The big breakup — enter the new power partnership
The Shopify-OpenAI partnership, touted since the fall of 2025, appears to be over — and instead we see a new power couple emerging: Amazon and OpenAI.
Instead of three power players jockeying for position in agentic commerce, the partnership between OpenAI and Amazon might be the way that the most popular answer engine (ChatGPT) and the most popular marketplace/product search engine (Amazon) will potentially dominate the most popular search engine (Google).
Three rapid succession milestones remade this market
How did we get here? Within just a couple of weeks:
Feb. 27, 2026 — OpenAI and Amazon announced a strategic partnership, including Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI.
March 4, 2026 — OpenAI quietly removed Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, both for Shopify merchants and for other retailers (at least for now).
March 11, 2026 – Amazon announced support for feeds so merchants can intentionally send their products to its Shop Direct experience.
Our take on the why: The dominant “product search engine” was losing ground to the dominant “search engine”
In Forrester’s February 2026 Consumer Pulse Survey, 71% of US online adults said they used Google to search for products they were interested in buying during the past month versus just 54% who said they used Amazon (including Rufus) for the same. That’s a change: A few years ago, Amazon surpassed Google as the first place that US consumers are most likely to go if they were searching for a product.
Amazon’s moves: offering products it doesn’t carry — and AI agents doing the shopping
Amazon has added three major features to regain ground:
Last year, Amazon launched the beta version of Shop Direct, which enables customers to buy products that Amazon doesn’t sell. When available, the Shop Direct button links customers to a merchant’s website.
Some products also feature a “buy for me” option, which enables Amazon to complete the purchase on the customer’s behalf.
Amazon’s genAI chatbot Rufus evolved from summarizing product descriptions to executing comparative shopping journeys and even autopurchasing items when they hit a specified price. In late 2025, Amazon credited Rufus with an estimated $10 billion lift in annualized sales.
ChatGPT is winning an increasing share of product research, however. In Forrester’s February 2026 Consumer Pulse Survey, online adults in both the US and the UK said that ChatGPT was the third most-used tool they’ve used in the past month to search for products (behind Google and Amazon). At the same time, ChatGPT’s app market share is slipping, possibly exacerbated by consumer backlash over OpenAI’s deal with the US Department of War. Meanwhile, Claude’s app market share is starting to gain ground.
So OpenAI and Amazon tied the knot.
What could this mean for agentic commerce?
Of course, we don’t know exactly how this will play out, but we can imagine some scenarios. It’s possible this is a desperate move for OpenAI, an industry leader that is astronomically far from profitability, as investors signal that they’re growing short on patience (despite massive investments).
I can imagine a variety of outcomes that bring massive market power to the OpenAI/Amazon partnership. Some possibilities could be:
OpenAI’s Instant Checkout morphs into the Amazon Buy Button. Instant checkout isn’t dead forever; it’s just going through a makeover. OpenAI learns about consumer shopping adoption from the expert while outsourcing checkout to Amazon and brand apps in ChatGPT.
Amazon earns back its title as the number one product search engine. Amazon leverages OpenAI to empower Rufus to become a massive product discovery engine, which can personalize the experience using customer profiles from both partners. Amazon truly becomes the “everything store” and the ultimate product search engine — and regains its position in first place.
OpenAI leverages Amazon’s commerce fundamentals. Inventory availability was absent from the Instant Checkout experience. Not only does Amazon deeply understand inventory and fulfillment, it has well-established standards for data feeds that include these crucial fields.
AI agents purchasing on behalf of consumers goes mainstream. The new product feeds for Shop Direct become a direct line to Amazon’s chat shopping experience (perhaps revamped by ChatGPT). Paired with its “buy for me” functionality, we see retail agentic commerce at market scale for the first time.
Amazon and OpenAI share a deep dataset on consumer behaviors. Most brands and merchants will feel they have no choice but to send a feed, even if they’d previously opted not to offer their products on Amazon. Brands retain control of the experience because the content and checkout are still in their owned environments. Amazon and OpenAI learn about what consumers shop for and buy, both on and off the marketplace.
Stay tuned for our forthcoming report on the state of agentic commerce, which Chuck Gahun and I will publish in April. In the meantime, view my blog posts and schedule a guidance session or inquiry.
