OpenAI’s Instant Checkout Aims for 1M Merchants

OpenAI is taking ChatGPT from product discovery to purchase with Instant Checkout, a native commerce flow that allows people to make purchases directly in the chat without even leaving. The feature launches with a single merchant and processes payments with Stripe, but more than 1 million Shopify merchants will be supported next. It is OpenAI’s most ambitious step yet in the direction of agent-oriented shopping that leads to a real transaction.

How Instant Checkout Works Inside ChatGPT Conversations

Request a gift, a replacement charger, or a running jacket from ChatGPT and you’ll see results. When merchants opt in for Instant Checkout, an inline Buy button is displayed. Users verify size, color, shipping, and payment information before finishing the order inside the conversation. Subscribers may use a payment method on file; free users must add a payment method at checkout.

OpenAI says orders, payments, and fulfillment will continue running through their set of tech stacks from each merchant. That is, ChatGPT serves as a secure concierge by dispatching structured order data to the backend of the seller (“procuring”) and transmitting status back to the user.

Who’s Live Now and Which Merchants Are Coming Next

The first one is readily accessible in chat with Etsy, using technology collaboratively developed with Stripe for payment processing and fraud checking. OpenAI also says support for Shopify’s large merchant base is in the pipeline, referencing brands like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori as early examples. Keeping the underlying technology open source could attract developers — presumably agnostic as to which warehouse robotics are in use, as long as they can plug their catalogs and fulfillment logic directly into agentic workflows — already hard at work on software related to these technologies.

That approach matters. Shopify has more than a million stores globally hosted on its platform, providing Instant Checkout with an instant supply side if the experience is painless, the documentation is clear, and authorization standards are predictable across merchants.

Why This Could Change AI Commerce and Checkout Behavior

So far, AI shopping assistants have excelled at curation and faltered at conversion. Handing users a list of links forces a context switch and adds back checkout friction—the main reason customers abandon their carts. Average cart abandonment — which industry researcher Baymard Institute has tracked for years — hovers around 70 percent, driven by clunky forms, surprise fees, and account-creation walls. One-screen confirmation inside chat goes directly at those frictions.

Distribution, too, is undergoing a tectonic shift. If shopping starts with a chatbot, not a search bar or marketplace homepage, the gatekeepers shift. OpenAI now competes with Google’s research on agentic shopping tools and Amazon’s interests in keeping as much discovery and checkout inside its walled garden. Perplexity has integrated in-chat buying, and sellers are being courted by Microsoft through its Copilot Merchant Program. Whoever holds that first helpful recommendation and the frictionless buy flow owns the most valuable moment in retail.

Trust, Payments, and Policy Hurdles for In-Chat Buying

Payments are one of the few corners easily cut that shouldn’t be. Stripe’s position implies normal PCI DSS behaviors and common fraud tooling, good for the confidence of buyers and sellers alike. Nevertheless, merchants are still on the hook for taxes, shipping, returns, and customer service. Clear audit trails — what the model recommended, what the user confirmed, and where that data went — will be key to resolving disputes and preventing accidental purchases.

Data governance is another pain point. Merchants will be looking for assurances that product feeds, pricing, and promotions are accurately reflected, while consumers will have greater expectations to receive clear consent prompts when a digital assistant shifts from browsing to buying. Don’t be surprised if OpenAI relies heavily on explicit confirmation steps, brand provenance signals, and opt-in controls around saved payment methods.

Implications for Merchants as Agentic Checkout Scales

For individual sellers, agentic checkout has the potential to reduce customer acquisition costs through funnel collapse (recommendation, consideration, and conversion in minutes inside one interface). And as ChatGPT evolves into a high-intent channel, brands might spend less on potentially inaccurate marketplace ads and search keywords and more top-of-funnel, on things like product data quality (so their models can understand what they’re selling), structured catalogs, and real-time inventory feeds.

The challenge, in turn, is ranking risk. Just as search required SEO, agentic commerce will benefit merchants that expose clean specs, transparent shipping timelines, competitive pricing, and generous return policies. The businesses that will win referrals will be the ones that buyers can trust to deliver without a hitch.

The Road Ahead for OpenAI’s Integrated Instant Checkout

Instant Checkout is a minor interface tweak with an outsized potential impact on its business: It transforms ChatGPT from a research tool into a transaction engine. The short-term challenge is execution — how fast it convinces merchants to sign up, how quickly it can process a refund, and whether the recommendations are accurate enough given they’re paired with real inventory. If OpenAI and its cohort establish reliability at scale and stack on the promised wave of Shopify merchants, agentic retail will escalate from demo to default for an increasing share of everyday purchases.