OpenAI has officially turned ChatGPT into a storefront. With native checkout powered by Stripe built directly into the chat experience, the walls between discovery and conversion are collapsing.
Consumers can now ask for recommendations, compare products, and complete purchases, all without ever visiting a brand’s website.
For e-commerce leaders, this is more than a feature launch. It signals an acceleration of what we are calling “distributed commerce” – the ongoing shift of traffic and conversions away from brand websites and into marketplaces and traffic sources themselves.
It raises urgent questions for marketers, C-Suite, and the boardroom:
Let’s break it down.
Table of Contents:
The traditional e-commerce funnel — search → click → landing page → cart → checkout — is being rendered obsolete. In ChatGPT’s new model, the funnel compresses into a single, fluid interaction – not unlike what was already happening with Amazon Marketplace or Tiktok Shop.
In this model, visibility becomes revenue. If ChatGPT recommends your product, you’re in the checkout flow. If it doesn’t, you’re invisible at the moment of purchase.
The question isn’t whether this change will stick. It’s how quickly it will reshape consumer expectations, and how e-commerce teams should adapt.
Apart from the difference in technology, attempts to control the entire purchase lifecycle have existed for a long time.
ChatGPT’s move feels different, primarily due to its release of ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) — an open source protocol OpenAI codeveloped with Stripe that lets any platform or merchant replicate what they are doing. While not without challenges (integration complexity, payments, fulfillment, customer service), it opens the door for broader adoption than walled-garden solutions.
We expect shopping cart platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix to move quickly here, giving merchants a bridge into ChatGPT’s, and potentially other, discovery ecosystems.
Google has tested the ability to complete purchases (both in E-commerce and in travel) directly on Google’s properties without ever visiting the merchant in question. They shut it down in 2021, indicating that this may be a tougher nut to crack than just the release of a protocol or a seamless integration.
The success of this effort is reliant on ChatGPT reaching:
ChatGPT is most definitely the underdog when it comes to search and shopping, and success with this is likely not going to be a straight path for them.
This shift forces a fundamental rethink of the role of the website in the near future.
For years, brands have invested in experiences — carefully crafted site taxonomies, personalized merchandising, promotional flows, and opportunities for non-purchase conversions (i.e. email capture, loyalty programs, etc.)
If the transaction moves off-site, what is the website’s purpose?
The decision to participate in this or not is a key question that will be debated in the C-suite. Here are some factors that may play into the decision:
Companies that missed the wagon with traditional search may be willing to invest early to make sure they don’t miss this wave.
To prepare for ChatGPT’s checkout era, e-commerce teams need to act now.
Here are some tactics we suggest implementing.
For brands, this shift changes the core currency of e-commerce success: visibility at the point of purchase.
In ChatGPT, being cited as the recommended source means your product is not just discovered, it’s bought. If your products aren’t present in these AI-driven listings, you’re effectively invisible at the moment of conversion.
Clarity ArcAI’s Shopping feature is designed to give you visibility into which prompts trigger shopping results, which products, brands, and merchants are featured, and exactly where your brand appears — along with the gaps where it doesn’t.
These insight becomes the foundation of any approach to win more customers.
Product data quality is now mission-critical:
Any mismatch reduces your chances of surfacing, and in this new world, that means missed revenue.
The seoClarity platform combines trillions of data points to help uncover exactly what your products are missing and provides guidance on enriching the data across millions of products at scale.
History teaches us that this kind of disruption isn’t new — from catalog shopping to Skymall to Amazon.
Each time, distribution shifted, and brands had to decide whether to resist or participate.
ChatGPT checkout is the next wave of distributed commerce. The brands that thrive will be the ones that adapt their data, unify their teams, and embrace new forms of visibility as the new path to revenue.