🚨BREAKING: Shopify /ChatGPT Instant Checkout Integration Is Live in the Wild! 🔥(No Tricks👻 only Treats🍬)🎃

We've discovered the second large partnership is live (after Etsy) with anchor Shopify stores' items available for checkout on ChatGPT, plus some new features AND we see a glitch or two.

Shopify/Glossier Welcome to ChatGPT Instant Checkout!

One of Shopify’s favorite large merchants to talk about is Glossier so we had a, shall we say, well informed opinion that we may see something happy on a ChatGPT Glossier product card soon, maybe even before November.

Live Example

As of 11am EST this is how to see this on desktop and phone:

prompt: “I’m looking for glossier products for my 16yr old daughter’s birthday” (this will shortcut you there, you could start higher in the funnel if you want)

Click on the Balm Dotcom Product Card and get these Offers:

There are three offers at the same price, but look at that Big Beautiful Buy botton on Glossier and the (i) Instant Checkout logo. Yep, mark your calendars the first Shopify store is live!

You’ll notice there’s a variation picker (that was there with the Etsy integration, not new). If I pick Espresso (yum!☕️) and hit buy, I get the same checkout experience as the Etsy integration:

I can choose expedited and the price adjusts as you would expect.

What’s new: Variation Canonicalization

One thing that IS new with this roll-out vs. Etsy is what we’d call Variation Canonicalization. With every Etsy product, because they are sooo long-tail, there was a 1:1 between Product Card and Offer. That makes variations easy because you don’t have to figure out to do with each offer’s variations. ChatGPT has now crossed the rubicon and is going to have to deal with that and it’s a very very very hard problem. For example, Perplexity does this already and many of the problems we find on Perplexity have a root cause back to the Variation Canonicalization.

Variation Canonicalization Example

Why is it hard? Glad you asked. It’s Friday and you know what that means?! Time to get NERDY! 🤓 For this lip gloss, let’s say you have this matrix:

Complications:

• Not every offer has the same variants

• How do match these up (I hope you said - “Isn’t that this canonicalization thing Scot goes on and on about!?” If you did - 100 points Gryffindor!” )

• What do you do if they don’t match ‘exactly’ (Glossier:Coconut // Sephora/Coconuts)?

• What do you do with Cherry/Red and Red/Cherry?

It’s hard. You can’t just take the union of variants, you have to take the union and then figure out if you can collapse any of them down. But what you also want to do is have the user interface (product card/Offer in this example) reflect the right merchant when the variation is picked. For example, in my table Kohl’s is the only one with Rose, so if the buyer picks ‘Rose’, Glossier+Sephora should not have offers, because they don’t have that variant. But if they pick ‘Birthday’, not it inverts - Kohl’s goes away and back in pop Glossier and Sephora.

Also, guess what, you can go out of stock of a variant. Suddenly that Rose in Kohl’s is gone and you have to update the whole enchilada again.

This is the tip of the iceberg of complexity here, but hopefully it helps you see that every cool little thing you see as a buyer as a much deeper problem set behind it being solved.

Fun Glitch: Who wants to try ‘dev1’ flavor lip balm?

If you look at the list of variations on this product, do you notice something? (Other than they are very nicely alphabetized.)

Yep Dev1. I’m going to guess this was added by someone on the Shopify or the ChatGPT side to work on…. yep, variation canonicalization.

Here’s why I think that’s what’s going on. Look at what happens if I select Dev1:

A++, the other offers go away (Sephora/Kohl’s) because they don’t have that variant. 👨‍🍳😘. They had to create Dev1 because in this case, all three merchants had all the variants in stock so they needed to create an example that would test and show the UI was right and ‘punched out’ the 2 merchants that don’t have the offer.

Go Get Some Glossier!

Enjoy playing with this, Happy Friday, Happy Halloween, we’ll be back to you next month with more exciting Agentic Commerce news, strategies and analysis.

P.S. Let us know if you find any more Shopify stores live in the wild.