In time for the holiday shopping season, OpenAI has shifted from general-purpose helper into shopping assistant. Shopping Research inside ChatGPT now builds full buyer's guides from simple prompts, asks clarifying questions, cites sources and steers people toward checkout without the usual flow and analytics visibility of ecommerce sites. The rollout spans web and mobile for all logged-in plans, with near-unlimited usage through the holidays. If shoppers start trusting AI chatbots over retail websites and online articles, the first and possibly last stop in e-commerce shifts to chat.
ChatGPT users in the U.S. can now make Etsy and Shopify purchases within conversations, marking a next step towards the future of online shopping - both for consumers and the platforms that control product discovery, recommendation, and payments. In other words, OpenAI might be on the path to reshaping who holds power in e-commerce. OpenAI's new "Instant Checkout" feature is available to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Free logged-in users buying from U.S.-based Etsy sellers, with more than 1 million Shopify merchants like Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori "coming soon," per OpenAI.
OpenAI said it will allow users in the U.S. to make purchases directly through ChatGPT using a new "Instant Checkout" feature powered by a payment protocol for AI developed by Stripe.The new chatbot shopping feature is a big step towards helping OpenAI monetize its 700 million weekly users, many of whom currently pay nothing to interact with ChatGPT, as well as a move that could eventually steal significant market share from traditional Google search advertising.