OpenAI’s plan to turn ChatGPT into an e-commerce hub is not progressing as planned, at least not yet. In an announcement Tuesday, the company said it is pivoting away from a recently released feature that allowed users to purchase items directly from the chatbot’s interface.
OpenAI originally launched purchasing functionality on ChatGPT last year, positioning itself as a “shopping assistant” that can connect consumers with relevant vendors. A feature called “Instant Checkout” was launched in September and encouraged users to have a conversation with a chatbot about what they wanted to buy and add the items to a checkout cart within ChatGPT, similar to traditional e-commerce sites. Items were purchased from vendors, and ChatGPT served as the portal for those purchases.
However, instant checkout was not a huge success. “We found that the early versions of Instant Checkout didn’t offer the level of flexibility we wanted to offer, so we’re focusing on product discovery while also allowing merchants to use their own checkout experience,” the company explained in a blog post. OpenAI told TechCrunch that merchants will still have the option to incorporate this functionality through their apps within ChatGPT for the time being.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company plans to deprioritize the development of Instant Checkout as a standalone feature and instead prioritize development of product discovery for consumers. OpenAI will continue to support various checkout channels, including through merchants’ own websites, they said.
The Information and CNBC previously reported that OpenAI’s new plan would see merchants create their own apps within ChatGPT, directing users to a checkout experience on each merchant’s website. Sources who spoke to The Information noted that ChatGPT users simply “don’t use chatbots to actually help them make purchases,” and said an October study looking at referral traffic from ChatGPT found that e-commerce sites don’t make much money from ChatGPT users.
Instead of turning ChatGPT into a shopping portal, what OpenAI is doing now is building the chatbot into a centralized hub for consumer information. That way, online shoppers will perceive it as an intermediate research tool to help them decide which product to ultimately purchase.
This shopping experience is powered by Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard for e-commerce developed by the company in partnership with fintech giant Stripe. This protocol utilizes data provided by participating merchants.
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In the future, ChatGPT will provide more detailed information about products, displaying side-by-side photos, as well as other comparative metrics for each item, such as price, features, and reviews, OpenAI said.
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