Shopping was once a bricks-and-mortar experience. Then came the web, smartphones and social media. Now it is coming to a chatbot near you. For retailers, that’s both good and bad.

Agentic commerce, or artificial intelligence-powered shopping, is the hot new trend. Over the past month, Etsy, Shopify, Walmart and PayPal have announced plans to make their products and services available within OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As a result, shoppers who today challenge the app with such questions as “What are the best shoes for under $100?” will also be able to buy them directly through ChatGPT instead of being redirected to a retailer’s website.

The financial market, at least, is buying into this. Walmart added about $40bn to its market capitalisation on the day it announced its OpenAI partnership, while Shopify and Etsy tacked on $11bn and $1bn, respectively.