OpenAI is also pushing into e-commerce with an agentic shopping system that makes it easier for people to explore and purchase products within ChatGPT. The maneuver, powered by a new U.S.-only Instant Checkout feature and initial support for Etsy that will expand over time to cover Shopify’s network of merchant creators, rewards PayPal with an increased cut including payment processing fees when shoppers pay online through its platform rather than alternatives like Google or Amazon that have long dominated discovery and purchase journeys.
Now, instead of clicking from search results to product pages to payment screens, buyers can ask for suggestions, compare options, and make a purchase without ever leaving the conversation. Effectively, that shatters the shopping funnel into a single string, and puts the AI in the role of a retail concierge.
How Instant Checkout Works Inside ChatGPT Conversations
ChatGPT pulls in items with photos, prices, and reviews before showing a Buy button that you can tap to confirm shipping and payment details directly in chat. Customers can pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and credit cards, as well as payment methods that are processed through Stripe, while orders are fulfilled by the merchant with their own systems.
The rollout starts with U.S.-based sellers on Etsy and will roll out more broadly to OpenAI’s network of over one million merchants using Shopify, with companies including Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori among the early brands OpenAI names. Surfaced results are unsponsored and ranked to show relevance, OpenAI says, adding that it will take a small fee on completed transactions.
Why This Shift Is Worrisome for Google and Amazon
For years, product discovery began on Amazon or Google. Surveys by Jungle Scout and others have routinely shown the majority of American shoppers start their searches on Amazon, while Google has turned shopping intent into a huge retail media business. If discovery and checkout move into conversational agents, control over what gets surfaced and bought moves with them.
That shift is important to sellers who have long chafed at bottom-line nibbling by marketplace fees and rising ad costs to remain visible. eMarketer calls out retail media as one of the fastest-growing ad categories, a sign of how costly discovery has become. If agentic systems can provide highly relevant, natural recommendations supported by simple transactions for purchase, then they can shift significant levels of demand from search results pages and marketplace listings.
Open Protocols and the New Rails for AI Commerce
OpenAI says it intends to open-source its Agentic Commerce Protocol, the underlying technical structure for Instant Checkout developed in collaboration with the Stripe team. The intention is to provide merchants and developers with a standardized way to plug into agent-driven shopping, allowing for everything from catalog sharing and order confirmation to payment handoff.
Stripe casts this as part of a larger re-architecture of commerce for AI, lining up with its push into one-click wallets and tokenized payments. Meanwhile, Google has established its own Agent Payments Protocol — a harbinger that a standard fight is underway for how AI agents will transact with and fulfill purchases on the open web.
The winner will be defined less by white papers and more by adoption: which protocol is easiest for merchants to adopt, interoperates cleanly with existing carts and ERPs, and delivers measurable conversion lifts without ceding too much control over data or margins.
Why Privacy and Trust Still Make or Break Agentic Checkout
OpenAI notes that the merchants process orders, payments, and fulfillment via their own systems while ChatGPT serves as an intermediate messenger delivering information in a secure manner. That model relies on tokenization and PCI-compliant processors to avoid storing or having unnecessary access to payment data, as OpenAI supports one-tap checkout experiences.
Friction matters. According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment hovers around 70% for e-commerce as a whole, mostly due to clunky checkout flows. In general, wallet-based payments such as Apple Pay and Google Pay link to materially higher conversion in research from both Stripe and Shopify. If agentic checkout continues to cut corners, then you will see fewer abandoned carts and more orders completed.
A Crowded Field of AI Shopping Assistants
OpenAI is not alone. Perplexity has also paved the way for shopping and payments inside chats, while Microsoft’s Copilot Merchant Program helps merchants create storefront-like experiences in its assistant. Amazon is integrating its own shopping assistant features and Google is still surfacing generative responses within commerce-related questions across Search and Shopping.
The differentiators will be the quality of recommendations, the number of merchants integrated, and clear policies about ranking and fees. Sellers will be watching to see whether agentic channels bring incremental demand instead of just sticking a tax on sales with new platform fees.
What to Watch Next as Agentic Shopping Rolls Out
There are three signals to watch regarding its effect:
- The percentage of GMV sent down agentic channels
- Merchant adoption of Agentic Commerce Protocol relative to other mechanisms
- Transparency about ranking and fees
Regulators like the F.T.C. and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority already are scrutinizing gatekeepers in digital markets; agent-led shopping will garner similar scrutiny if it agglomerates power over discovery.
E-commerce in the U.S. remains a trillion-dollar market, according to eMarketer, and even small changes to where discovery happens might reallocate billions of dollars in ad spending and transaction fees. If OpenAI shows that conversational agents can close at higher rates than simply shipping the customer off to search and marketplace listings, then Google and Amazon — for the first time in years — have a real fight on their hands when it comes to retail discovery.
