Shopify merchants will pay a small fee to OpenAI if their products are purchased through the platform, the ChatGPT developer says.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Shares in Shopify Inc. SHOP-T jumped more than 5 per cent on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Monday, after the company said its merchants will soon be able to sell products directly to users of the generative artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT.
Through the chatbot, users will be able to request help with finding an item and will then be provided with a range of options from the Canadian e-commerce company’s Shop app, as well as products from the online marketplace Etsy.
Those users can then buy the item directly within the AI platform using the new Instant Checkout feature, ChatGPT developer OpenAI Inc. said in a statement posted to social media on Monday afternoon.
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OpenAI said the partnership will allow merchants to “meet customers where they are,” be discovered organically by ChatGPT’s ranking system and grow sales. ChatGPT will take a small portion of the sales made through its platform, though customers won’t have to pay to use the feature. Instant Checkout will use technology from payment processor Stripe.
The feature will first be rolled out to U.S.-based ChatGPT users who would like to buy from American Etsy pages, OpenAI said. Those users will later gain access to over one million Shopify merchants as well.
Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke said in a post to X on Monday that the company has been working with OpenAI to launch the feature for “quite some time,” and that rollout is coming “very soon.”
Shares of Shopify were valued at around $207 at the close of trading on Monday.
The new feature marks a milestone in changing the way the internet is monetized – a shift away from human-targeted websites found through search and toward chat-discoverable websites, according to D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria.
The announcement has broad implications for Shopify, Google and Amazon, he said in a note to investors, calling it a turning point for the commercial structure of the internet.
“We see this as the first in two steps OpenAI will take to target Google’s core business,” Mr. Luria said. “We expect the next step will be the availability to advertise within ChatGPT, in a similar way Google allows ads in its AI search.”
Once that second step is in motion, he added, advertisers will have another option for where they can spend their search budget, apart from Google.