ChatGPT Chases Retail Revenue with One-Stop Shopping

Always wanted a personal shopper? Get ready to let ChatGPT do the buying. OpenAI recently added “instant checkout” to its chatbot, letting users buy crochet keychains and pet portraits from Etsy merchants. Soon, it’ll also add Shopify’s 1 million sellers, which include retailers like Glossier and Vuori. 

That means ChatGPT users can now go from asking, “What’s a good gift for a pet lover?” to purchasing a pet portrait without leaving OpenAI’s platform. 

As AI platforms take the place of search engines, a move into shopping could further upend the established tech order.

AI’s On a Shopping Spree

OpenAI’s new all-in-one-place shopping experience cuts marketplaces like Amazon and Google Shopping out of the equation, connecting users directly with brands. Amazon and Google have used their dominance in the past to promote the products of their choosing, and now OpenAI will have that power. For now, though, OpenAI says its product recommendations are “organic and unsponsored.” It charges a small fee to merchants when a purchase is completed. Stripe, which helped create the agentic checkout protocol, said it’s making “the economic infrastructure for AI.”

For OpenAI, earning fees from facilitating shopping sprees could become a new revenue source. OpenAI may be the world’s most valuable private company, but it hasn’t turned a profit and has burned through billions of investor dollars building and running its AI models. 

Despite having an estimated 700 million weekly active users, ChatGPT also has stiff competition in agentic shopping: 

• Perplexity, an AI search engine, introduced a shopping feature last year that, similar to OpenAI’s, allows customers to check out directly on the platform without switching tabs. Microsoft’s AI platform, Copilot, also lets merchants operate stores directly in chats with shoppers. A handful of startups, including Daydream and Deft, have raised millions to build AI-powered shopping solutions. 
• But the old guard of retail doesn’t want to be left in the dust: Amazon rolled out an AI assistant last year that it said has helped recommend products to millions of shoppers, and Google has AI-ified its Shopping tab with personalized recommendations. 

Double-Edged: While Etsy said the integration will help new users discover its merchants and buy their handmade trinkets, shopping on ChatGPT could ultimately hurt the retailers it features. They lose control over curating and promoting products, and may have a harder time building a loyal customer base when those customers have never been on their site.