OpenAI’s plans to turn ChatGPT into an e-commerce hub aren’t over yet – at least, not yet. In an announcement on Tuesday, the company revealed that it is moving away from a recently introduced feature that allowed users to purchase items directly from the chatbot interface.
OpenAI originally introduced shopping capabilities to ChatGPT last year – positioning itself as a “shopping assistant” that can connect buyers to the right sellers. A feature called “Instant Checkout” was launched in September and encouraged users to talk to the chatbot about what they want to buy and, like a regular e-commerce site, add products to the checkout cart within ChatGPT. Items were purchased from vendors, but ChatGPT acted as a portal for those purchases.
However, Instant Checkout was not a huge success. “We found that the first version of Instant Checkout didn’t offer the level of flexibility we wanted to offer, so we’re allowing merchants to use their checkout experience while we focus our efforts on product discovery,” the company explained in its blog post. OpenAI clarified to TechCrunch that vendors will still have the option to install the feature for now with apps within ChatGPT.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company will be putting down Instant Checkout development as a standalone feature and plans to prioritize improving product discovery for consumers instead. OpenAI will continue to support multiple exits, including merchant websites, they said.
Information and CNBC previously reported that OpenAI’s new plan was for merchants to create their own apps within ChatGPT, which would then direct users to test experiences on the respective merchants’ websites. A source who spoke to The Information noted that ChatGPT users simply “weren’t using a chatbot to actually help them buy,” and an October study looking at referral traffic from ChatGPT found that e-commerce sites weren’t making much money from ChatGPT users.
Instead of turning ChatGPT into a shopping portal, what OpenAI is doing now is making the chatbot a central hub of consumer information. That way, online shoppers will see it as an intermediary research tool that can help them decide which product to buy in the end.
This shopping experience is supported by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which is its open standard for e-commerce, which the company developed in collaboration with the fintech giant Stripe. The protocol uses data provided by participating vendors.
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Going forward, OpenAI said ChatGPT will provide detailed information about products – showing side-by-side images, while providing other comparison metrics for each item – such as prices, features, and reviews.
