Published on the 14/10/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Santa’s little helper and your own personal shopper…

ChatGPT developer OpenAI is looking to take on Amazon and Google, introducing eCommerce to ChatGPT to enable users to purchase via the likes of Etsy and Shopify – payment included.

Instant Checkout, which is initially only available in the United States but will inevitably hit Australia and New Zealand before too long (‘tis the season for shopping, afterall), will enable searches and complete purchases, without ever leaving the chat interface, no links or redirects needed.

“This will give shoppers a way to buy without breaking their flow. It’s a really exciting shift for commerce.”

OpenAI says more than 700 million people are using ChatGPT each week, including asking for help finding products. In July 2025, more than 2.5 billion messages were being sent each day, with just 27 percent of those sent in June 2025 being work related, according to a September report. It shows seeking information, such as advice on products to purchase, made up 24.4 percent of queries.

For OpenAI, that presents a massive opportunity – the company will take a ‘small fee’ – as yet undisclosed – for completed purchases, for Instant Checkout’s part in enabling the sale by making ‘conversion faster and more likely’ OpenAI says.

Vanessa Lee, Shopify VP or product, says people are discovering products in AI conversations now, not just through search or ads.

“This will let our merchants show up naturally in those moments and give shoppers a way to buy without breaking their flow,” Lee says. “It’s a really exciting shift for commerce.”

Users can describe what they’re looking for, and ChatGPT will serve up a selection of products, each complete with a Buy button to complete the transaction.

The company is using Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, opensourcing the technology to enable merchants and developers to build integrations, with order details sent from ChatGPT to the merchant’s backend systems using ACP.

“They remain merchant of record, own the shopper relationship and control whether shoppers go through the Instant Checkout experience or their online store,” Shopify says.

The company says for businesses already processing payments via Stripe, agentic payments can be enabled ‘in as little as one line of code’. Those using other payment processors will need to either use Stripe’s Shared Payment Token API or adopt the Delegated Payments Spec in the ACP.

US ChatGPT users, including those who are on the free version, can now buy directly from US Etsy sellers right in chat. (ChatGPT paid subscribers get the option to save details on file for payment.)  OpenAI says more than a million Shopify merchants, including Glossier, Spanx and Vuori ‘coming soon’, and store names will be clearly displayed so shoppers know who they are buying from, Shopify says.

Instant Checkout is initially only enabling single-item purchases.

Keen to head off any concerns around prioritising merchants, OpenAI says product results are ‘organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user’. Instant Checkout items won’t get preferential treatment in the product results – though it is a factor considered in rankings.

“When ranking multiple merchants that sell the same product, ChatGPT considers factors like availability, price, quality, whether a merchant is the primary seller and whether Instant Checkout is enabled, to optimise the user experience,” OpenAI says.

Boston Consulting Group says agentic commerce signals an era where retailers’ most valuable customers might not be humans, with AI agents, embedded in platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini, already increasingly influencing consumers’ decisions and redefining how they discover, evaluate and purchase products online.

“The rise of AI shopping agents represents a seismic shift in how commerce will be conducted on a global scale

Agentic payments

Global consulting company Edgar, Dunn and Company has forecast the total addressable market for agentic commerce – defined as consumer-to-business transactions initiated by AI agents – to reach around US$136 billion this year, driven by early adoption across the United States.

“As consumer trust, AI capabilities and merchant adoption improve, we project the market to grow to US$1.7 trillion by 2030, reflecting a CAGR of 67 percent, Edgar, Dunn and Company says.

It says agentic commerce is set to have ‘transformative’ impacts on payments – which have previously been the stumbling block to agentic commerce. While AI agents were able to provide most steps of the shopping journey, customers then had to manually complete a payment via the merchant’s site. However, recent months have seen a myriad of solutions pushed into the market.

Earlier this month Google unveiled its Agent Payments Protocol, which can be used as an extension of the Model Context Protocol and the Agent2Agent protocol, providing a payment-agnostic framework for secure, compliant transactions between users – or agents – merchants and payments providers. Mastercard, meanwhile has its Agent Pay platform and Visa has Intelligent Commerce – both launched in April and due to roll out globally next year – while PayPal is providing developer tools for building agentic AI experiences to enable customers to pay, track shipments and manage invoices.

Amazon, meanwhile, has its Buy for Me offering to help customers discover and seamlessly purchase select products from other brands’ sites if those items aren’t available on Amazon.

Accenture’s Future of Money report found that businesses are gearing up for a future where AI-driven systems will manage payments. The research, which surveyed over 200 executives from across a range of industries including retail, travel, insurance and gaming, found 57 percent of those surveyed expect agentic payments to become mainstream within the next three years.

The most popular use case was utility or recurring billing, with AI-powered systems automatically managing recurring payments including selecting the payment date and method and applying discounts or deferrals based on customer data.

Of course, it’s not the first time we’ve been told that the way we sell, or purchase, was about to change forever. Remember social commerce? As Forrester’s Kelsey Chickering told iStart earlier this year, social media might drive interest in products, but it isn’t closing deals locally.

As more mature markets, Australia and New Zealand have embedded eCommerce experiences customers are already comfortable with and which retailers have heavily invested in.

She noted that social commerce also provided a somewhat lacklustre browsing experience, lacking an in-depth shopping experience – an issue agentic commerce may also find itself coming up against.

Social commerce customers were opting to purchase ‘lower consideration items’, and return purchases were unlikely to happen via a social link.

Edgar, Dunn and Company notes that customer enjoyment of shopping, whether online or in-store, and merchant concerns over disintermediation from the customer shopping journey if agentic commerce is used, will be roadblocks to agentic commerce becoming widespread.

Customer data privacy concerns, heightened fraud risks and regulatory challenges around agentic payments, with limited clarity around who holds liability if an agent makes an unauthorised purchase, are all still issues to be overcome.

For merchants, agentic commerce may also require re-evaluation of  go-to-market strategies as shopping shifts from being emotionally driven to data-driven.

“The dawn of agentic commerce presents another crossroad in the industry for businesses to innovate and lead market adoption,” the consultants add.