FLASH: PayPal Coming to ChatGPT Checkout
Another week, another set of big agentic commerce news out of ChatGPT!
Early this morning, PayPal announced that next year the ChatGPT checkout will support PayPal as a digital wallet/payment option.
The release also talks about the ‘merchant’ side of the PayPal equation and the deal enables PayPal merchants to now list their inventory and sell on ChatGPT via the ChatGPT Instant Checkout / ACP system.
Why it Matters…
This matters for several reasons:
If buyers have any unease/worry about security with the new system using their PayPal wallet will add a layer of security. There are hundreds of millions of consumers with PayPal wallets and thousands of merchants in the PayPal network that can now seamlessly connect.
One thing we know holding back some mid-tier and small retailers not on shopify is the stripe integration. Stripe is more adopted in startups than e-commerce. Conversely, PayPal has great penetration in e-commerce, so this will open up the TAM of merchants.
Perhaps most interestingly in the ‘battle of standards’ (ACP vs. AP2 vs. MCP+, etc.) PayPal breaking ranks with the Google alliance for AP2 shows that, at least in these early days, payment providers and digital wallets are going to have a lot of flexibility.
Wall St. Reaction
PayPal CEO, Alex Chriss has been very bullish on Agentic Commerce (and he’s not tied up on the ‘right’ definition I’ll add for all you Naysayers out there). Back in July he predicted:
When you believe that, you suddenly get a lot more flexible and want to make sure you don’t miss that boat which could be an existential crisis for a payment company whose life blood is payment volume (TPV).
As OpenAI has been announcing deals be they chip deals or data center, public company stocks have been rallying based on investor enthusiasm in AI. On CNBC they call this the OpenAI effect. PayPal enjoyed a ~15% bump in early market trading:
Adding a whopping $10B in market cap in about 20 minutes.
Alex Chriss’ Comments On the Deal
“It’s a whole new paradigm for shopping,” Chriss said. “It’s hard to imagine that agentic commerce isn’t going to be a big part of the future.”
“We’ve got hundreds of millions of loyal PayPal wallet holders who now will be able to click the ‘Buy with PayPal button’ on ChatGPT and have a safe and secure checkout experience,” Chriss said in an interview.
“It’s not just that a transaction can happen,” Chriss said. “It’s that this is a trusted set of merchants, the largest merchant network in the world from PayPal, that are verified, with the largest set of verified consumers in a consumer wallet.”
What’s Next?
What big news will we get next week? I don’t know, but stay tuned, we’ll be on top of it! Welcome to the arena PayPal, nicely played!
Happy Agentic Commercing!