The checkout page is dead.

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Google just killed the checkout.

Well actually. Everyone doing agentic commerce is slowly killing it. Commerce is moving upstream to the chatbot. Merchants and their processors will revolt. It upends the payments ecosystem, and while volumes are low today, AI has an annoying habit of being gradually then sudden. Your Rant this week. 📣 The Checkout Page is Dead.

On the Tokenized Podcast, talking about Squads (one of our 💸 4 Fintech companies this week) it struck me. We talk a lot about AI-first fintech, but the reality is the new era is stablecoin-first fintech. And these two trends are converging. I’ll be in New York next week for Stablecon, and you should grab one of the last few remaining tickets if you want to get your head around this properly.

Oh, and Bitcoin hit another all-time high while you weren’t looking.

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Here's this week's Brainfood in summary

📣 Rant: The checkout page is dead.

💸 4 Fintech Companies:

👀 Things to Know:

📚 Good Read: It takes a GENIUS to cause a financial crisis

The checkout page is dead.

And your “pay now” button might not be far behind.

This week, Google announced its  "shop with AI Mode," letting users complete purchases directly within an AI experience. Saying “Google Search’s AI Mode will soon be able to shop for products on behalf of users”. The agent can even "pay autonomously," removing humans entirely from the payment flow.

If the agent buys before the page even loads, everything we did at checkout (fraud prevention, identity, conversion optimization) all has to shift upstream to the ad, chatbot, or “point of intent.” Merchants will hate it, acquirer processors might block it, and conversion will plummet unless we think this through.

Every technology eventually disappears. Cars used to require hand-cranking. Phones had operators. Computers had command lines.

The checkout page is commerce's command line - a necessary interface that exposed the underlying complexity. Like we moved from DOS to GUI to touch to voice, commerce is moving from pages to conversations to... nothing.

The checkout page is dead. But here's what nobody realizes: if the agent buys before the page even loads, every single thing we built our business on has to move upstream."

Fraud detection. Identity verification. Conversion optimization. Upselling. Customer service. All of it. Gone. Upstream. 

Every metric you track, every optimization you run, every dollar you spend on conversion rate optimization - it's all becoming irrelevant faster than you think.

If you compare today’s e-commerce world vs tomorrow, it really stands out.

In e-commerce or mobile, it looks something like this. 

(Yes, I know this is a dramatic over-simplification and missing countless actors, competitors, and others from the ecosystem, chill PR person. It’s conceptual.)

This flow changes dramatically in the Agentic commerce world. 

(There will be other AI companies, and incumbents won’t disappear, but the primary customer interface, the thing they see, changes)