Walmart, Ulta and Wayfair chase AI traffic, guard checkout data

A quieter shift in retail e-commerce is playing out in the wiring of product pages rather than in the storefronts themselves. According to Reuters, Walmart, Ulta Beauty and Wayfair are reworking their sites so their products rank highly in answers from ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, while pushing back on any arrangement that would move the actual checkout, and the customer data attached to it, onto an AI platform.

The pull to show up in those answers is real. Juniper Research told Reuters shoppers are expected to spend $8 billion this year after AI agents such as Anthropic's Claude and Gemini direct them to retail sites. Adobe Analytics said 41% of U.S. consumers used generative AI for online shopping in June, and visitors referred by AI services generated 41% higher revenue per visit than shoppers arriving through traditional channels. Ulta's head of digital and e-commerce, Josh Friedman, told Reuters the retailer is seeing 'double the conversion and intent' from shoppers who find its products through Gemini and ChatGPT, and framed the calculus bluntly: 'there's always a tax for engaging customers on other people's platforms.'

What retailers are trying to preserve is first-party data: browsing habits, basket sizes, past purchases, the fuel for loyalty programs and repeat sales. Vince Koh, global head of digital commerce at Amazon Web Services, told Reuters that when a shopper completes a purchase on a brand's own site, the retailer maintains a direct relationship with that customer. Ulta is trying to have it both ways, working with Google to plug its shopping cart and Ulta Beauty Rewards program into Gemini's AI shopping experience without simply handing checkout to the platform. That posture reads a lot more reasonable now that OpenAI has ended its Instant Checkout feature (in March, per Reuters) and Etsy's Chief Product and Technology Officer Rafe Colburn is telling reporters users typically return to Etsy's site to finish purchases initiated through ChatGPT.

The honest caveat is that the reporting is short on mechanics. It does not describe exactly what Walmart, Ulta or Wayfair are changing on-page to rank in LLM answers, whether the $8 billion Juniper figure is a hard measurement or a projection, or how AI referral revenue is being attributed when a shopper hops between a chatbot and a browser tab. Take the specifics as reported, not settled.

The forward-looking bit is who benefits if this détente holds: large retailers with the engineering budget to optimize for chatbot ranking, cloud vendors like AWS that sell the tooling to do it, and any platform willing to position itself as a discovery layer rather than a competing storefront.