TikTok announced two things on 5 October that belong together. The first is a shopping assistant, a chat agent that answers questions about sizing, shipping and stock and remembers what you told it. The second is one-click checkout from the For You feed, so you can buy from a brand without leaving the video you were watching. TechCrunch’s report says both are being built with Salesforce, Shopify, Shoplazza and Stripe.
Ten days later Google launched Universal Cart in the US, a basket that lives in search and the Gemini app, collects products from any retailer, tells you when the price drops, and checks out through a protocol Google wrote for AI agents to talk to shops.
Neither of these is a feature. Together they are the end of a 20-year arrangement.
The arrangement
Since roughly the launch of Google Shopping, the deal between platforms and retailers has gone like this. The platform owns discovery, the retailer owns the checkout. You pay for the click, the customer lands on your site, and everything from that moment belongs to you: the email address, the basket, the returns, the second purchase.
That second purchase is the whole business. Nobody in ecommerce makes money on a cold acquisition. They make it on the third and fourth order from someone they already know, bought with an email that cost nothing. The customer relationship is the asset and the website is where it was kept.
It is also where the margin was kept. A checkout you own is a checkout you don’t pay a platform a percentage of, and that percentage is what every intermediary in this story is really after.
TikTok and Google are now offering to keep it for you.
What the retailers are doing about it
The Wall Street Journal looked at how merchants are responding, and PYMNTS summarised it. Three different answers from three different sizes of company.
Amazon has blocked Meta’s agent and OpenAI’s from shopping on its platform. It owns discovery, checkout, delivery and the data, and it has no reason to hand any link in that chain to someone else. Target lets agents in from an approved list. Walmart has gone the other way and partnered with OpenAI and Google to bring customers in through them.
BrightEdge, a search optimisation firm quoted in the piece, reckons agent purchases are growing 43% a month and have roughly quadrupled since April. The same firm says only about 3% of the ecommerce businesses it works with let an agent complete a purchase. So the demand is arriving and almost nobody has the door open. That gap is where the next 2 years of ecommerce strategy sits.
The question nobody is asking in the pitch
When an agent buys on someone’s behalf, the retailer gets an order and not much else. The person behind it is represented by software that may tell you nothing about who they are. You can’t retarget them, you can’t email them, you may not even know whether they are new or returning. A Federal Reserve governor, Christopher Waller, put it in payments terms: the question shifts from whether the buyer is authorised to pay to whether the agent is authorised to pay for them. Chargebacks and returns follow from that.
Agencies are going to be asked to “optimise for agents”, and some already are. Before anyone does, it is worth re-reading the brief nobody talked to a customer about, because an agent is the one customer you definitely never met. The honest version of that advice is uncomfortable. Yes, structure your product data so a machine can read it. Yes, let the approved agents in, because Walmart is right that the customers will arrive through them whether you like it or not. But go in knowing what you are trading. Every order that completes inside TikTok or Universal Cart is a customer you never meet.
For a brand with a strong direct relationship and a decent email list, that is a real cost, and it belongs in the forecast next to the extra revenue. For a brand that lives on paid acquisition anyway, it might be no worse than what Meta already takes.
Either way, decide it on purpose. The platforms have.