Shoppers are increasingly turning to AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini to discover products and build shortlists, but when it comes time to pay, most purchases still happen on retailers’ own sites. AI has become an important discovery channel, yet the customer relationship and checkout remain largely with established retailers.
What the data and companies say
- Ulta Beauty reports that traffic originating from AI shows double the purchase intent.
- Etsy observes that customers often discover products inside chatbot conversations and then return to Etsy to complete the purchase.
- Overall, visitors referred by AI spend on average 41% more per visit.
How this plays out in practice
Asking AI first is becoming a habit that effectively captures the top of the funnel — curiosity, browsing and shortlisting. However, at the moment of transaction most consumers choose to complete payments on the retailer’s website. Trust is a major factor: people prefer the returns policies, customer service, loyalty programs and post-purchase assurances that established retailers have built over decades.
Illustrating this dynamic, OpenAI quietly wound down its in-chat checkout functionality and shifted emphasis back to discovery, signaling that immediate checkout inside a general-purpose model has limitations until it can offer comparable trust and service guarantees.
Implications for retailers
Retailers are optimizing to appear in AI assistants’ recommendations because those mentions bring higher-intent, higher-spend visitors. At the same time they aim to drive the final purchase back to their own channels so they retain the customer relationship and the associated data.
Bottom line
AI is winning attention and boosting the value of discovery, but crossing the counter — the actual payment and the long-term customer bond — still relies on the capabilities and trust that retailers have spent years building. For now, AI brings the foot traffic; retailers keep the wallet.
