The startup on Monday (Sept. 29) announced “Instant Checkout,” a service that lets American ChatGPT users make purchases from U.S.-based Etsy merchants plus some sellers on Shopify.
“This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it,” the company said in a news release. “For shoppers, it’s seamless: go from chat to checkout in just a few taps. For sellers, it’s a new way to reach hundreds of millions of people while keeping full control of their payments, systems, and customer relationships.”
So far, Instant Checkout supports only single-item purchases, but the company plans to add multi-item carts and expand merchants and regions.
According to the release, Instant Checkout works by showing users who ask shopping questions the most relevant products from around the web, ranked solely according to their relevance to the user.
If a product supports Instant Checkout, users can click “Buy,” confirm their order shipping and payment details, and carry out the purchase without ever leaving the chat.
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“Orders, payments, and fulfillment are handled by the merchant using their existing systems. ChatGPT simply acts as the user’s AI agent—securely passing information between user and merchant, just like a digital personal shopper would,” the release added.
The service is free for users, but merchants pay a small fee for completed purchases. This payment doesn’t impact prices or color ChatGPT’s product results.
As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote recently, AI agents could pave the way for the single-click purchase OpenAI describes to become “zero click” purchases.
“Here’s what that may look like,” she said. “In a world where agents shop and pay, they will not fill out forms. Consumers will not go to a checkout page. Agents will interpret prompts, orchestrate product and payment options, and execute end to end.”
The consumer will select outcomes and constraints, as well as things like price points, delivery windows, a desire to redeem points, preference for sustainable materials, sizes and colors and favorite brands, the report continued.
The agent will translate those instructions into a sequence of machine calls across merchants, apply loyalty and financing logic, and return a confirmed order with a quick explanation of the tradeoffs and the decision that led to the outcome.
“In that world, the consumer prompt replaces the not-that-always-relevant guesswork that wallets once called personalization,” Webster added. “The consumer and her instructions are the personalization engine. Her wish is the agent’s command.”
