Google made a similar splash at the NRF Retail’s Big Show. Shopify, PayPal, Stripe, Walmart, Wayfair, Target, and other brands and retailers all made it into press releases that show the gold-rush effect of generative AI on ecommerce.
Sellers, always a wary bunch when it comes to how their listings are presented to buyers, are learning their cynicism is justified. Just ask Bobo Design Studio’s owner who claimed Amazon scraped her site and showed her listings on its mobile app – with possible AI-hallucinated errors – even though she doesn’t sell on Amazon.
Sellers may also end up shouldering part of the costs of agentic search. Etsy left the door open to charging sellers for visibility on ChatGPT. We have yet to receive a reply to our inquiry to Etsy on Friday morning asking if it was working on monetizing ChatGPT, copilot, and other AI checkouts.
“Etsy pays commissions to OpenAI for sales made through ChatGPT Instant Checkout,” we reported in October. Outgoing CEO Josh Silverman told Wall Street analysts the company was considering how to think about that and whether there was an opportunity to charge fees to sellers for exposure on ChatGPT through Etsy’s ad program.
Microsoft Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents
In Thursday’s announcement at CES, Microsoft announced Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents:
- Copilot Checkout turns conversations into conversions—instantly. No redirect, no friction, and you stay the merchant of record.
- Brand Agents bring AI-powered guidance for customers to your own site—your brand’s voice, built for fast, scalable adoption.
Google AI Tools and Open Standards
In Sunday’s announcement at NRF, Google announced “a new open standard for agentic commerce and AI tools to help retailers connect with high-intent shoppers and drive sales” called Universal Commerce Protocol. “UCP establishes a common language for agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses and payment providers,” Google said:
“UCP was co-developed with industry leaders including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and endorsed by more than 20 others across the ecosystem like Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s Inc., Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa and Zalando.”
To start, the new UCP open standards will soon power a new checkout feature on eligible Google product listings in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, “allowing shoppers to check out from eligible U.S. retailers right as they’re researching on Google.”
PayPal Helping to Democratize Agentic Shopping?
PayPal appears agnostic when it comes to agentic shopping. On Thursday, it said it would “power surfacing merchant inventory, branded checkout, guest checkout and credit card payments” on Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout. On Sunday, PayPal said it would power AI Checkout with Google.
It also promises an easy solution for sellers. “For merchants, the challenge of agentic commerce has been the complexity of fragmented platforms. PayPal solves this by acting as a trusted infrastructure layer for agentic commerce. For more than 25 years, we have connected hundreds of millions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants through reliable payments and fraud protection, along with our buyer and seller protections. As commerce becomes more agent-driven, those foundations matter more than ever.”
