ChatGPT Now Shops for You: The Future of Online Buying
▼ Summary
– ChatGPT now offers Instant Checkout, allowing users to purchase products directly within chat conversations without leaving the interface.
– The feature is available to all US users, including those on Free, Plus, and Pro plans, and currently supports single-item purchases.
– Instant Checkout acts as an intermediary, passing buyer information to merchants and charging merchants a small fee while remaining free for users.
– Product results remain organic and unsponsored, with availability, price, and quality determining listings, not Instant Checkout eligibility.
– OpenAI open-sourced the Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed with Stripe, to enable merchants to integrate agent payments and maintain customer relationships.
The way we shop online is undergoing a significant transformation with the introduction of Instant Checkout within ChatGPT. This new feature allows users to complete purchases directly through their conversations with the AI, eliminating the need to navigate away to external websites. Available to all users in the United States, including those on free and paid tiers, this development positions ChatGPT as a powerful personal shopping assistant.
When you ask ChatGPT for help finding a product, it will display a list of relevant items from various online stores. If one of those products is enabled for Instant Checkout, a simple “Buy” button will appear. Tapping that button lets you confirm your order details, such as shipping address and payment method, to finalize the purchase instantly. For subscribers of ChatGPT Plus and Pro, there’s the added benefit of being able to save their payment information for even faster future transactions.
OpenAI describes the system as acting like a personal AI agent that facilitates the transaction between the buyer and the seller. While merchants pay a small fee on each completed sale, using Instant Checkout is completely free for shoppers. Importantly, OpenAI has stated that its product recommendations will remain organic. Whether a product supports Instant Checkout will have no bearing on its ranking in the search results, which will continue to be determined by factors like availability, price, and quality.
At the heart of this new shopping experience is the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open-source framework developed by OpenAI in collaboration with Stripe. This protocol is designed to make it easier for merchants to integrate with AI agents. It allows them to maintain control over their customer relationships and efficiently process payments through their existing systems. When a customer places an order through ChatGPT, the necessary details are sent to the merchant via this protocol. The merchant can then accept or decline the order and process the payment through their preferred provider.
For businesses already using Stripe, enabling this feature requires just a single line of code. Merchants not on the Stripe platform can still participate by utilizing Stripe’s new Shared Payment Token API or the Delegated Payments Spec included in the Agentic Commerce Protocol.
This move by OpenAI is part of a broader industry trend toward “agentic transactions,” where AI assistants act on behalf of users to complete tasks like shopping. Other major players are launching similar initiatives. Google recently introduced its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and Visa has unveiled its Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, both with the goal of creating secure and seamless checkout experiences powered by AI. For now, the feature is limited to single-item purchases in the US, but support for shopping carts and additional regions is expected to follow.
(Source: ZDNET)
