ChatGPT is going from suggestions to actions. A new Instant Checkout feature now enables people to buy products without leaving the app, beginning with single-item purchases from Etsy and rolling out shortly to over a million Shopify sellers. The feature lives on top of OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol and was developed with payments infrastructure from Stripe as well as participating merchants.
How Instant Checkout Works Inside ChatGPT
Find an item in ChatGPT, open the product details, and click Buy. You’ll confirm price and shipping options in the chat, and then pay with a saved card, a new one, or an express option. Payment processing and fulfillment are kept with the merchant’s e-commerce platform, while ChatGPT is “a bit like a digital personal shopper,” OpenAI wrote, which securely passes order information back and forth between you and the seller.
At launch, the feature works for Individual Sellers and for Etsy orders with a single item, and is available to Free, Plus, and Pro users. Coming soon: multi-item carts and a significant expansion on Shopify that includes brand-name storefronts, like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori. The goal is to make the process of discovering and buying products one seamless flow.
Why It Matters for Shoppers and Sellers Today
Fewer steps usually result in fewer drop-offs. It turns out that about 70% of shoppers abandon online carts before purchasing, according to the Baymard Institute, and a significant number point to lengthy or cumbersome checkout as one reason they’re bailing. In-chat buying, by removing page loads and account logins, can chip away at that friction and turn more intent into orders.
For consumers, Instant Checkout is free. It represents a new revenue line for OpenAI: a modest fee on successful purchases paid by participating merchants. That margin incentive helps to explain why conversational commerce is now a battlefield on tech platforms, where not just social networks are testing native checkout but search engines are threading shoppable answers into their results.
OpenAI says ChatGPT will not promote listings just because they offer Instant Checkout. For the same product from multiple sellers, the assistant will take availability, price, and quality into account, and consider whether a merchant is a primary seller and whether the merchant is using consistent Instant Checkout, to determine the best experience for the user. That framing attempts to strike a balance between user utility and marketplace fairness.
Security, payments, and the Stripe factor
Under the hood, Stripe and the third-party e-commerce platforms take care of the gnarly parts: card authorization and settlement. That keeps payments within well-established, PCI DSS–compliant systems. ChatGPT is another player in the room facilitating the relay of order details and user intent, not a new checkout stack for the merchant to use.
Because fulfillment, refunds, and customer support all still go through the individual sellers on Etsy and Shopify, buyers keep all the same protections and policies they would have if they were going through those platforms directly.
In theory, that could mean you can ask the chatbot to locate a gift and instantly place an order, but still handle returns via the merchant if necessary.
Agentic AI turns to commerce with ChatGPT
Instant Checkout is an early case of “agentic” AI — systems that not only answer questions but take action as a user’s agent. The Agentic Commerce Protocol is an attempt to standardize how AI agents are talking to storefronts, making it potentially more seamless for marketplaces and direct-to-consumer brands to plug in without having to build custom integrations for every assistant.
The timing coincides with a larger transition in which companies are moving away from helping users search for things to instead accomplishing the entire task for the user. In commerce, that shift is from “show me options” to “buy this now, ship it to my office.” Platforms that narrow this gap will be well positioned to capture more transaction volume, and first-party data — provided they preserve user trust in ranking transparency and data handling.
A quick example of Instant Checkout in ChatGPT
Ask ChatGPT for a handcrafted ceramic mug at or below a specified price point, rely on one of the top Etsy product listings, confirm preferences for size and color and shipping, and make payment without leaving the thread you’re in.
The seller gets the order through Etsy, fulfills it, and issues a tracking number. No more opening new tabs, manually copy-pasting addresses, and re-entering card information.
What to watch next as ChatGPT Checkout expands
Scaling to multi-item carts will be a proving ground for whether in-chat experiences can replicate the nuance of full storefronts — think discount codes, product variants, and bundling. Look for greater express payment options, deeper order status updates, and seller tools to quantify conversion lift from conversational channels.
Regulators are also paying attention. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has telegraphed scrutiny of AI-fueled recommendations and dark patterns, cajoling platforms into clearer explanations for how rankings work and how ads are kept sequestered from organic results. OpenAI’s stated product ranking guardrails and its dependence on existing commerce rails will be critical to ensuring user trust as agentic shopping scales.
Together, Instant Checkout makes it possible for ChatGPT to move from a helpful research friend to a transactional interface. If the execution delivers on the promise — speed with transparency and merchant parity — this could become AI-native shopping’s first mainstream moment.
