E-commerce sites see low sales from ChatGPT traffic, study finds

Modern Retail spotlights research by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze that analyzes 12 months of first-party data from 973 e-commerce sites and more than 50,000 ChatGPT-referred transactions. The working paper shows ChatGPT referrals currently lag traditional channels: affiliate links convert 86% more often and organic search drives roughly 13% higher conversion, while ChatGPT traffic remains under 0.2% of total visits. Yet the study observes steady month-over-month gains in conversion and revenue per session, suggesting LLM-driven commerce is slowly building trust with shoppers. The article also examines how OpenAI’s Instant Checkout and broader agent adoption could accelerate performance if users grow comfortable completing purchases inside ChatGPT.