OpenAI is letting users buy products inside ChatGPT via its new “Instant Checkout” – which launched today in a limited preview for US users.
OpenAI’s Instant Checkout will initially only let users buy single products, via US Etsy sellers. It will add “over a million Shopify merchants” in the near future, it said today, calling it the “next step in agentic commerce.”
Right now that terminology looks premature: It’s still humans (a ChatGPT user) surfacing a product and then clicking buy from inside the AI interface.
But payments firms, ecommerce platforms and LLM providers alike see a near-future where autonomous agents make/optimise purchases for users.
OpenAI, in a blog launching Instant Checkout, promised results that are “organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user.”
The pay-through-AI chat system is built on a new open standard for AI commerce co-developed with Stripe, “Agentic Commerce Protocol” (ACP).
Agentic Commerce Protocol
Stripe and OpenAI released the open standard today under a permissive Apache 2.0 open-source licence. The specification’s documentation shows that it can be implemented as a RESTful interface or MCP server.
“Businesses not processing with Stripe can still adopt it with their existing payment providers, and it works across AI agents,” insisted Stripe.
nb: This new “ACP” is not to be confused with the Agent Connect Protocol, another “ACP” launched in 2024 by Cisco in partnership with organisations such as LangChain and LlamaIndex to facilitate an “internet of agents...”
Welcoming ACP’s release today, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison posted on X: “It's clear that internet purchasing modalities are going to change a lot, and we're excited to start to lay some of the foundations.
OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, added: “...we’re making it possible for businesses of all sizes to meet people where they are – and for shoppers to complete purchases seamlessly in conversation.”
Agentic commerce ftw?
Writing earlier this month, analysts at London firm TTL LLP noted of agentic commerce and AI shopping that “the commercial implications are enormous. If AI agents become the primary gateway to shopping:
Consumers may bypass traditional e-commerce websites altogether.
Search volumes on platforms like Google could fall dramatically…
New revenue models are emerging. OpenAI, for instance, plans to charge merchants commission for sales completed through its integrated checkout system.
They added: “This represents a new commercial ecosystem where brands compete not for clicks, but for algorithmic visibility within AI systems.”
As McKinsey put it in June: “More than 80% of companies still report no material contribution to earnings from their gen AI initiatives.”
Releasing bots to do shopping for users might just start to change that.
The Stack welcomes your views on Stripe and OpenAI’s new protocol, agentic commerce, and shopping directly through AI chatbots.
