Coming soon to ChatGPT: Frictionless one-stop shopping. This week, TWIRM is asking if OpenAI has just made the future of commerce a whole lot chattier—and what it means for retailers and brands everywhere.
TWIRM, as everyone in-the-know knows, is the This Week in Retail Media podcast, a free-wheeling discussion of three of the week’s most buzzy retail media stories. It’s hosted by Kate Dickson, Head of Marketing and Communications, Retail Media, STRATACACHE, and Jonathan Rosen, STRATACACHE’s Global EVP of Retail Media Strategy, who is checking in from New York’s action-packed Advertising Week.
The buzziest story this week is OpenAI’s launch of Instant Checkout, which will let U.S. shoppers make purchases directly from inside ChatGPT, starting with products from Etsy and soon expanding to over a million Shopify merchants. Rather than sending shoppers to external webpages, ChatGPT will display product options, set up shipping and process payments—all within the chat.
For Jonathan, the impact could be massive. “It’s essentially displacing whatever algorithm makes recommendations based on relevance, price, quality and availability,” he notes. “Once you do that, OpenAI is the last mile—you’re one level removed from the merchant’s website.” Kate hones in on the untapped data it will unlock for marketers. “That level of detail in search terms is something that I don’t think retailers or brands have ever seen before,” she says, musing on how it could radically reshape advertising strategies.
From checking out ChatGPT’s big move, Kate and Jonathan check in on two credit card giants, MasterCard and AmEx, who are launching retail media platforms tailored to their tens of millions of cardholders. Last, they size up Ahold Delhaize USA’s new Edge retail media platform, set to launch in 2026.
Hear Kate and Jonathan unpack OpenAI’s major commerce shakeup and what it means for the future of retail media.
