Articles · October 2026
Your door, or theirs?
You have seen this movie before, even if you never bought a ticket. A new way for customers to reach businesses appears. The businesses hang back. A platform steps into the gap — and stays there, collecting rent on every customer who walks through it.
The rent is real, and it is published
Don’t take our word for it; take DoorDash’s. Its own merchant pricing page lists commissions of 15%, 25%, or 30% of every delivery order, depending on the plan (DoorDash merchant pricing). Hotels learned the same lesson a decade earlier, watching booking sites take over their reservations — and a cut of every stay — while owning the customer relationship outright. The pattern is not malice. It is simply what happens when a doorway exists and the business doesn’t own it.
Now the twist: even the biggest platform blinked
In September 2025, OpenAI turned on checkout inside ChatGPT. Six months later, in March 2026, it stepped back — announcing that merchants would use their own checkout while ChatGPT focused on helping customers discover and compare (OpenAI, “Powering product discovery in ChatGPT”). Read that again: the most powerful platform in the business concluded that the transaction belongs at the business’s own door. Discovery is what platforms will fight over. The sale itself wants to live with you.
So: two futures, both available
In one, your customers’ assistants reach you only through someone else’s storefront — their description of you, their ranking of you, their fee. In the other, the assistant comes to your door: your facts stated your way, your prices, your booking rules, your customer confirming at your counter, and the relationship — and its data — staying yours. The second future is not the expensive one. It is mostly a decision, taken once, while the doorway is still unclaimed.
Lean in, and the assistant era works for your business. Lean back, and it will still work — for whoever owns your door instead.