{"id":53062,"date":"2025-09-30T23:52:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T23:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/53062\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T23:52:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T23:52:10","slug":"how-openai-and-stripes-latest-move-could-blow-up-online-shopping-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/53062\/","title":{"rendered":"How OpenAI and Stripe\u2019s latest move could blow up online shopping as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

For decades, the rhythm of online shopping was predictable, if often frustrating: search, scroll, cart, checkout. Then social platforms like Facebook and Instagram<\/a> shook things up by dropping products directly into your feed for the ultimate impulse buy. Now OpenAI and Stripe<\/a> are upping the ante, folding shopping into the flow of an AI chat\u2014a kind of holy grail for consumers who want to go from idea to purchase in seconds.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, the companies unveiled an Instant Checkout feature in ChatGPT<\/a>, powered by a new commerce protocol they codeveloped. The feature is launching first with U.S.-based Etsy<\/a> sellers and will soon extend to more than a million Shopify<\/a> merchants, including buzzy brands like Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori. The protocol sits on top of an open standard for connecting AI models to business systems, developed by Anthropic, called MCP\u2014but focuses specifically on commerce and payments. Stripe brings fraud prevention, global payment rails, and a vast merchant network, making the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) usable by millions of businesses right out of the gate.<\/p>\n

But the implications go far beyond OpenAI. Because the protocol is open source, any AI assistant\u2014from Claude and Gemini to TikTok\u2019s AI and xAI\u2014could use the same rails to let users shop within their chatbots. That means conversational shopping could spread across the internet far faster than brands are ready for.<\/p>\n

The result: Google<\/a> and Amazon\u2019s days as the default starting points for online shopping may be numbered. Sure, those companies could adopt the same open protocol and join the in-chat shopping game, too. But the bigger point is that, for the first time in two decades, there\u2019s a real chance that the foundations of online shopping could shift. And that shift, if it catches on, will have profound implications for everything, from the way that consumers make purchasing decisions to the way that brands market their products.<\/p>\n

Still, why would OpenAI create a protocol that competitors can use, too? ChatGPT product lead Michelle Fradin framed it as a merchant-first calculation: \u201cThe primary goal we had was making something incredibly easy for the entire ecosystem\u2014merchants and developers\u2014to adopt,\u201d she said. \u201cSo yes, one aspect of that is, competitors or other players in the space can adopt it, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, she explained, it\u2019s \u201cnet-beneficial\u201d if merchants have to do less work to integrate with different platforms and grow sales. \u201cWe felt like the most merchant-friendly approach was making this available to everyone,\u201d she added, noting there was so much demand from merchants that \u201cwe needed to build something that could scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, not every brand or retailer will jump in. Even though ACP is open-source, adopting it still means ceding some control of the direct relationship they\u2019ve worked to build with their customers. There\u2019s also the matter of fees: Stripe will take its cut on each transaction, which could be a deterrent for sellers operating on thin margins. But for many companies, especially bigger brands, the frictionless reach of AI shopping may outweigh the loss of control over customer data and brand experience.<\/p>\n

And while brands and merchants will be able to take advantage of the ACP protocol through other platforms that adopt it (if Anthropic or Google were to adopt the protocol, for example), there\u2019s an obvious benefit to having products appear directly within ChatGPT\u2019s search results, given the chatbot\u2019s popularity<\/a>. In addition to Etsy and Shopify, Fradin said that OpenAI is currently working with several other large retailers that will eventually be included in ChatGPT\u2019s Instant Checkout, though she declined to name them.<\/p>\n

To be included in ChatGPT\u2019s search results for Instant Checkout, brands and merchants need to do some work, Fradin noted. That\u2019s because if you want ChatGPT to recommend your product, you have to feed it structured, detailed data that the model can \u201csee\u201d and understand.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best way today to ensure as a merchant that your product has the best chance of being chosen is to make sure that we have the most up-to-date and richest amount of information about your products as possible,\u201d she said. Fradin added that merchants are eager to provide detailed \u201cproduct feeds\u201d\u2014essentially structured catalogs of their items with rich descriptions, updated prices, and availability\u2014so ChatGPT has the fullest context when deciding what to recommend. In some cases, she noted, brands are supplying even more detail than they publish on their own sites, in hopes of improving their chances of being surfaced. It\u2019s a sign that a new discipline is taking shape: what some are calling AIO, or AI Optimization<\/a>, the successor to SEO, where the goal is to fine-tune product data so AI assistants surface your brand instead of a competitor\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Beyond the technical plumbing of payments, ACP effectively positions ChatGPT as a new arbiter of product recommendations. Instead of shoppers browsing Google search results, scrolling Amazon\u2019s \u201ccustomers also bought,\u201d or consulting reviews on Wirecutter, the assistant itself will increasingly decide what to surface. That shift raises thorny questions: How will ChatGPT determine which product to recommend? Will it offer a menu of options or streamline to a single choice? And down the line, will OpenAI accept money from vendors to boost their placement\u2014turning conversational commerce into a pay-to-play channel?<\/p>\n

For now, Fradin noted that, unlike traditional search engines, where platforms carefully guard algorithms to prevent low-quality content from gaming the system, ChatGPT\u2019s shopping recommendations are entirely AI-driven. There isn\u2019t a fixed formula merchants can optimize against, she explained\u2014instead, the more high-quality product information the model has access to, the more likely it is to surface relevant results.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expect to see a lot of evolution in the new version of AIO over time,\u201d she said. \u201cI think we\u2019re just at the beginning of this space.\u201d\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26\u201327, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For decades, the rhythm of online shopping was predictable, if often frustrating: search, scroll, cart, checkout. Then social…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,414,363,364,4036,12758,111,139,69,620,45314,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-53062","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-chatgpt","13":"tag-e-commerce","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-openai","18":"tag-stripe","19":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}