OpenAI Challenges Google, Amazon With AI Shopping Agent

A new feature from OpenAI now allows people in the United States to purchase items directly through ChatGPT conversations with Etsy and Shopify sellers, signaling a major shift in how consumers shop and how businesses connect with buyers. This development could potentially reshape the balance of power in e-commerce, moving influence away from established giants like Google and Amazon toward AI-driven conversational platforms.

Available to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and logged-in free users, the “Instant Checkout” feature currently supports purchases from U.S.-based Etsy sellers. OpenAI has announced that over one million Shopify merchants, including well-known brands such as Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori, will be integrated into the system soon. This enhancement builds on earlier ChatGPT shopping capabilities, which let users ask questions like “what’s a good gift for someone who loves ceramics?” and receive product suggestions, images, reviews, and prices along with links to merchant sites. Now, instead of navigating away to complete a purchase, shoppers can simply tap “Buy” to confirm their order, shipping address, and payment method, options include Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, or credit card, all without leaving the chat interface.

Other companies have explored similar in-chat commerce solutions. Last year, Perplexity introduced a shopping and payment feature within its platform, while Microsoft’s Copilot Merchant Program enables businesses to build storefronts directly inside chat environments. These innovations point toward a broader movement away from traditional search engines and e-commerce marketplaces, favoring instead conversational agents that offer personalized recommendations, product comparisons, and streamlined checkout.

This shift also introduces new potential power brokers in online retail. For years, Google and Amazon have dominated product discovery, often leveraging their positions to highlight their own offerings or preferred partners, sometimes at the expense of competitors. In contrast, OpenAI states that the product results displayed in ChatGPT are “organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user.” The company also confirmed it will collect a “small fee” from merchants for each completed transaction.

Alongside the rollout of Instant Checkout, OpenAI plans to open-source its Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), the underlying technology developed with Stripe that powers the feature. This move will allow other developers and retailers to integrate agentic checkout into their own systems. Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of technology and business, commented, “Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI. That means re-architecting today’s commerce systems and creating new AI-powered experiences for billions of people.”

While some users may hesitate to share payment details with an AI chatbot, OpenAI clarifies that order, payment, and fulfillment processes are managed directly by the merchant using their existing systems. ChatGPT functions only as an intermediary, securely transmitting information between the customer and the seller.

By open-sourcing ACP, OpenAI not only encourages wider adoption of AI shopping agents but also strengthens its own position as a potential gatekeeper in retail discovery and payments. This could establish the company as a leading architect of the AI commerce ecosystem, a role that brings it into direct competition with Google, which recently introduced its own open protocol for AI-initiated purchases, the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2).

(Source: TechCrunch)