By Belle Lin

OpenAI is letting ChatGPT users buy things through its popular artificial intelligence chatbot, all without leaving the confines of its platform.

The San Francisco-based AI company said Monday that U.S.-based ChatGPT users will be able to buy goods from online marketplace Etsy's domestic sellers, as well as some merchants on Shopify's e-commerce platform. The service, called Instant Checkout, currently only supports single-item purchases.

OpenAI also unveiled an open-source technical standard for merchants to build integrations with ChatGPT, called Agentic Commerce Protocol, which the company hopes will draw more merchants onto its chatbot platform. The protocol allows merchants to make their products shoppable inside ChatGPT.

Amazon and Walmart, the nation's two largest digital retailers, aren't currently using the protocol, OpenAI said.

OpenAI's announcements come as the company continues expanding the capabilities and reach of its flagship chatbot, which ignited the AI boom in late 2022. Over one in 10 people who use ChatGPT have some intent or interest in making a purchase, said Michelle Fradin, OpenAI's product lead for commerce in ChatGPT.

That makes ChatGPT an ideal place for users to actually complete their purchases, rather than needing to leave the platform to finish buying something, OpenAI said.

OpenAI's Operator AI agent, released early this year, can also buy goods on behalf of users, but requires them to manually enter their payment information at checkout. ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature is meant to be easier to use within the chatbot, plus, more users are using ChatGPT to search for products than Operator, Fradin said.

Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases through ChatGPT. OpenAI declined to specify the amount of that fee, citing confidentiality agreements with its partners.

For tech giants like Google and Amazon, there's a lot at stake as search and e-commerce are radically upended by tools like ChatGPT. People are turning to AI chatbots and services to act as personal shopping assistants, or even asking AI agents to do their purchasing for them.

As of August, OpenAI counted roughly 700 million people -- 9% of the world's population -- as weekly users of ChatGPT, up from 500 million in March.

Late last year, OpenAI pushed directly into Google's territory with the launch of a search engine for ChatGPT. The company added product recommendations inside ChatGPT in April, making it easier for chatbot users to compare products and services.

For online merchants, too, there's a risk of losing a direct connection to shoppers who might otherwise be visiting their websites.

"The merchant gets the sale, that's the benefit, but they lose the [customer] loyalty," said Emily Pfeiffer, a principal analyst focused on commerce at IT research and consulting firm Forrester. "A lot of retailers and brands are just very nervous because this is all moving super quickly."

But that's a threat OpenAI says won't bear out.

"ChatGPT serves a very different purpose than a merchant's website," Fradin said.

The chatbot also sends customer payment information through the payments processor Stripe, which forwards that data to the merchant. Fradin said that allows merchants to maintain control over their customer relationships.

OpenAI's latest move also serves to lay the groundwork for future AI agent-based shopping, which is still in its infancy. While e-retailers like Amazon and eBay have released their own AI shopping agents, they are neither ubiquitous nor fully autonomous.

For the most part, AI agents still need more technical infrastructure to work across apps and services. Agents will need permission to access apps, APIs and websites if they are ever going to call an Uber or book a flight. The effort has been helped along by Model Context Protocol, or MCP, an open-source standard introduced by Anthropic last year.

OpenAI's Operator, which is a computer-use agent, is limited to using other apps and services through the web browser, and still requires human intervention to access them.

OpenAI said it aims for its own Agentic Commerce Protocol to serve as a foundation for merchants to reach more customers who might be searching for their products in ChatGPT.

Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 29, 2025 13:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

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