After announcing a partnership with Shopify in April and spending the last few months piloting a new feature with merchants that integrates a checkout within ChatGPT, on Monday, OpenAI has officially announced the launch of its Instant Checkout.
It’s going live first with Etsy in the US, where ChatGPT users with both paid and free subscriptions will be able to buy from US-based sellers without leaving their chat. In a blog post announcing the launch, OpenAI said it has “over a million” Shopify merchants coming soon, including Glossier, Skims, Spanx and Vuori. While shoppers will initially only be able to make single-item purchases within Instant Checkout, the tech company said it will expand to multi-item carts as well as more merchants and regions soon, without specifying a timeline.
For every sale received and fulfilled through ChatGPT’s interface, brands will pay a “small fee” to OpenAI, the company said. OpenAI declined to comment on the exact size of the fee due to confidentiality agreements with Etsy and Shopify.
Instant Checkout is free to users and does not affect product prices, OpenAI said. It’s powered by what the tech company has dubbed its “agentic commerce protocol”, the technology it’s built in partnership with fintech company Stripe — which already powers ChatGPT subscription payments — which facilitates the new integrated checkout feature. OpenAI’s upcoming merchant partnerships are powered by Shopify, which also supports TikTok Shop. The company said it is open-sourcing the technology that underpins Instant Checkout, “so that more merchants and developers can begin building their integrations”.
It’s a rapid development from OpenAI, which first announced its ChatGPT shopping features five months ago. And it’s one step further towards the tech company’s agentic checkout ambitions — where the autonomous AI agents it’s building will complete product purchases on behalf of the customer.
“This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, but also helps you to buy it,” OpenAI said in the blog post.
Brands have been getting up to speed with faster-than-expected changes in the way that consumers shop online, with several investing in generative AI to introduce natural language search capabilities on their own sites. At the same time, the race to become consumers’ go-to product discovery platform has become a Big Tech preoccupation in 2025. Google is playing serious AI commerce catch-up to OpenAI: in May, it launched its AI Mode for generative AI-led search, and announced three new AI shopping features (virtual try-on, Gemini-powered personalised shopping recommendations, and agentic price-match comparisons), which are all being rolled out in the US first. We can also expect an entry into AI search from Big Tech rival Apple soon, via its Safari browser, according to reports.
At the other end of the funnel, venture capital investors have poured millions into a new wave of AI startups promising enhanced personalisation and product discovery, through the latest virtual try-on technology and AI-powered stylists. By open-sourcing the tech behind Instant Checkout, one thing’s clear: OpenAI is confident that it has built a feature that will become non-negotiable for brands online.
Websites that AI and humans trust
Instant Checkout removes the friction for ChatGPT users: where they previously searched and discovered products on ChatGPT, before clicking through to make the purchase on a brand’s own site, this new feature omits that final step, shortening the purchase journey.
There’s mounting evidence to suggest that this is now what shoppers want, as convenience forms the number one driver of AI adoption. A recent study from Cognizant and Oxford Economics found that frustration with the buying process pushed 75 per cent of consumers towards AI for shopping, with 22 per cent citing time savings as their top reason for using the platforms to shop, compared with just 12 per cent who viewed it as a way to find the best deal.
“People are going to expect the experience of asking a question of an AI engine and getting an answer — and they won’t want to pay for that. They’ll just want to use an AI engine that they trust is giving them honest and correct answers,” says Max Sinclair, CEO of Azoma AI, which helps brands shape their AI search strategies.
All of this has moved the marketing conversation away from search engine optimisation (SEO) to AI optimisation (AIO). Experts say brands must now anticipate and meet the changing demands of AI-enabled customers, while at the same time designing their own websites and online content to gain as much brand trust among human customers as it does among the LLM “crawlers” that power the product recommendations on ChatGPT.
“AI search will be the new front door for shopping, but luxury websites aren’t going away,” says Mac King, co-founder of Domaine, a Shopify agency that works with the likes of Oscar de la Renta and Fenty Beauty. “That’s where trust and loyalty get built. Brands should think of AI as the entry point and then use their own websites to deepen the experience. Using AI tools on brand websites to increase personalisation is how you continue the conversation and lift conversion rates.”
Although King points out that luxury brands have been slower to optimise for AI search than more traditional direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, he says, “now is the right time to move” as ChatGPT shopping traffic is expected to increase exponentially over the next 12 to 18 months.
In the last couple of months, however, brands including Ralph Lauren and Moncler have begun unveiling their own investments in rich, AI-powered storytelling features like styling tools and video generation, to up the appeal of their digital storefronts.
The new e-commerce tax
While Instant Checkout unlocks a huge revenue stream for OpenAI — which is currently restructuring to a “for profit” company — it raises big questions for brands’ current business models and advertising budgets.
OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar previously told the Financial Times that the company was exploring advertising options, and the announcement today makes it difficult for brands to gauge to what extent the decision to partner with ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout will affect sales.
While OpenAI mentioned in the blog post that Instant Checkout items “are not preferred in product results”, the startup also said that when it’s ranking multiple merchants selling the same product, ChatGPT considers product availability, price, quality and whether a merchant is the primary seller, as well as “whether Instant Checkout is enabled, to optimise the user experience”.
Experts say that for the first nine months or so, brands already operating with Shopify will have a significant advantage.
“Given that it’s not a closed system, I’d imagine that OpenAI will quickly sign other partnerships after the Shopify integration and we’ll have a bigger pool of brands,” says Sinclair.
Meanwhile, for brands that can partner with Instant Checkout, OpenAI’s commission is a new cost for marketing teams to budget for. Although the size of the fee is unclear, experts say that neglecting website AIO will be a much bigger drag on brands’ bottom lines than the commission OpenAI will charge.
“Short term, it could produce a small drop in bottom line if left unmanaged; but long term, if brands manage AI like a new marketplace or channel, and proactively engage in AIO, they should see a neutral to positive bottom-line impact over six to 12 months,” says King.
Brands are well versed in the importance of online channel diversification, as marketing teams contend with unpredictable social media algorithms, platform outages and fluctuating Shopify rankings. Now, experts say AI search is the new non-negotiable channel.
“It’s just going to be the new normal,” says Sinclair. “The affiliate fee is just the cost of doing business on the internet, and they’re going to take that tax on everyone. But ultimately, this is just a new — very important — channel.”
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