The next trillion-dollar retail channel may not be a website or an app — it may be a conversation.
According to ecommerce pioneer Scot Wingo, intelligent shopping agents such as ChatGPT are already handling enough product queries to fuel a global digital marketplace worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Wingo is a serial e-commerce entrepreneur and founder of marketplace integration services provider ChannelAdvisor (now Rithum). He’s also CEO of ReFiBuy, which develops advanced AI frameworks to help retailers and brands tackle complex digital commerce challenges.
Using recent data from ChatGPT’s public usage reports, Wingo estimates shopping-related interactions could already represent tens of billions of dollars in potential annual sales, marking the early formation of what he calls agentic AI commerce.
ChatGPT fields 2.5 billion prompts per day, according to academic research published earlier this year. Of those, “purchasable products” make up about 2.1%, or 53 million shopping queries daily.
“That 2.1% doesn’t seem so small anymore,” Wingo said. “When you multiply it by billions of daily interactions, you’re looking at an entirely new retail channel forming almost overnight.”
How agentic AI can scale to billions in commerce
Applying standard ecommerce metrics, Wingo calculated that even at a 5% conversion rate, AI agents could generate around 2.5 million daily orders. At a more aggressive 20% rate, consistent with high-intent conversational queries, daily orders could exceed 10 million.
With an average order value of $80, that translates to between $73 billion and $292 billion in annual gross merchandise volume (GMV). The midpoint — about $182 billion — would rival the yearly online sales of some of the largest U.S. retailers.
If platforms such as ChatGPT captured an 8% transaction fee, Wingo estimates that would represent $15 billion in annual revenue from agentic commerce alone.
Behind the growth, he points to two forces: ChatGPT’s massive global scale and the retail “surface area” provided by platforms such as Walmart. Wingo cited Similarweb data showing that ChatGPT already drives referral traffic equal to about 20% of Walmart’s total visits, underscoring the shift toward conversational discovery. With Amazon blocking most AI shopping integrations, Walmart’s 420 million-SKU catalog now dominates what Wingo calls the “agentic digital shelf.”
“Amazon’s decision to wall itself off created an opening,” he said. “Walmart’s catalog is now the backbone of many AI shopping results, and that visibility converts.”
Amazon and Walmart rank 1 and 2 in the Top 2000 Database, respectively. That database ranks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales. Amazon is also third in the Global Online Marketplaces Database, where Walmart ranks eighth. That database ranks the world’s leading online marketplaces by their annual third-party gross merchandise volume (GMV).
Wingo believes agentic commerce will follow a trajectory like early online marketplaces — steady experimentation followed by rapid scaling once checkout becomes native to chat.
“The last barrier to scale is transaction execution,” he said. “Once that’s seamless, agentic commerce moves from concept to commerce — and the growth curve gets steep fast.”
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