ChatGPT launches in-chat buying with Etsy and a million Shopify merchants

ChatGPT has moved from recommending products to selling them. Shoppers can now buy directly inside the chatbot, starting with Etsy sellers and expanding to more than a million Shopify merchants.

The numbers behind the move are large: ChatGPT already drives about 20 percent of Walmart's referral traffic and fields tens of billions of product-related searches a month.

The pitch to merchants is deliberately friendly. Sellers keep ownership of the customer relationship, buyers purchase directly from them, and they retain control of order approval, payments and fulfillment through their existing systems.

The plumbing is Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard its backers hope becomes the default for AI commerce. The approach is the opposite of a closed, platform-controlled marketplace: the assistant facilitates the sale while the merchant stays at the center of it.

Merchants can apply to join through OpenAI's merchant onboarding page, and the expansion pace suggests in-chat checkout will be a meaningful sales channel this holiday season rather than an experiment.