OpenAI’s plans to turn ChatGPT into an e-commerce hub aren’t exactly coming to fruition – at least not yet. In announcement on Tuesday, the company revealed it was moving away from a recently launched feature that allowed users to buy items directly from the chatbot interface.
Originally OpenAI launched shopping opportunities in ChatGPT last year – positioning itself as a “shopping assistant” that can connect consumers with the right suppliers. The feature, called “Instant Pay,” launched in September and encouraged users to talk to a chatbot about what they wanted to buy and, like a customary e-commerce site, add products to their cart within ChatGPT. Items were purchased from vendors, but ChatGPT acted as the portal for these purchases.
However, Instant Checkout was not a great success. “We found that the initial version of Instant Checkout didn’t provide the level of flexibility we wanted, so we’re allowing sellers to use their own checkout methods while we focus on product discovery,” the company explained in its blog post. OpenAI explained to TechCrunch that merchants will still have the option to enable this feature via the app within ChatGPT for the time being.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company will deprioritize developing Instant Checkout as a standalone feature and that it plans to instead prioritize the development of consumer product discovery. They say OpenAI will continue to support multiple checkout paths, including through merchant websites.
Information AND CNBC has already reported on the matter that OpenAI’s fresh plan was for merchants to build their own apps within ChatGPT, which would then direct users to checkout on the merchants’ respective sites. A source who spoke to The Information noted that ChatGPT users simply “weren’t using the chatbot to actually help them make purchases” and test in October, which analyzed referral traffic from ChatGPT, found that e-commerce sites were not making much money from ChatGPT users.
Instead of turning ChatGPT into a shopping portal, OpenAI is now turning the chatbot into a centralized consumer information center. This way, online shoppers will see it as an indirect research tool that can facilitate them decide which product to ultimately buy.
This shopping experience is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which is an open standard for e-commerce that the company developed in partnership with fintech giant Stripe. The protocol uses data provided by participating sellers.
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In the future, OpenAI said ChatGPT will provide more detailed product information – presenting images side-by-side while also providing different comparison data for each product – such as pricing, features and reviews.