ChatGPT Now Has a Buy Button. Here's What That Means for Retailers.

OpenAI just made a move that changes everything about how retailers think about AI visibility.

With the launch of Instant Checkout, ChatGPT users can now purchase products directly inside the chat. No redirect. No abandoned cart. Just conversation to transaction in a few taps.

This isn't a feature announcement. It's a signal of where commerce is heading.

From Discovery to Transaction

For months, we've talked about AI engines; ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, as discovery tools. Shoppers ask questions, AI recommends products, and then sends them elsewhere to buy.

That model just got disrupted by the company that pioneered it.

OpenAI's Instant Checkout, built in partnership with Stripe, lets U.S. shoppers purchase from Etsy sellers today, with over a million Shopify merchants. The underlying technology, called the Agentic Commerce Protocol, is open-source. Any merchant or developer can build on it.

The implications are significant. AI isn't just influencing purchase decisions anymore. It's completing them.

Why This Should Have Your Attention

Here's the math that matters: OpenAI reports 700 million weekly active users. A "huge portion" of their queries are shopping-related. When those users can buy without leaving the chat, the friction between intent and purchase nearly disappears.

But here's the part most retailers are missing: you can only capture that demand if ChatGPT can find you in the first place.

OpenAI states that product results are "organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user." When multiple merchants sell the same product, ChatGPT considers availability, price, quality, whether a merchant is the primary seller, and whether Instant Checkout is enabled.

This is fundamentally different from Amazon or Google Shopping, where visibility is largely pay-to-play. In ChatGPT, relevance wins. Structured, crawlable content wins. Being the "source of truth" for a product-location combination wins.

The New Gatekeeper Economics

Traditional marketplaces like Amazon charge referral fees ranging from 8-15%, plus fulfillment costs, plus advertising fees that have become essentially mandatory for visibility. The total cost of selling can easily exceed 30%.

AI commerce channels are emerging with a different model. OpenAI charges merchants a fee on completed purchases; not on impressions, not on clicks, but on actual sales. And critically, the fee only applies if you opt into Instant Checkout. Your products can still appear in ChatGPT's recommendations with links to your site, even without the checkout integration.

This creates a strategic choice: pay for in-chat conversion convenience, or drive traffic to your own properties. Either way, you need to be visible first.

What AI Agents Need From You

Here's where most multi-location retailers have a structural problem.

AI engines don't just want to know that you sell running shoes. They want to know that you sell Nike Pegasus 41 in your Brooklyn store, in stock, at a specific price. They want to answer "Where can I buy this nearby?" with your location.

But most retailers have one e-commerce site with a product catalog, plus separate store locator pages. There's no connection between specific products and specific locations. When a shopper asks ChatGPT where to find something near them, your content doesn't provide the answer.

This is the gap that AI commerce exposes. The retailers who will win in this environment are building product-location connections at scale, thousands of searchable pages that connect each product to each store, structured in a way AI engines can parse, cite, and trust.

The Infrastructure Shift

What OpenAI is building isn't just a checkout button. It's the infrastructure for a future where AI agents handle more of the purchase journey on behalf of users.

In that future, the question isn't whether your brand has a presence. It's whether your products are visible at the moment of decision, in the format AI can understand, with the local specificity shoppers actually need.

What This Means Now

If you're a multi-location retailer, this is the strategic question: Are your products visible in AI-generated answers at the local level?

Not your brand. Not your store pages. Your specific products, in your specific stores, when shoppers ask "where can I buy this near me?"

The retailers who answer yes are building what we call a local discovery layer; AI-ready content that connects every product to every location, automatically updated, structured for the way modern search actually works.

The retailers who answer no have a visibility gap that's about to become a revenue gap.