“Buy In ChatGPT” is live, here’s what brands need to know

“Buy it in ChatGPT” is now officially here! Most relevant to our brands is the direct integration with Shopify. Does your brand sell with Shopify and want to know what you need to do to get in on the action? Keep reading. 

Quick facts:

• Open to Etsy and Shopify sellers only

• Sellers must apply here

• ChatGPT will “reach out and onboard merchants on a rolling basis,” with no quotas or timelines provided

• OpenAI will take a “small fee” from each transaction, but this number has not been publicly disclosed

What is new

Consumers will now be able to get their product recommendations AND check out directly in ChatGPT. Rather than having to click to the merchant’s website, the transaction will all take place in-platform. 

What is not new

While we’re all riding the AI wave right now, looking at the impact that these emerging technologies will have on our businesses and day-to-day lives, this is not a surprising or new trend. Tech companies, especially in search and social, have been trying to attract shopping to their platforms for years, with mixed success. Sucharita Kodali, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester recently told NPR’s Marketplace: 

“This happens over and over and over again. Every large tech company goes through this cycle where they think we're going to own commerce now. Meta, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok and Google have all tried to bring shopping transactions directly onto their platforms, with mixed results.”

Those mixed results come from a few factors. 

• The desire for retailers and brands to own their own data — if the transaction doesn’t on your site, you lose that data. 

• Consumers continue to seek a deeper experience than a purely transactional one. Brand loyalty, better content experiences, and UI/UX and datafeed challenges (like accurate inventory) all contribute.

So what?

In our research, traffic from ChatGPT to our clients websites was less than 1% of total web traffic in Q3 of 2025. It is, however, growing. The graph below shows an example from one client website — steady growth from near zero at the beginning of the year, and increasing.

We also do not have good visibility into the clickthrough rates of ChatGPT, but we know that there is a lot of opportunity. Currently, links are not very prominent or promoted by the platform. But shopping could be a major change, turning more searches into traffic and conversions. The orders of magnitude and rate of growth are the continued unknowns. 

Traffic to one client website in 2025 — showing strong growth

Conclusion — should your brand sign up?

While ChatGPT says products available for Instant Checkout won’t be favored in results, we’ve heard similar lines from tech companies like Google in the past

Regardless of any potential favoritism, brands face the potential benefits and risks of participating or not participating. The obvious upside is potentially driving new conversions directly in-platform on ChatGPT. We know that showing up in AI searches is becoming more important as more consumers turn to the platforms for product recommendations, and now those can become customers without any additional hurdles to conversion. 

Potential downsides can include: an uneven playing field if your competitors sign up, potential margin loss, control over customer data and experience, and operational complexity. There’s also the larger platform risk. OpenAI could change fees or policies, and uncertainty around how much value the channel actually adds versus the potential loss of customer relationships and brand independence.

Final recommendation: for Shopify merchants, the lift to sign up is pretty low, so we would recommend giving it a shot. The timeline and scope of this rollout are still unknown, but it’s typically easy to pull out of one of these trials or platforms if they are more trouble than they’re worth. The future of search and product discovery is being rewritten, with a more fragmented landscape than ever before, so additional channels to capture customers, like with ChatGPT shopping, are an appealing proposition. With PR becoming ever-more important in the way that ChatGPT recommends products, this might be a great way to show the value with conversions directly coming from those recommendations.