ChatGPT Shopping & Agentic Commerce
ChatGPT Shopping describes buying through AI chat assistants: users have products suggested to them and increasingly complete the purchase in the chat or through linked merchant apps. The technical basis is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard developed together with Stripe that exchanges payment and order data between the AI assistant and the merchant system.
In practice
OpenAI launched "Instant Checkout" in September 2025, initially for US users with Etsy sellers and more than a million Shopify merchants; in 2026 the focus then shifted from a central in-chat checkout towards standalone merchant apps inside ChatGPT (including Target, DoorDash and Instacart), with the ACP continuing as supporting infrastructure. Availability in German-speaking markets or across the EU has not been confirmed so far. For shops this already means that structured, up-to-date product data and clear price and availability details are becoming a precondition for being considered in AI answers and future checkout flows at all.