As AI agents shift e-commerce from high-margin cost-per-click models to lower-margin commissions, search platforms will likely retaliate. They will make free, direct, and unpaid traffic more difficult to acquire, forcing a higher volume of transactions into their paid ecosystem to compensate for the lower per-transaction revenue.
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While a 4% fee seems reasonable for new customer acquisition, it becomes a burden if users who discovered a product organically then use ChatGPT for checkout convenience. This dynamic forces merchants to pay OpenAI for customers they didn't acquire through the platform.
AI is creating a fork in marketing strategy. It disrupts traditional demand acquisition channels like search, making it harder and more expensive to get measurable traffic. Simultaneously, it provides powerful new tools to monetize existing demand more effectively. This forces a strategic shift from a volume-based to a value-extraction model.
OpenAI's 4% fee for in-app purchases creates a risk for merchants. If consumers start using ChatGPT as their primary purchasing interface, it could intercept sales that originated from a brand's own marketing. A customer might see a product elsewhere, then buy it via ChatGPT, imposing a new tax on an otherwise organic conversion.
Your reliance on Google AdWords is a critical vulnerability. As user attention shifts from traditional search to AI-powered chat, search volume will drop, competition for remaining traffic will intensify, and your customer acquisition costs will skyrocket. This isn't a future problem; it is happening now.
Google's search business is incredibly profitable, generating ~$400 per user annually in the US through ads. AI models, which provide direct answers instead of links, break this value capture mechanism. Current alternatives, like subscriptions, cannot yet replicate the scale and profitability of search, posing a direct threat to Google's core business model.
Google's AI search panels intercept user queries, causing massive click-through rate drops (up to 89%) for even the highest-ranking organic results. This breaks the long-standing model where top rankings directly translated to traffic and revenue, making traditional SEO metrics obsolete.
Unlike service platforms like Uber that rely on real-world networks, Amazon's high-margin ad business is existentially threatened by AI agents that bypass sponsored listings. This vulnerability explains its uniquely aggressive legal stance against Perplexity, as it stands to lose a massive, growing revenue stream if users stop interacting directly with its site.
The primary financial risk of agentic commerce to e-commerce companies is not the transaction fee but the potential loss of high-margin retail media advertising revenue. Since many retailers derive most or all of their profit from on-site ads, agents threaten their core business model.
These two seemingly contradictory trends can coexist. While overall search queries on Google are increasing, the platform is answering more queries directly with AI overviews and featured snippets. This means a higher percentage of searches are "zero-click," resulting in less referral traffic for websites.
AI will dominate product discovery, forcing brands to either pay for sponsored ads in LLMs or earn organic placement through genuine product quality and authentic reviews, as AI aggregates too much data to be easily gamed.
