When shopping stops being a place

For years, online shopping followed a fixed path. Search bar, product grid, filters, checkout. The interface barely changed, even as everything else on the internet did. That path is now breaking.

Monday 12 January, 2026, JD Sports Fashion plc (JD Group) became one of the first large retailers to let US customers search and buy sneakers directly inside AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini. No website visit. No app. Just a conversation that ends with a payment.

Basically, a customer can chat with an AI bot, say “add these shoes to my cart,” and complete a purchase in one click.

How it works?

JD Sports has agreed a global deal with commercetools to enable “one-click” purchases on AI assistants including Copilot, Gemini and ChatGPT. US customers will simply tell the chatbot what they want and pay instantly via Stripe’s integrated payment flow. 

The retailer is the first to deploy commercetools’ “Agentic Jumpstart” solution along with Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite (ACS). Stripe handles the payment and fraud protection, while commercetools’ AI Hub keeps JD’s product data, pricing and availability in sync across all AI channels.

For example, “Find me a pair of Nike Air Max size 10.” The AI queries JD’s catalog (via commercetools) and returns relevant products, with images and details. The shopper can then say “buy this pair,” and Stripe handles the checkout seamlessly. Commercetools and Stripe emphasize that all payment and fulfillment data still flow through JD’s systems – the retailer retains control over inventory, pricing, and customer experience. 

From browsing to asking

AI-driven shopping shifts the act of buying from browsing to intent-based conversation.

Instead of scrolling through hundreds of sneakers, a customer can ask for “black running shoes under $150, good for daily training,” refine the request, compare options, and pay, all within the same chat. The AI handles discovery, filtering, and decision support in one flow.

For consumers, that means less friction and less time spent navigating interfaces designed around catalogs, not questions. For retailers, it means the loss of something they’ve relied on for two decades: control over the shopping journey.

JD Sports CEO Regis Schultz compared the impact of AI on retail to the internet boom of the late 1990s and suggested it could shrink physical store footprints by reducing the need for cash desks. The comment points to a wider rethink. If discovery and checkout move into AI layers, both digital and physical stores become less central.

The challenge to classic e-commerce

Traditional e-commerce platforms are built around pages, categories, and conversion funnels. AI shopping ignores most of that. When purchases happen inside chatbots, platforms lose visibility into how customers arrive at decisions. Brand differentiation becomes harder when products are presented as answers rather than destinations. Loyalty shifts from websites to whichever AI assistant the customer trusts.

This creates a new competitive layer. Retailers are no longer just competing on price, delivery, or UX, but on how well their inventory, data, and brand translate into AI-mediated conversations. It also raises questions for marketplaces. If AI assistants can compare products across multiple retailers in real time, the advantage of being the “place people go to shop” weakens.

Payments, trust, and brand control

Letting customers buy without visiting a website introduces new risks. Retailers must ensure that payments remain secure, that inventory and pricing are accurate in real time, and that the brand experience doesn’t dissolve into a generic AI response. Stripe’s role here is critical, acting as the trust layer that makes conversational checkout viable at scale.

There’s also the issue of accountability. When something goes wrong, a failed payment, a wrong size, a delayed delivery, the customer interacts with an AI, not a store. Retailers still own the outcome, even if they no longer own the interface.

A quiet but structural shift

JD Sports is not alone. The move points to a broader pattern: commerce is migrating upward into AI systems that sit between consumers and brands. As mobile apps reshaped shopping in the 2010s, conversational AI is reshaping it again, this time by pushing the store itself out of the center of the experience.

What replaces it is less visible, but more powerful: intent, context, and conversation. Retail isn’t disappearing. It’s dissolving into the tools people already use to think, search, and decide.

There is something undeniably impressive about this evolution. Buying becomes faster, friction thins, decisions compress into a few lines of text. Yet, step by step, human interaction is quietly being removed from the equation. The cashier, the sales assistant, even the act of browsing alongside others, all fade into background infrastructure.

The open question isn’t whether this shift will happen, but how far it should go. When shopping becomes a dialogue with machines, convenience wins, but presence is lost. Retail now faces a new design challenge, not just how to sell through AI, but how to decide where human interaction still matters, and how to keep it from disappearing by default.