Starting September 29th, ChatGPT now lets you buy items without ever leaving the chat. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, allowing U.S. users to buy products directly through the chatbot without leaving the conversation. Starting with Etsy sellers and soon expanding to over 1 million Shopify merchants (like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx), the feature is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol—an open standard co-developed with Stripe.
Here's how it works: Users ask ChatGPT for product recommendations, tap "Buy," and complete their purchase instantly. OpenAI takes a small fee per transaction, creating a new revenue stream for the company while potentially reshaping e-commerce by making AI the new shopping interface. Hey Amazon, you thinking about buying all of Anthropic right now? Cause it might be a good idea!
Try it yourself: Ask ChatGPT for "running shoes under $100" or "gifts for a ceramics lover," and it shows you relevant products from across the web. If the product supports Instant Checkout, you tap "Buy," confirm your details, and boom, done. No app-switching, no browser tabs, no forgotten passwords.
U.S. users (Plus, Pro, and Free) can buy from Etsy sellers right now, with over a million Shopify merchants joining soon. And if you're already using Stripe for payments, you can enable this in one line of code. Even if you use another payment processor, you can still participate through Stripe's Shared Payment Token API (more below).
For now, Instant Checkout only handles single-item purchases. Multi-item shopping carts and expanded merchant/regional support are coming next.
What makes this different:
- Product results are organic and unsponsored: OpenAI claims products are ranked purely on relevance, not who paid the most (for now...).
- Merchants stay in control: they handle orders, payments, and fulfillment using their existing systems.
- Built on a new open-source standard co-developed with Stripe that lets AI agents, people, and businesses work together to complete purchases (more on that below).
Michelle Fradin says "a huge portion" of ChatGPT's 700M weekly users are already asking shopping-related questions. OpenAI's product lead for commerce revealed most queries involve shopping in some capacity, from specific items to broader planning questions.
Why this matters: Over 700M people use ChatGPT every week, and now they can shop directly through Instant Checkout.
In case you didn't see, the market reaction was massive: Etsy stock surged 16% and Shopify jumped 6% on Monday following the announcement.
The tech behind this? OpenAI and Stripe created the Agentic Commerce Protocol so merchants can integrate quickly without overhauling their backend. Interestingly, the Agentic Commerce Protocol is based on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. Stripe's payment protocol builds on the MCP framework that Anthropic open-sourced in November 2024, which has since been adopted by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft
As we mentioned, the payment method uses Shared Payment Tokens: Stripe issues encrypted tokens scoped to specific merchants and cart totals, so ChatGPT can initiate payments without exposing buyer payment credentials.
Let's not forget: OpenAI is competing with Google's Agent Payments Protocol. Google launched its own agent payments protocol earlier in September with PayPal, making this a competitive race between AI giants for commerce dominance. While Google is exploring agentic search, they're stopping short of completing purchases; OpenAI is going all the way to transaction completion. TechCrunch noted that if more purchases start inside AI chatbots, OpenAI becomes a new gatekeeper in e-commerce, potentially challenging Google's search dominance and Amazon's retail power
Why this matters: This isn't just another "shop online" feature. This is OpenAI positioning ChatGPT as the interface layer between consumers and commerce. With 700M weekly users asking product questions, they're building what could become the biggest shopping channel since Amazon—except the AI is your personal shopper, and the entire web is your mall.
The bigger play? Agentic commerce. OpenAI is betting that AI agents will increasingly handle purchases on our behalf. As we've said before, ChatGPT isn't just a chatbot anymore; it's becoming your AI shopping assistant, travel planner, and now... credit card. Basically, it's America's first "super-app", combining search, shopping, productivity, and payments in one interface. This is just its next step in that direction.
Not everyone is buying the hype. Martin Peers from The Information argues that OpenAI's "agentic commerce" label is hyperbolic: right now, it's just searching for products and buying them, nothing particularly agentic about it (he says Buy with GPT is closer to "Instagram" than Amazon, and also, Instagram and Pinterest both tried to offer checkouts directly in the app but neither took off).
Still, Peers acknowledges this is an important revenue step for OpenAI, helping monetize hundreds of millions of free ChatGPT users. And if all else fails, it helps Amazon make the case that it's not a monopoly in online shopping (what Peers hilariously labels "The Google Defense." If you want to know what that's referring to, here ya go).
