ChatGPT Instant Checkout: Deep Dive Part I/III

Now that we know ALL the juicy details about ChatGPT Instant Checkout, it's time to go deep on this exciting and game changing new development in the world of Agentic Commerce.

Our goal here at Retailgentic is to provide you not only the fastest most targeted information about Agentic Commerce, but also to go deeper than anyone else. This will allow you to properly assess the opportunity, threats and, ultimately form your strategy for how to navigate this rapidly changing world.

Yesterday we had the ‘predicted by yours truly’ earth shattering announcement of ChatGPT Instant Checkout. There were a plethora of surprises, questions answered and questions left unanswered that we have now had 24hrs to digest and are going to be going over here in a three part series:

• Part I - User Experience, Merchant (DTC Brand or Retailer) Experience and what does this mean for Merchants (you, most of my reaers) and Agentic Commerce strategically?

• Part II - Let’s get nerdy and dig into the feed and ACP specs to understand more.

• Part III - Open questions, what the naysayers are saying, and FAQs we are hearing from merchants with answers where available.

ChatGPT Instant Checkout User Experience

Instead of creating an 80 page walk through, this is going to be much more efficient in a video, here’s a < 5min video walk through of me purchasing a gift via ChatGPT. You can see I go from Research→Find→Buy in seconds - this collapsing of the funnel is going to be a recurring them and you’ll see it first hand here. I’ve also heard folks talk about a complete conversational buying experience or as Harvey Finkelstein at Shopify calls it: “Conversations are a new storefront”.

Buyer User Experience Highlights

Thanks to innovations from Shopify and their one-page checkout and Stripe, checkout has come a long way. As mentioned on the video:

• Single item - This is a single item experience, not a cart. That being said several articles I read mentioned that ‘more complex checkouts are coming soon’ - without attribution. Reading between the tea leaves, I think this came from the Stripe camp and not the ChatGPT side. Stripe can certainly handle much more complex situations given their expertise in payments, so I suspect by Holiday 2026, this feature will have dramatically matured. Items like a multi-item/multi-vendor cart, cross-border trade, multi-currency, complex variations, will all be added.

• 100% relevance - ChatGPT has gone out of their way to make it very clear to the buyer that this is 100% not paid to play. Here’s what the user sees→

When you click more it goes to a consumer-oriented very long help page here.

What I found most interesting was this snippet→

Merchants - re-read that first bullet very carefully “Structured metadata from first-party…” (you are first-party in this sentence).

Merchant Experience Highlights

I’m going to keep this high-level and not talk about implementation, that’s coming in Part II, but here once you’re integrated, what’s the experience like for a merchant? On what I call the Merchant Experience side:

• Fees - All we know at this point is that ChatGPT charges merchants a ‘small fee’. We’ve heard whispers of a ‘low single digit fee’ so that puts us in the 1-5% zone to ChatGPT and Stripe’s list price is 2.9% plus $.30/transaction. Put those together and we have a range of 4-8% plus a $X/transaction. Given that marketplace take rates inclusive of payment depending on category and other factors (excluding add-ons like ad network spend, FBA-like programs, etc) are in the 12-20% range, this is quite a deal especially given you ‘get the customer’ and are MoR. Fee-wise, even compared to the effective take rate of ad-based channels like Google or Meta, ChatGPT instant checkout is a no-brainer.

• Merchant of Record (MoR)- After the leak that ChatGPT was working on a checkout, I had many conversations with merchants who were concerned and even incredulous this would work, because in their mind, it would be like Amazon where Amazon is (MoR). Stripe has had a third-party MoR capability for a long time, so I felt this is the direction ChatGPT would take as they are smart enough to not get tangled up the risk and liability associated with MoR. and that’s where we landed. Some marketplaces that have a similar setup are not clear about it and that was another concern I heard - “How will the customer know who they are buying from? Well, I think ChatGPT has really addressed that well, and, in fact may have even overdone it - they mention the merchant (or marketplace+seller) no fewer than 14 times in the process! Let’s walk through them.

In the research phase, it’s 100% clear who you are buying from, we’ve covered that ground 1000’s of times so we’ll skip that, now in Find→

It’s consistent, logo’d and authenticated that we are buying from Etsy and the seller ‘TinyTomatoCo’.

As we get into Buy it comes up another 3 times:

We have the header, the total to be paid and then the giant ‘Pay Etsy’ button. It actually animates and says Etsy 2-3 more times, but I’m not even counting those as same surface area.

Finally, at the checkout confirm page, we are told very clearly who we just purchased from a whopping 6 times→ Etsy, Etsy, Etsy, Etsy, Etsy,Etsy!!!!

Finally, in the ChatGPT order flow→ we have 4 more

For a total of 14 times from Research to post transaction it has been made CRYSTAL clear who the merchant is. I think ChatGPT has done more than enough to really put this concern to bed. This is also a strong positive to merchants, as other ‘channels’ and especially marketplaces have taken a very anti-merchant approach: “It’s our customer, you rent them for a transaction and we’re not telling you anything about them.

ChatGPT is saying - hey people love our experience and may choose it, if you Retailer/Brand want to help us make it better for them we’d love for you to join our checkout program, you are MoR, it’s still your customer - here’s a paid-for transaction, here’s their email and shop-to - have fun, re-market to them, loyalty program them up - party on!

This is super-smart and I think will make merchants both need and WANT to work with them. This gives us hope that ChatGPT will add more merchant-friendly options that have been missing from many third-party checkouts: loyalty program integration, up-sells, additional data collection, marketing opt-ins, etc.

ChatGPT Instant Checkout vs. Amazon Merchant Mindset

Finally, to me, this is what should make Amazon the most afraid. I know literally thousands of Amazon sellers that are pretty fed up with the ‘rent our customer’ approach because it comes with some very heavy-handed elements well documented by journalists such as Jason Del Rey - he even wrote a book about it!

Strategy: What Does ChatGPT Instant Checkout Mean for YOU and Agentic Commerce?

Merchant Strategy Considerations

Every merchant is now facing a theological decision right now and we don’t have a lot of time. Let’s cover that first, then look at a Bull case 🐂 (for/pro) and a Bear case 🐻 (against/con).

59 Days ⏰

There are 59 days between Oct 1 and Black Friday (Nov 28) this year. Until then, you’re looking at a whole year until you’re back in this game. Will merchants that embrace this now take share on ChatGPT from you due to the compression of the funnel? Do you want to sit this out? Based on my experience from the launches of these new opportunities, the merchants that jump on them early, get a huge head-start on both the tactics (conversion optimizations, etc.) and the strategies (what to send, what not to send, pricing, bundling, etc.) that will pay dividends for a long time.

I’ll help you think about if you want to pull the trigger on this and probably re-sort your priorities with a bull case vs. bear case argument.

The Bull Case: 🐂📈

• ChatGPT has a reported 700m active users and 3.1B monthly visits to their site (similarweb).

• Most surveys triangulate on 40-50% of those users using ChatGPT to either Research or Find products.

• Instant Checkout is the most Retailer/Brand-friendly implementation I’ve ever seen. You are MoR, you are capturing a zero-sum transaction AND acquiring a potential ‘new to you’ buyer.

• The fees seem quite reasonable and I’m going to make an educated guess they are 70-50% less than any marketplace or ad-based channel you have.

• The front-end of this is relatively painless (more in Part II) and if you have an ‘order API’ or on one of the standard big e-commerce platforms, you should be able to get this done in < 30 days.

• LFG! 🚀🚀🚀 (you know who to reach out to if you want a partner that’s on top of this 😉)

The Bear Case:🐻📉

Note: I’ve heard all of these objections and while I think they are off-base or not the right decision, I want to strongly make both arguments as a helpful thought experiment so you understand both sides:

• Our legal dept doesn’t understand AI and made our IT team block all the bots including ChatGPT Perplexity. They’ll never loosen up this year.

• Pinterest tried a checkout, so did Meta (Instagram) and it was a dud. This is going to be a huge nothing-burger.

• I’ve seen some data that says 2% of ChatGPT prompts are shopping based, even if we go through all this work, there’s zero guarantee it will drive any sales.

• I have 10 other bigger projects to knock out before the lock-down, I can’t get to this this year, heck probably next year either.

• I’ll wait and let ‘CompetitorX’ take the arrows and figure this out, then next year if it’s big, I have plenty of time to jump in and copy what they did.

• What’s going to happen when someone returns one of these products to my store in Iowa and says: “I bought it on ChatGPT” - how do we deal with all that mess?

Instant Checkout’s Agentic Commerce Strategic Implications

We’re updating the ‘Retailgentic Agentic Shopping Levels of Autonomy’ tracker today and moving ChatGPT from ‘Level 2- Find’ to ‘Level 3 - Buy’:

It’s a bit of a nuance, but ChatGPT Instant Checkout has leap-frogged Perplexity, so they are now at the top of Level - 3 to indicate that. I suspect next year as they add more complex checkout technologies, we’ll see them move up to Level 4: cart, loyalty program integration, etc.

What About the Other Six Players?

The heat is now on - especially for Google Gemini!! Google announced an interesting looking Agentic Checkout at Google I/O. Where is it? They have 30 days to get this out with any hope of it hardening before Holiday kicks in. Microsoft Copilot is in the same situation - they have a limited checkout capability in their mobile app (I only just was told this - it’s been out since Spring supports limited mercants and who uses the copilot app? I also was made aware there is a ‘copilot app’ - haha). It needs to be bigger, they need to get in this game.

I think it’s safe to say we won’t see anything this year from the other 4 players: Apple, Anthropic/Claude, XAI/Grok and Meta AI.

Up Next…

In Part II, we’re going to do a deep dive into both parts of the technical side of ChatGPT Instant Checkout: the new inventory+catalog feed specification and the ACP checkout protocol and integration points.