OpenAI is moving away from Instant Checkout, the feature that allowed users to purchase products directly within ChatGPT, after the company acknowledged it “did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide,” according to an OpenAI blog post published Tuesday. The company said it would deprioritize development of Instant Checkout as a standalone feature and focus instead on product discovery, TechCrunch reported.
The retreat marks a significant strategic pivot for OpenAI, which launched Instant Checkout in September 2025 and originally billed it as “the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it,” per CNBC.
What Went Wrong
The core problem was adoption. A source who spoke with The Information noted that ChatGPT users “weren’t using the chatbot to actually help them make purchases,” and a Modern Retail study from October found that e-commerce sites were not making much money from ChatGPT referral traffic, according to TechCrunch.
Merchant onboarding was also difficult. As of last month, roughly 30 Shopify merchants were available via Instant Checkout, Forrester principal analyst Emily Pfeiffer told CNBC. Walmart made about 200,000 products available, but product data scraped from retailer websites was often inaccurate on stock availability, delivery timing, and shipping costs, Pfeiffer said.
“Crawling and scraping is inadequate to get the full breadth of product data that you need to do a good job of commerce,” Pfeiffer told CNBC. “I think that it was not an ideal shopping experience, but it’s not like the death of agentic commerce.”
Bob Hetu, a Gartner analyst, told CNBC that “OpenAI underestimated how difficult the enablement of transactions was going to be.”
The New Approach
OpenAI is now repositioning ChatGPT as a product discovery and comparison tool rather than a transactional platform. The shopping experience will be powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard developed in partnership with Stripe, according to OpenAI’s blog post.
Instead of handling checkout natively, retailers will build dedicated apps within ChatGPT that route users to the merchant’s own website to complete purchases, CNBC reported. Shopify confirmed a new e-commerce experience is coming where checkout happens through merchants’ own online stores. Walmart plans to integrate its Sparky AI assistant into ChatGPT as soon as this week, per CNBC. Etsy confirmed it is also developing a ChatGPT app.
Daniel Danker, Walmart’s executive vice president of AI acceleration, referred to Instant Checkout as “a very temporary moment in time” at Morgan Stanley’s Tech, Media & Telecom conference on March 4. “By this time next month, you will not see that experience anymore,” Danker said, according to CNBC.
Broader Signals
Semrush found that just 22% of users have bought a product inside an AI tool, based on a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers released earlier this month. Half of respondents said they made a purchase after using AI during research, CNBC reported.
Meanwhile, Google released updates to its shopping agent platform on Thursday that enable real-time product data loading, multi-item carts, and loyalty membership connections, per CNBC. The gap between OpenAI’s shopping ambitions and Google’s infrastructure advantage in commerce data is widening.
Pfeiffer was blunt about the current state: “Right now, I don’t see success in retail apps in ChatGPT. That doesn’t mean there won’t be. Adoption takes time.”