Convenience remains top of mind for consumers in 2025, and retailers are exploring new ways to buy in. Recently, we’ve covered the rise in popularity of innovations like virtual fitting rooms, AI chatbots and voice-assisted shopping.
Now, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research and development company responsible for ChatGPT and other generative models, has announced another notable advancement in digital intelligence technology. In collaboration with payment processing platform Stripe, in September 2025, OpenAI announced its “Instant Checkout” product alongside an open-source agentic commerce protocol, which will allow consumers to buy products directly through ChatGPT. Below is an image from OpenAI that details the process for consumers to connect with retailers to complete their purchases, with the help of their AI assistant to gather data, answer questions, and authorize payment behind the scenes.
For consumers looking for convenience, this innovation is monumental. For merchants, it poses a variety of benefits and challenges.
Benefits
Integration – The open standard protocol co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe is available to all retailers that are looking to take advantage of this new technology, ensuring their checkouts are optimized and ready to be crawled by AI agents. If you’re a merchant looking to get started, it can be as simple as inserting a few lines of code.
Visibility – The biggest benefit for businesses is visibility, as customers may not have known exactly what they were looking for at first, but are now able to discover your products through recommendations that are based solely on relevance. This means that businesses now have exclusive access to 700 million ChatGPT users, many of which are already using the technology to shop.
Customer Experience – From the perspective of your future customers, allowing for a seamless shopping experience through a service they’re already comfortable with will improve the customer experience without much extra effort from retailers. A better customer experience will increase the chances of repeating business.
For merchants looking to take advantage of the many benefits that come with this new technology, there are also a few challenges to consider.
Challenges
Price – Like most payment processing options for retailers, OpenAI does charge a transaction fee for merchants on every completed sale. The program is free to use for consumers, however, and ChatGPT doesn’t influence product prices either.
Control – Customers are building a relationship with ChatGPT when they purchase products through it, not with your business. This will undoubtedly affect the loyalty landscape. If you are an online retailer, you may not have as much control over how customers perceive your products and your brand.
Security – Though OpenAI and Stripe have implemented safeguards to catch and prevent fraudulent activity and encrypt sensitive data during transactions through ChatGPT, the system may create more avenues for customer data to be misused. Especially as Instant Checkout removes friction and makes impulse shopping easier, if criminal activity were to take place, it could potentially be more difficult for retailers to detect it and respond.
Analytics – Because Instant Checkout is responsible for all marketing and checkout flow, this adds another barrier for retailers to understand what’s working, and what isn’t. Only necessary data is shared with the merchant, removing the ability for retailers to collect zero-party data that helps them to personalize the shopping experience, reach out to their customers for marketing purposes, and evaluate their strategy.
Though there are many considerations for merchants looking to get started with OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, retailers will see the benefits of increased visibility and frictionless checkout. If you’re still skeptical, you could consider building an AI chatbot of your own that knows your business inside and out. Depending on your eCommerce platform, you may already have this technology available to you. If you’re looking to increase revenue and optimize your eCommerce site for maximum growth, Virid’s enterprise eCommerce platform, marketAgility, not only comes standard with agentic AI capabilities, but dedicated services and support to guide you each step of the way
Schedule a site consultation today to discuss how Virid can help you grow your eCommerce business.