ChatGPT previews checkout in a direct challenge to marketplace incumbents
OpenAI is quietly previewing a checkout feature inside ChatGPT, with plans to take a cut of sales it drives, effectively becoming a marketplace. Merchants would receive and fulfill paid orders, financial terms are already being discussed with partners, and the feature could arrive alongside the company's anticipated agentic browser, in time for the 2025 holiday season.
Shopify is involved, though whether it powers the full checkout or simply connects its merchants is unclear. The strategic reading is pointed: Shopify likes to be seen as a software company, but about three quarters of its roughly 9 billion dollars in annual revenue comes from merchant services, mostly payments. Incumbent marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target are unlikely to participate, but their third-party sellers are exactly who a ChatGPT marketplace would court, armed with data showing what direct listing could add to their sales.
Industry watchers already expect a sponsored placement layer, a retail media network in all but name, letting merchants pay to stand out when the assistant recommends them. Amazon's retail media business alone is worth about 60 billion dollars, which sketches the prize.
In related moves, OpenAI quietly brought Shopify on board as a shopping search partner alongside Bing, feeding product images, prices and review summaries into ChatGPT results; non-Shopify stores can apply by not blocking the company's crawler.
Amazon is not standing still: its Starfish project uses generative AI to build what it hopes will be the world's most complete product catalog, filling missing data, correcting errors and rewriting listings, sourced from 200,000 external brand websites and projected to add 7.5 billion dollars in sales. It positions Amazon's catalog as an answer to AI-era discovery.
Elsewhere: Prime Day 2025 analysis across 3,500 brands showed orders nearly doubling to 5.63 million over the extended four-day event, while average order value fell 35 percent to 41.94 dollars, discounts were slashed by half, and shipping offers surged 176 percent. And in trivia, 576 cargo containers went overboard during 2024, more than twice the prior year's count.
