Until very recently, ChatGPT could recommend your products, but the shopper still had to leave, find your site, and check out.
That friction is gone.
Starting with the Instant Checkout rollout in late 2025, the entire funnel happens inside the ChatGPT platform: from product discovery to the actual purchase. That’s what we know as ChatGPT Shopping.
Now, a customer a can ask ChatGPT “best running shoes under $100,” see your product card appear, tap Buy, and complete the purchase without ever opening a new tab.
If you’re a Shopify merchant, here’s everything you need to understand about what this is, how to get in, and how to win.
🛒 Important: Instant Checkout is currently available for US Etsy sellers, but over a million Shopify merchants are coming imminently.
How Does the Shopify × ChatGPT Integration Actually Work?
The plumbing behind this is the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard built by OpenAI with Stripe and leading merchants.
It’s the language that lets ChatGPT act as an AI purchasing agent on behalf of a shopper: querying your inventory, displaying product cards with real-time pricing and availability, and passing a confirmed order back to your Shopify backend.
For the shopper, the journey looks like this:
- Discovery — The Shopper Asks a Question
Someone types a prompt like “best waterproof hiking boots under $150” or “gift ideas for a ceramics lover.” ChatGPT scans the Shopify catalog and surfaces the most relevant products from integrated merchants. These results are organic and unsponsored — ranked by relevance, price, availability, and quality, not who’s paying the most.
- Product Card — Your Listing Appears In Chat
Your product shows up with its name, image, price, variants, and a Buy button — all powered by real-time data from Shopify’s catalog. Your store name is shown clearly so shoppers know exactly who they’re buying from
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- Checkout — One Tap, No Redirect
The shopper taps Buy. Their shipping and payment info is confirmed — often via one-tap with Shop Pay. The purchase is completed inside the chat. They never open a new tab.
- Order Lands in Your Shopify Admin
The order appears in your Shopify dashboard exactly like any other sale — with proper attribution, transparent fees, and the same fulfillment workflow you already use. You remain the Merchant of Record. You own the customer relationship, the shipping, and the returns process.
Key point: You don’t need to rebuild anything. Shopify handles the technical integration on your behalf. There is no new backend system to learn, no new API to wire up manually. Your existing catalog, checkout flow, and order management all carry over.
How to Get Your Shopify Store Into ChatGPT — And Optimize for It
If you’re already on Shopify, the path to appearing in ChatGPT is short.
Shopify handles the catalog data feed to OpenAI automatically. Real-time pricing, inventory, images, and product variants are all surfaced through Shopify’s infrastructure.
You don’t wire anything up manually.
For Instant Checkout specifically, merchants need to opt in via Shopify Admin. Shopify is rolling this out to its merchant base progressively from late January 2026 onward.
Here’s what the setup process looks like, and what you can do right now to optimize your chances of showing up (and converting) in ChatGPT results:
Step 1: Enable the ChatGPT sales channel in Shopify Admin
Go to Sales Channels in your Shopify Admin and enable the ChatGPT channel.
This opts you into the Agentic Storefronts program and makes your catalog discoverable.
If the channel isn’t yet visible, Shopify is still rolling it out — check back regularly or visit shopify.com/chatgpt to register your interest.
Step 2: Opt in to Instant Checkout (to enable the Buy button)
Within the ChatGPT channel settings, toggle on Instant Checkout.
This allows a Buy button to appear on your products in chat. You can opt out at any time.
Products without Instant Checkout can still appear in ChatGPT’s organic results and link back to your store.
Step 3: Audit your product titles and descriptions for natural language
ChatGPT matches products to conversational queries — “best waterproof jacket for rainy commutes,” not “blue jacket SKU-44291.” Write product titles and descriptions the way a shopper would ask for them, not just how you’d keyword-target them. Concise, descriptive, benefit-led copy performs best.
Step 4: Keep pricing, inventory, and variants accurate and up to date
ChatGPT’s ranking considers availability, price, and whether a merchant is the primary seller of a product. Out-of-stock items, stale pricing, or broken variant data will hurt your placement. Shopify feeds this data in real time — but only if your catalog hygiene is solid.
Step 5: Enrich your product pages with reviews and fresh content
ChatGPT draws on content it can understand to assess product quality. Structured review data, updated product descriptions, and rich media (images, video, clear specifications) all help your products read well to AI ranking systems. Treat your PDP like an AI-readable data source, not just a laiding page.
Step 6: Ensure Shop Pay is set up for frictionless checkout
Instant Checkout supports one-tap payment options including Shop Pay. If Shop Pay isn’t enabled on your store, set it up — it’s the lowest-friction path from ChatGPT product card to completed purchase, and it’s free to activate.
What Does It Cost For Shopify Sellers to Sell Through ChatGPT?
This is the question every merchant is asking right now, and the answer involves a few layers. There are three cost elements to understand:
The 4% commission is opt-in. Merchants choose whether to enable Instant Checkout on ChatGPT, or whether to instead have shoppers redirected to their online store, which avoids the fee but adds friction.
Products remain discoverable in ChatGPT’s organic results either way.
The 4% in context: Industry observers note that 4% is roughly in line with what many small US merchants already pay for card processing — and Klarna’s early merchant fees were higher when it launched.
The argument for opting in: ChatGPT users discovering products via chat are already in a purchasing mindset. Removing checkout friction from that moment is likely worth the premium for most product categories.
Which Brands Are Already Selling in ChatGPT?
The early wave of Shopify merchants confirmed for the integration includes some of the most recognizable DTC brands in the US which gives you a clear picture of the type of shopping experience OpenAI is building this around.
- Beauty industry: Glossier.
- Apparel industry: SKIMS, Spanx, Vuori, Steve Madden
- Travel industry: Away
- Drinkware: Stanley 1913
Plus, 1M+ Shopify merchants will also be available on the platform soon.
Beyond ChatGPT — The Bigger Agentic Commerce Picture
ChatGPT is just the beginning. Shopify and OpenAI announced the Agentic Commerce Protocol in September 2025 as an open standard,
And in February 2026, Shopify went further with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), co-developed with Google, designed to connect Shopify merchants to every major AI agent platform through a single integration.
The strategic value here is significant: Shopify merchants set up their data once, and through Agentic Storefronts, that data surfaces everywhere.ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, all managed from a single place in your Shopify Admin.
No separate integrations. You’re plugging into a shared commerce infrastructure layer.
For merchants on other platforms, Shopify has also launched an Agentic plan that opens the Shopify catalog infrastructure to brands that don’t have a Shopify store.
Yes, this means you can use Shopify’s AI channel distribution without migrating your entire backend.
Top Growth Marketing’s collective opinion: AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores grew 7× in the year leading up to this launch, and AI-attributed orders grew 11×. This channel is real, and it’s accelerating.
The merchants who optimize their product catalogs for conversational discovery now, before the competition catches up, will have a structural advantage that compounds over time.
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