AI has officially entered the e-commerce realm as OpenAI introduces Instant Checkout through ChatGPT. The move follows advances in AI-assisted shopping by companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, who have enabled product discovery and hunting through their platforms. With the launch of the Instant Checkout feature for US users, e-commerce is witnessing a transformation in how businesses market to consumers — while traditional Google search advertising takes a back seat (or potentially gets kicked out of the car).

OpenAI debuts this feature to its 700 mn weekly userbase, many of whom are non-paying users, providing the AI powerhouse with a new monetization channel. Etsy is the first to support Instant Checkout, with over a mn Shopify merchants — including brands like Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori — expected to join soon. Beyond helping users find products they want, the feature keeps users within the chat interface as they check out and secure their payments. The launch currently allows for single-item purchases, with multi-item carts on the way.

How the payments work: In partnership with digital payments platform Stripe, OpenAI co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard for AI commerce that provides the language for AI agents and businesses to work together to complete purchases. The protocol is open-source and available for any merchant or developer to build integrations. After users receive product suggestions and select a product they like, Instant Checkout is enabled — all it takes is a tap on the “Buy” button to confirm their order, shipping, and payment details without leaving the chat.

Is it safe to trust the AI agent with sensitive information? OpenAI says it is. The company has built the system with trust in mind: users explicitly confirm each step before any action is taken, payment details are secured through encrypted tokens only authorized for specific amounts and merchants with user permission, and only the information required to complete the transaction is shared with the merchant.

How merchants fare in this new setting: Merchants have to navigate uncharted territory in how they reach consumers under this new model. To participate, merchants join Instant Checkout for a small fee to OpenAI on each purchase. OpenAI claims the fees won’t interfere with product results, stating that searches will yield “organic and unsponsored [products] ranked purely on relevance to the user.”

But there appears to be a contradiction in OpenAI’s approach. While the company states that Instant Checkout items are not preferred in product results, it also acknowledges that ChatGPT considers multiple factors when ranking merchants, including “availability, price, quality, whether a merchant is the primary seller, and whether Instant Checkout is enabled.” This raises questions about how truly unbiased the results will remain.

Security risks and future implications: This new online shopping experience carries potential security risks and shortcuts to exploitation. Currently, OpenAI requires users to explicitly agree to each step of the purchasing process, but as AI agents become more sophisticated, users may be able to authorize the AI models to act more “agentically” and actually make purchases based on a prompt without checking back with the user. Such autonomous purchasing capabilities, already under development and partially available, could introduce new vulnerabilities — easy to joke about now — if not carefully managed.

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