You Can Now Pay for Stuff in ChatGPT, and OpenAI Will Take Its Cut

You can now pay for your shopping directly in ChatGPT. Instant Checkout is one of OpenAI’s most anticipated features, letting users complete purchases directly from product recommendations without visiting the seller’s website or, crucially, Amazon or Google.

ChatGPT Instant Checkout’s costs and availability

For shoppers, the service costs nothing. They can describe what they’re looking for, and ChatGPT will present a selection of products, each with a Buy button that lets them complete the purchase with no added fees. 

The button is initially available only for single-item purchases on US Etsy; however, support for more than a million additional merchants, including Skims and Glossier, as well as multi-item purchases, is coming soon. ChatGPT users in the US with Free, Pro, and Plus plans can use Instant Checkout, and the latter two can save their shipping and payment details. 

Merchants will pay an undisclosed “small fee” to OpenAI upon the completion of a purchase, so it is not added on to a product’s price. The fee, which will be refunded if the product is returned, is for Instant Checkout’s part in enabling the sale, as “it makes conversion faster and more likely,” according to OpenAI’s merchants page.

Will merchants with Instant Checkout enabled be prioritised?

Sam Altman’s company insists throughout its announcement that merchants with Instant Checkout enabled will not be prioritised in ChatGPT’s product recommendations. “Product results are organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user,” it said. Google and Amazon have both been accused of prioritising their own products or preferred merchants who may buy priority placements in search results.

However, when ranking multiple merchants that sell the same product, ChatGPT may place the one with Instant Checkout higher because the feature “optimize(s) the user experience.” It also considers other factors in this decision, such as availability, price, and whether a merchant is the primary seller.

The tech behind an Instant Checkout transaction

OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol is propping up Instant Checkout. When a user clicks “Buy,” the transaction details are sent to the merchant using the protocol, allowing the merchant to accept or decline the purchase. They can then complete the transaction with their existing payment provider and fulfill the order as usual. Google launched a similar protocol, designed for AI agents that can make purchases, earlier this month.

The Agentic Commerce Protocol has been open-sourced, allowing merchants interested in Instant Checkout to build their own integrations ahead of time. As it was developed with the fintech company Stripe, the protocol enables merchants using Stripe as their payment processor to connect payments with just a single line of code, although it also supports other providers.

Merchants can now apply to be listed in ChatGPT search results and enable Instant Checkout, but it is unclear when their applications will be accepted. OpenAI says that it won’t be available to geographies outside the US until 2026.

OpenAI needs the cash from merchant fees to build its new data centers

Moving into shopping is a logical next step for OpenAI. While it is arguably the most well-known AI company in the world, thanks to the ubiquity of ChatGPT, it has yet to turn a profit. 

But if a “huge portion” of its 700 million weekly active users are using the chatbot for shopping, as OpenAI’s e-commerce lead Michelle Fradin claimed to CNBC, that small fee it takes from each transaction could fast change things. It began introducing shopping features to ChatGPT in April, including tools that let users browse curated product recommendations, compare prices across merchants, and view real-time availability. 

The new revenue stream of merchant fees, along with its paid subscription tiers, can’t come a moment too soon, as the company heavily invests in expensive new data centers and other AI infrastructure worldwide. Investors are confident it will be popular, with shares in Etsy and Shopify increasing by 16% and 6% respectively, after the announcement on Monday, according to CNBC.

But OpenAI is not alone in its quest to take the e-commerce reins from the titans of Amazon and Google. In November 2024, AI rival Perplexity introduced product recommendations and added an in-chat payment option in May.

Instant Checkout isn’t ChatGPT’s only new feature this week. The chatbot can now search through your apps and chat history independently to generate personalised daily updates.