Walmart's ChatGPT Checkout Converts at One-Third the Rate of Direct Sales

Walmart made around 200,000 products available for purchase inside ChatGPT through a feature called Instant Checkout, but the experiment fell well short of expectations: in-chat purchases converted at roughly one-third the rate of transactions where customers were redirected to Walmart's own website, according to a Wired report.

Daniel Danker, Walmart's executive vice president overseeing product and design, put the gap plainly. Conversion rates for in-chat purchases were "three times lower" than purchases completed after a redirect to Walmart.com, he said. The underperformance left Walmart reportedly unhappy with the partnership it built with OpenAI to enable shopping directly inside ChatGPT.

The friction was not only about where the sale happened but how. Instant Checkout required customers to complete purchases item by item rather than building a cart and checking out in a single transaction. That structure triggered a specific anxiety. "They fear that when checkout happens automatically after every single item that they're going to receive five boxes when they actually just want it all in one," Danker said.

Not every product category suffered equally. Vitamin and protein supplements ranked among the top sellers through the chatbot. Automotive, beauty, home management, hardware, and tools together accounted for more than half of the orders processed through Instant Checkout.

Walmart and OpenAI are now moving away from the Instant Checkout model entirely. The plan is to replace it with Sparky, Walmart's own chatbot operating within ChatGPT, which will allow shoppers to add multiple items to a cart and complete a single, standard checkout rather than triggering a separate transaction for each product. The shift represents a meaningful course correction on one of retail's more prominent AI commerce experiments and signals that embedding a buy button inside a chatbot is considerably harder than it looks when conversion is measured against a website customers already trust.