The Checkout Is Moving Into the Chat
What every ecommerce brand needs to understand about AI-driven transactions.
Attention ecommerce entrepreneurs 📣
There is a real shift happening right now.
People are not just using AI to research products anymore. They are starting to buy inside the conversation.
ChatGPT rolled out Instant Checkout late last year (known as ACP - Agentic Commerce Protocol - Shopify and Etsy were their early partners). A customer can discover a product in chat, click buy, and complete the payment without ever leaving the interface. OpenAI takes roughly a 4% transaction fee on those completed sales.
Put that next to Amazon, where most sellers give up 8 to 15% plus in referral fees and then spend even more on ads just to stay visible. It changes the conversation.
Here’s the important nuance.
Even though checkout happens inside ChatGPT, the order is still sent to the merchant’s backend. You fulfill it. You handle shipping, taxes, returns, customer support. You remain the merchant of record. ChatGPT is facilitating the transaction, not becoming Amazon with warehouses.
That matters.
This is conversational commerce becoming a real sales channel.
Does this mean ads disappear? No. ChatGPT has introduced paid placements for certain users. But it does mean that product discovery is no longer limited to search engines and traditional marketplaces.
Traffic is still early. This is not replacing Amazon tomorrow, and I’m sure Amazon will continue to push harder into this space too.
But AI is moving closer to the transaction layer, not just the research layer.
And ecommerce platforms are paying attention.
They know merchants will want structured ways to connect their catalogs to these AI systems. So they are building the infrastructure to make that possible.
Shopify, as it often does, is moving quickly here.
In addition to their partnership with OpenAI/ChatGPT on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, they have introduced what they call agentic commerce infrastructure, including the Universal Commerce Protocol. The idea is to standardize how AI platforms connect to merchant stores so pricing, inventory, discounts, subscriptions, and policies can flow directly into AI environments (all of them). Here’s a quick video on how it works.
In simple terms, AI becomes another channel that plugs into your store’s backend.
If you are on Shopify or any major platform, this is the moment to understand:
• How clean and structured your product data really is
• Whether your catalog is machine-readable
• How your checkout logic and policies are configured
• What this could mean for attribution and customer ownership
We talked about this direction on the podcast late last year before this most recent announcement, and it is unfolding quickly.
If you run an ecommerce brand, this feels like one of those early shifts. It does not look massive yet. But neither did SEO. Neither did marketplaces. Neither did paid social in the beginning.
The merchants who pay attention now and start testing will be in a much better position when this channel matures.
This is another evolution in how products get discovered and purchased.
It’s an exciting time and one you MUST pay attention to if you want to succeed in ecommerce.
Interesting framing - Instant Checkout inside chat is a real signal that the channel is evolving, but it’s easy to read “checkout in chat” as something bigger than it actually is.
There’s a difference between checkout facilitated by UI and true agentic autonomy where the system reasons, negotiates, and executes buying decisions. Many teams still struggle with structured product data, policy clarity, and governance, which are prerequisites for meaningful autonomous interactions.
Would love to hear more about how brands are measuring impact beyond awareness - e.g., attribution, customer trust signals, and cost economics - because “chat as channel” is not the whole story.