OpenAI revamps shopping experience in ChatGPT after Instant Checkout

OpenAI is rolling out a new shopping experience within ChatGPT to make it easier for users to find and compare products, after its Instant Checkout feature failed to take off.

The company said on Tuesday that shoppers will be able to find products they’re looking for by uploading images or describing items and including criteria like their budget, preferences and other constraints. ChatGPT will offer more visual results that people can use to compare different product offerings.

“Under the hood, we’ve improved speed, relevance, and product coverage — so results are more up-to-date and more useful,” OpenAI said in a blog post.

The update comes after OpenAI pivoted away from Instant Checkout, which allowed users to purchase select items from retailers like Etsy, Walmart and Shopify directly within ChatGPT. OpenAI announced that feature last year and initially billed it as the “next step” in AI-enabled commerce.

Analysts previously told CNBC that OpenAI underestimated how difficult the enablement of transactions would be. It struggled to onboard merchants, show accurate data about products, and introduce multi-item carts or connect loyalty memberships.

“We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide, so we’re allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery,” OpenAI said in the latest post.

OpenAI said merchants can now share their product feeds and promotions with the company, which means their products are “fully represented” within ChatGPT. Retailers like Target, Sephora and Nordstrom already support OpenAI’s new product discovery experience.

Merchants interested in deeper integrations can also continue to develop custom apps within ChatGPT, OpenAI said. The company introduced that functionality at its annual developer conference in October and began adding dedicated retail apps from Instacart, Target and others last year.

Triggering an app within the chatbot will help give those companies more control of the customer experience and the transaction process. Walmart introduced an in-app ChatGPT service on Tuesday that supports linking, loyalty and Walmart payments, OpenAI said.

Alongside OpenAI’s announcement, Shopify said Tuesday that it’s “upgrading the shopping experience” in ChatGPT. It will allow Shopify merchants to connect their storefronts to its catalog, “then complete purchases via an in-app browser.”

Shopify is also rolling out a new service called Agentic Plan that lets merchants who don’t have a storefront with the company surface their products via Shopify’s own tools in ChatGPT, Google Gemini and elsewhere.

–CNBC’s Annie Palmer contributed to this report

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