OpenAI has recast shopping in ChatGPT around product discovery, expanding the Agentic Commerce Protocol, or ACP, to support merchant-fed catalogs and rolling out richer product browsing, side-by-side comparisons, conversational filtering and image-based lookalike search to Free, Go, Plus and Pro users.
In the same update, OpenAI said it had improved product coverage, relevance and speed.
The positioning marked a change in emphasis from September last year when OpenAI introduced Instant Checkout as the first step toward letting U.S. Free, Plus and Pro users buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers inside chat, with Shopify merchants and multi-item carts slated to follow.
On March 24, OpenAI said the “initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility” it wanted to provide and said it was now allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while it focused its efforts on product discovery.
What ACP does now and what merchants plug into it
OpenAI’s current commerce documentation still says Instant Checkout in ChatGPT is available to approved partners, but the same documentation also makes clear that merchants remain responsible for payment processing, tax calculation, risk analysis and order acceptance, with OpenAI not acting as the merchant of record.
In the update, ACP is emphasized as a discovery, catalog and promotions layer, even though current docs still include checkout and payment flows.
Merchants can provide structured product feeds containing titles, descriptions, images, price and availability, typically through daily snapshots with additional API updates during the day, while promotions are handled through the API.
Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, Best Buy, The Home Depot and Wayfair have already integrated ACP for discovery, and said Shopify merchant data is now represented through Shopify Catalog.
How results are generated and what the caveats are
According to the firm, product results are not ads and are not influenced by partnerships, but they also say ChatGPT may simplify titles and descriptions, generate labels such as “Budget-friendly” from model judgments and show prices that lag merchant updates. In its ACP materials, OpenAI says required and recommended feed attributes improve correct display, ranking, relevance and user trust.
What Shopify and Walmart show about where control sits
Partner materials released alongside the March 24 shift point in the same direction. Shopify said hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users can now shop from Shopify merchants through Shopify Catalog, completing purchases in an in-app browser or a separate browser tab while merchants remain merchant of record and retain customer relationships and data.
OpenAI, for its part, said Walmart’s new in-ChatGPT app takes users from discovery into a Walmart environment that supports account linking, loyalty and Walmart payments.
The discovery data behind the reprioritization
Broader retail data helps explain why discovery is now carrying more of the story. Adobe said traffic from AI sources to retail sites rose 693.4% year over year during the 2025 holiday season, while Salesforce said traffic from third-party AI search channels such as ChatGPT and Perplexity doubled and converted nine times more often than social referrals.
Both sets of figures describe AI as a growing discovery and referral surface, but they measure traffic and conversion on retailer sites rather than a transfer of merchant-of-record status to AI platforms.
Read together, the update, the current ACP docs and the partner announcements show ChatGPT shopping being reorganized around a narrower role.
That role is to help users discover, compare and refine products inside chat, while merchants provide the structured data, preserve the branded purchase flow and keep control of payments, fulfillment and customer ownership.