Why ChatGPT Is Now the Checkout Button for the Internet

The landscape of online commerce shifted overnight (quite literally, this dropped yesterday). What once required a labyrinth of clicks, redirects, and abandoned carts has collapsed into a single moment inside a chatbot conversation. ChatGPT has stepped into the role that every retailer, marketplace, and platform has long been chasing: the frictionless checkout button for the entire internet.

ChatGPT has become the new front door of ecommerce. It’s no longer just answering questions, it’s processing purchases in real-time, replacing search, collapsing the sales funnel, and acting as the checkout button that sits across the web. This change is not hypothetical. It’s already live right now, already driving sales, and already forcing merchants to adapt or be left behind.

Key Takeaways

• ChatGPT Instant Checkout is live and already handling purchases inside chat, removing the traditional shopping cart from the journey.
• Merchants remain in control, keeping customer data, owning the sale, and paying only a ~2% fee on completed transactions.
• Product feeds must be structured for AI readability, not traditional SEO, to appear in shopping results.
• OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) provides the open-source foundation for AI-mediated transactions, rivalled by Google’s AP2.
• The battle between ACP and AP2 will shape the infrastructure of autonomous commerce for years to come.
• Shopify, Etsy, and other platforms are already integrated, and early adopters are seeing immediate impact.
• Consumer behaviour is shifting from browsing and comparing to instant intent-driven purchases guided by AI agents.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• The Collapse of the Shopping Funnel
  • Cart Abandonment Becomes Irrelevant
  • Discovery and Purchase Merge
• How ChatGPT Became a Commerce Layer
  • The Rise of High-Intent Queries
  • From Search Traffic to Direct Transactions
  • The Scale of ChatGPT’s Audience
• The Merchant’s New Reality
  • Control of Data Stays With Sellers
  • AI-Ready Product Feeds
  • Optimising for Conversational Commerce
• Protocols Powering AI Transactions
  • OpenAI’s ACP
  • Google’s AP2
• The Battle of the Platforms
  • Amazon’s Inward Focus
  • Shopify’s Open Strategy
  • Why Both Approaches Matter
• The Market Impact
  • Immediate Reactions
  • The Infrastructure Bet
  • From Bubble to Boom
• What This Means for Local Businesses
  • Early Adoption Advantages
  • Shifting Customer Expectations
• FAQs
• Conclusion

The Collapse of the Shopping Funnel

For two decades online retail has revolved around the cart. Every optimisation, every piece of A/B testing, every abandoned-cart email has tried to patch the same leak in the funnel. Now that funnel is crumbling. When OpenAI switched on ChatGPT Instant Checkout yesterday, the long chain of clicks collapsed into a single intent and a single action.

The timing caught even seasoned analysts by surprise. Within hours of launch, Etsy stock jumped 16 percent and Shopify gained six. Wall Street understood immediately that if a buyer can ask “show me handmade jewellery under $50” and complete that purchase without leaving the chat window, the old funnel has no role left to play. The numbers back it up. Walmart has already confirmed through Similarweb data that one in five referrals now originate from ChatGPT, and that was BEFORE Instant Checkout was enabled.

Cart Abandonment Becomes Irrelevant

Cart abandonment has been ecommerce’s silent killer. Studies regularly show 70 to 80 percent of shopping carts never make it to completion. The reasons vary: too many steps, too many forms, too much hesitation between discovery and payment. ChatGPT cuts out all of those points of friction. A customer who already knows what they want asks a question, sees a product with clear details, and confirms the purchase inside the chat.

Instead of businesses battling to squeeze another percentage point of conversion through abandoned-cart emails or one-click checkout buttons, the cart disappears entirely. The conversation itself is the checkout. OpenAI’s developer portal spells this out with two simple flags, enable_search and enable_checkout. Set them to true, and the product can be surfaced and purchased in-chat. This is the structural shift that makes all those optimisation tactics suddenly irrelevant.

For merchants, this means revisiting how product data is presented. If ChatGPT can resolve the customer’s need in a single response, there is no pause for the buyer to second-guess themselves. The abandonment problem doesn’t shrink, it vanishes.

Discovery and Purchase Merge

Traditionally, discovery has been separate from purchase. Search engines, social ads, and marketplaces handled discovery, while retailers fought to move that traffic through their own checkout pages. Now discovery and purchase are merging into the same step. When TechCrunch reported that ChatGPT serves 700 million weekly users, it framed the context: that many people asking high-intent shopping questions means the distinction between browsing and buying is collapsing.

A prompt like “best running shoes under $100” used to generate a list of links, reviews, and blog posts. Now it can surface a product from a merchant feed that meets those criteria, complete with price, availability, reviews, and a checkout button inside the same chat. This isn’t browsing, it is direct action. OpenAI’s own research suggests that two percent of its daily prompts already involve shopping. That equates to 50 million shopping queries every single day, and Instant Checkout now means those queries can turn into transactions without delay.

This is not an incremental tweak to ecommerce. It is a reordering of the entire sequence. Discovery is no longer the warm-up act before purchase. Discovery is the purchase. For merchants, the question is no longer how to lead a visitor from product page to cart. It is how to be the answer when ChatGPT responds to a buying query.

How ChatGPT Became a Commerce Layer

The change didn’t come from a single feature. It came from a series of shifts that slowly repositioned ChatGPT from a conversational assistant into a channel where commerce could live natively. By the time Instant Checkout arrived, the foundations had already been laid through massive user adoption, high-intent queries, and the steady movement of referral traffic away from traditional search.

The Rise of High-Intent Queries

Generative AI isn’t just answering trivia. It is handling shopping questions with a precision that search engines never mastered. Prompts like “gift ideas for a ceramic lover” or “running shoes under $120” carry purchase intent, not casual interest. OpenAI revealed in its merchant onboarding guide that roughly two percent of all daily ChatGPT prompts involve shopping, which translates into around 50 million queries every day.

The distinction is important. Search engines are filled with low-quality traffic, where clicks don’t always equal intent. ChatGPT’s conversational flow reduces that noise. When people ask it for product recommendations, they are usually on the brink of buying. The generative model bridges the gap by returning structured product data directly from merchant feeds, paired with reviews and availability. This makes the query itself the beginning of a transaction rather than the start of a long funnel.

For retailers, that means appearing in these conversations is less about advertising and more about having accurate, quotable product data. Instead of racing for rankings, the game has shifted to being the best match for the query.

From Search Traffic to Direct Transactions

The signal that this change had real commercial weight came from Walmart. Reports confirmed by Modern Retail show that one in five visitors arriving on Walmart.com now come through ChatGPT, not Google or social media. That level of share in referral traffic would once have taken years to build. ChatGPT did it in a fraction of the time, and it did it before checkout integration was even enabled.

Once Instant Checkout went live, traffic became only part of the story. Transactions could complete inside the chat itself. OpenAI’s commerce documentation describes how merchants only need to expose structured product feeds and toggle checkout capability to be eligible. From there, ChatGPT can handle both discovery and payment, and the merchant still receives full customer data, shipping information, and control of fulfilment. The pipeline from query to sale no longer leaves the chat window.

This direct transactional capability rewrites the value of AI in commerce. Instead of serving as a referral engine feeding traditional sites, it is now a standalone commerce layer that operates across the web.

The Scale of ChatGPT’s Audience

Scale is the final part of the puzzle. A commerce layer only matters if it has the users to sustain it. By September 2025, TechCrunch reported that ChatGPT had grown to 700 million weekly users, with tens of millions of daily shopping-related queries. That scale places it among the largest consumer platforms in the world, and one with behaviour that is already highly commerce-oriented.

Stock markets reacted instantly. Reuters documented the surge in Etsy’s share price as news of the integration broke, and Shopify shares followed the same path. Investors understood that a channel this large, with buying intent embedded in its queries, would reroute a significant portion of global ecommerce activity.

With users conditioned to trust conversational AI for recommendations and answers, shifting those same interactions into purchases is not a leap. It is a natural extension. That’s why ChatGPT is no longer simply a tool layered on top of commerce. It is now part of the infrastructure of commerce itself.

The Merchant’s New Reality

The launch of Instant Checkout is not only a consumer story. It reshapes how merchants structure their product data, handle customer relationships, and think about discovery. For once, the infrastructure is designed so sellers remain visible and in control rather than being hidden behind a marketplace wall.

Control of Data Stays With Sellers

On platforms like Amazon, merchants rarely see a customer’s email address or retain direct ownership of the relationship. With ChatGPT commerce, the design is different. OpenAI’s merchant programme makes clear that sellers remain the merchant of record, keeping names, addresses, and emails. They control fulfilment, shipping, and post-purchase communication. The chatbot provides discovery and checkout, then steps aside.

That has immediate consequences. Customer service remains personal, branding still carries through packaging, and support requests still flow directly to the retailer. For businesses used to competing in crowded marketplaces where data is walled off, this is a significant change. It gives smaller shops the ability to benefit from AI-driven discovery without losing ownership of the customer relationship.

The commission structure also reflects this positioning. A ~2 percent fee applies only when a purchase completes, unlike Google Shopping which charges for clicks that may never convert. Sellers are not paying to compete in auctions, they are paying once value has been created.

AI-Ready Product Feeds

Getting into these conversations requires preparation. OpenAI has published exact requirements in its developer documentation, and they differ from the rules that have governed SEO or marketplace feeds. Product IDs must be consistent and stable, titles capped at 150 characters, descriptions detailed but free from keyword stuffing, and availability updated in real time. Image links must be tested, return policies explicit, and reviews included with count and rating.

The structure is designed so the model can quote the data directly inside a conversation. That means vague or generic content has no weight. Instead, a product description needs to be specific enough that the AI can present it as an answer to a query. For example, “Waterproof trail running shoes with 8mm heel-to-toe drop” is more likely to surface than “high quality running shoes.” Quotability has become the new metric of optimisation.

For retailers already using Google Merchant Center, the transition is not as heavy as it looks. Feeds can often be exported and extended with the OpenAI-specific fields. Shopify is also moving quickly, with its Storefront MCP integration designed to make external AI agents like ChatGPT capable of browsing and transacting directly with stores.

Optimising for Conversational Commerce

The way buyers interact with AI shapes how products must be presented. Instead of scanning through dozens of thumbnails or category pages, users see one or two products quoted back as the best match. That changes the competition. Relevance inside a conversation is the new battleground.

Merchants must think about how a model interprets their catalogue. Reviews play a larger role because they serve as social proof when presented in an answer. Pricing fields that include sale dates can push deals into visibility, as the AI prefers structured promotions it can highlight. Frequent updates to stock availability and prices raise ranking likelihood, as stale data gets pushed down.

This is not the same as building out a checkout funnel. It is about building clarity and precision into product data so it can be surfaced in conversations naturally. Businesses that understand this shift can position themselves where intent is highest, inside the chat itself.

Protocols Powering AI Transactions

Behind the headlines about instant checkout sits a quieter but equally important story. The shift from browsing to in-chat purchasing depends on new transaction protocols that give AI systems permission to handle payments. Two approaches are already emerging, and both are shaping how future commerce will operate.

OpenAI’s ACP

When OpenAI unveiled Instant Checkout it also released the Agentic Commerce Protocol. ACP is open source, designed to let any business connect their product data and enable transactions through a single line of code if they already use Stripe. The philosophy is speed: working code in merchants’ hands immediately, rather than years of planning before adoption.

This protocol is focused tightly on shopping interactions. It is not a universal agent framework but a system that makes product discovery and purchase possible inside a conversation. Merchants can enable search and checkout in their feeds, and ChatGPT can then surface those products and process the payment. Refunds are tied back to the fee structure so sellers are not penalised when a customer changes their mind.

By shipping ACP in parallel with Instant Checkout, OpenAI created a functioning ecosystem on launch day. Etsy sellers were already live, and Shopify stores were being onboarded within days. The network effects began as soon as merchants toggled the capability on.

Google’s AP2

At nearly the same time, Google introduced its Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2. The scope is wider than ACP. Instead of focusing on conversational shopping, AP2 aims to create infrastructure that any AI agent can use to spend money securely. It covers not only retail but potentially tickets, bills, subscriptions, and multi-step purchases that require permission controls.

The structure of AP2 emphasises governance. Merchants and consumers can set spending limits, authorise categories, and define conditions under which an AI is allowed to act. It is an attempt to build trust at scale, with more than 60 partners including major payment networks such as Mastercard, PayPal, and American Express already signed on.

The contrast between ACP and AP2 highlights two different visions. OpenAI prioritised getting merchants selling quickly, while Google focused on building the broad rails for future autonomous agents. Both approaches are likely to coexist, with ACP handling conversational commerce at scale and AP2 enabling more complex financial activity across the wider internet.

The Battle of the Platforms

Two of the largest ecommerce players have taken very different paths in how they respond to AI-driven shopping. Both see the shift coming, but the way they prepare their merchants reveals contrasting priorities. One is doubling down on its own ecosystem, while the other is opening the gates to external agents.

Amazon’s Inward Focus

Amazon’s September announcements centred on making life easier for its existing sellers. The company revealed new agentic tools powered by Bedrock and Claude that can draft product listings, manage pricing, and run competitive analysis. Sellers are promised time savings measured in dozens of hours per week, freeing them to focus on inventory and customer service rather than administration.

The strategy is clear. By building internal AI that automates seller tasks, Amazon strengthens loyalty to its marketplace. Transactions still run entirely through Amazon, where customer data remains tightly controlled. The company’s platform becomes more efficient, but it also remains insulated from the rise of external agents like ChatGPT that might otherwise redirect demand away from its site. In effect, Amazon is reinforcing its walls while optimising the inside of the fortress.

Shopify’s Open Strategy

Shopify has chosen another path. In its Summer 2025 Editions, the company unveiled upgrades to its Sidekick assistant, now capable of handling agentic interactions, generating images, and supporting voice in multiple languages. More importantly, it released Storefront MCP, a standard that allows third-party AI agents such as ChatGPT to browse and transact with Shopify stores as if they were users.

The framing is deliberate. Shopify knows customers are already asking questions inside ChatGPT and similar systems. By making it easier for those agents to pull live product data and complete purchases, it positions its merchants at the front of this new traffic channel. The approach is outward-looking: instead of locking buyers inside its own platform, Shopify is preparing for commerce that takes place in multiple AI ecosystems simultaneously.

Why Both Approaches Matter

The divergence between Amazon and Shopify reflects different calculations about power and distribution. Amazon has unmatched customer volume and can afford to concentrate on protecting that base. Shopify, by contrast, acts as an enabler for independent retailers, so preparing them to meet customers wherever they are is a survival strategy as much as an opportunity.

Both moves make sense in context. Amazon’s internal AI gives sellers efficiency and keeps the marketplace sticky. Shopify’s openness ensures its merchants are not cut off from the rising tide of AI-mediated discovery. For now the two approaches coexist, but as more buying intent flows through conversational AI, the strategies will be tested against the reality of where customers choose to spend.

The Market Impact

Markets usually take time to react to new technology, but ChatGPT Instant Checkout triggered a shift almost immediately. Investors read the launch as a signal that AI is no longer a theoretical layer in commerce but a functioning channel already producing sales.

Immediate Reactions

On the morning OpenAI flipped the switch, Etsy’s stock climbed by 16 percent and Shopify gained six. That surge was unusual not only for its speed but also for the timing, landing on a Sunday when trading usually drifts. It demonstrated how strongly markets believed in the revenue potential of in-chat purchasing. Barron’s covered the reaction, pointing out how quickly Wall Street factored conversational commerce into valuations of companies already integrated with OpenAI’s ecosystem.

This reaction was grounded in numbers. Walmart’s referral data, reported by Modern Retail, showed that 20 percent of its traffic was already flowing through ChatGPT before instant checkout was active. That kind of traffic source would normally be built over years of SEO and paid campaigns. Here it appeared almost overnight.

The Infrastructure Bet

Markets were also reacting to the infrastructure story behind the product. OpenAI’s leadership has spoken openly about its intention to spend vast sums on data centres to support this type of demand. In September, reports surfaced of commitments in the trillions, with capacity equivalent to multiple nuclear plants in power consumption. These figures are not speculative. They show that OpenAI is treating AI commerce as a utility-level business, requiring physical investment on the same scale as energy or telecoms.

This level of build-out suggests long-term intent. It indicates that what launched with Etsy and Shopify integrations is just the start of a broader commerce framework designed to handle global volume. Analysts watching the numbers from ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly users, highlighted in TechCrunch, view this as a capacity challenge as much as a software story.

From Bubble to Boom

Some commentators frame the surge in valuations as part of a broader AI bubble, but the revenue signals from commerce make the case that this is not just speculation. AP News reported that the system was already live with Etsy sellers transacting in real time, a fact that separates this moment from earlier cycles of hype. Transactions are not projected. They are happening.

Bank of America has projected AI-driven commerce to exceed 150 billion dollars by 2030, but those numbers are beginning to look conservative. With tens of millions of daily shopping queries now actionable, the ceiling appears higher than analysts anticipated. The result is a market that simultaneously recognises froth while also acknowledging the reality of immediate cash flow. In that tension, valuations continue to rise.

What This Means for Local Businesses

For local New Zealand businesses, the change arriving through ChatGPT is not abstract. It shifts how products are discovered, how relationships with customers are managed, and how quickly sales can occur. The infrastructure is already in place, and the opportunity is to adapt feeds and processes so products appear where customers are asking their questions.

Early Adoption Advantages

Being present in ChatGPT’s shopping layer means showing up where intent is highest. According to OpenAI’s merchant guide, products that meet the feed requirements can already surface directly inside conversations. For a small store in Wellington selling handmade ceramics or a Queenstown outdoor gear shop, this visibility places them alongside global brands without paying for advertising slots or bidding on search terms.

Early adoption carries a competitive edge because ranking is based on relevance and data quality rather than spend. As Modern Retail reported, Walmart’s traffic from ChatGPT grew rapidly even before checkout was live, which suggests that smaller retailers who move early can capture share before the competition catches up. For businesses that have struggled against marketplaces charging commissions of 15 to 40 percent, the flat ~2 percent fee from OpenAI presents a simpler model.

Shifting Customer Expectations

Consumers are beginning to treat ChatGPT as a trusted assistant for shopping. AP News noted that Etsy sellers were making sales on launch day, which means buyers are already comfortable completing purchases inside the chat interface. For New Zealand customers used to browsing multiple sites or comparing across marketplaces, the experience of asking a question and buying instantly will soon feel natural.

This behaviour shift impacts how local businesses present themselves online. Product descriptions need to be specific and quotable so they can be returned as a complete answer. Reviews carry more weight because they are presented as evidence inside the chat. Pricing fields that include start and end dates for promotions become critical because AI highlights them during conversations. In short, the way a product is represented to an algorithm matters as much as the way it appears on a storefront.

Local merchants that adapt to this reality will be positioned to reach customers in ways that previously required costly marketing campaigns. The barrier is not scale but readiness. Structured product data, frequent feed updates, and clear return policies now determine whether a shop is visible when buyers ask their questions.

FAQs

How does ChatGPT Instant Checkout work for merchants?
Merchants provide a structured product feed and enable checkout within it. According to OpenAI’s developer documentation, if those flags are set correctly, ChatGPT can surface the products and process payments directly in the chat. Sellers still fulfil the orders and keep all customer details.

What fees apply when selling through ChatGPT?
OpenAI charges around 2 percent on completed purchases. This is outlined in the ChatGPT merchant guide. There are no fees for discovery and no payments for clicks that don’t result in sales.

Do sellers lose control of customer data like they do on Amazon?
No. The ChatGPT merchant programme states that businesses remain the merchant of record. This means they keep names, addresses, emails, and order history. The relationship stays direct rather than mediated by the platform.

What role do reviews play in product visibility?
Reviews influence ranking because they act as trust signals for the AI when surfacing results. OpenAI’s specifications require product_review_count and product_review_rating fields. Products without reviews are less likely to be quoted in conversations.

How big is ChatGPT’s audience for shopping queries?
TechCrunch reported 700 million weekly users, and OpenAI notes that around 50 million daily prompts involve shopping. This volume gives it one of the largest potential pools of intent-driven buyers online.

What impact has this had on stock markets?
On launch day, Reuters documented a 16 percent jump in Etsy’s share price, with Shopify rising by six. These movements show investors immediately priced in the potential of conversational commerce.

How does ChatGPT differ from Google’s AP2 protocol?
Search Engine Land explains that AP2 is designed as a broad payment rail for all kinds of AI agents, while OpenAI’s ACP focuses directly on conversational commerce. Both approaches are now in play, and merchants may choose to support both.

What does this mean for local New Zealand businesses?
For a shop in Wellington or Christchurch, Instant Checkout means appearing in the same chat responses as global brands. As Modern Retail showed with Walmart’s referral data, even smaller retailers can gain traffic quickly once their feeds are ready.

What kind of product descriptions work best?
Descriptions need to be specific and quotable. A line like “Waterproof trail running shoes with 8mm heel-to-toe drop” is more effective than a generic claim about quality. The OpenAI documentation stresses clarity and precision over keyword stuffing.

Is this shift already producing real transactions?
Yes. AP News confirmed that Etsy sellers were processing sales inside ChatGPT on the day the feature launched. This shows that the system is live and functioning, not in beta or limited rollout.

Can New Zealand businesses use ChatGPT checkout right now?
Not yet (As of October 1st 2025). ChatGPT for Merchants confirms the feature is currently limited to US Etsy sellers, with Shopify integrations rolling out in the US first. OpenAI has stated its goal is to expand to other regions, including New Zealand, next year.

What should New Zealand retailers do while waiting for availability?
Preparation matters. By aligning product feeds with OpenAI’s specifications now, a New Zealand merchant can be ready to switch on checkout the moment international expansion begins.

How does this affect New Zealand ecommerce strategy in the short term?
Even before checkout is available locally, discovery through ChatGPT already matters. Customers in New Zealand are using it to research and compare products, and when local integrations arrive, those queries can turn directly into sales.

Why is early preparation valuable for New Zealand shops?
When Etsy sellers in the US went live, AP News reported sales happening on day one. For a Wellington gift shop or Christchurch clothing store, being feed-ready ahead of time means capturing traffic immediately once New Zealand is included.

What timeline should New Zealand businesses expect?
While OpenAI has not published exact dates, the merchant guide states that geographic expansion is a priority for next year. This means New Zealand retailers have a limited window to prepare structured feeds, update inventory practices, and ensure their catalogues are AI-readable.

Conclusion

The arrival of ChatGPT Instant Checkout marks a structural change in how commerce operates online. What once involved a chain of steps spread across multiple sites now happens within a single conversation. Discovery and purchase have collapsed into one moment, and the systems behind it are already live.

Merchants keep control of customer data, fulfilment, and post-purchase relationships while benefiting from an entirely new channel of demand. The introduction of ACP and the emergence of competing protocols show that commerce is entering an infrastructure race, with every move shaping how transactions will flow in the years ahead.

For local New Zealand businesses, the current rollout is not yet within reach, but the trajectory is unmistakable. Preparing feeds, refining product data, and aligning catalogues with AI specifications ensures readiness for when expansion arrives. The competitive advantage will belong to those who take the time now to position themselves for an environment where conversations drive sales.

The checkout button for the internet has shifted, and it now sits inside ChatGPT. The question every business must answer is how quickly they are willing to adapt to a world where intent and transaction are one and the same.

For AI-driven commerce and discovery, hire a local AI expert that will help prepare your product feeds for ChatGPT, optimise your catalogue for conversational queries, and position your business to capture sales as AI shopping expands globally.