The future of agentic commerce appears to be shifting at OpenAI, where the company’s Instant Checkout feature for ChatGPT is reportedly being sidelined in favor of checkout experiences through merchants that use ChatGPT apps.
The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which OpenAI and the payments vendor Stripe co-developed together, seems poised to live on. However, instead of powering purchases made directly from product listings appearing in ChatGPT’s prompt responses, it will facilitate transactions in different forms.
Target became one of the most prominent retailers to announce its own ChatGPT app in time for the 2025 holiday shopping season. The wedding-planning platform The Knot also announced ChatGPT app plans, with a DoorDash app and an Instacart app joining OpenAI’s app family as well.
What is happening to OpenAI’s agentic commerce experience in ChatGPT?
“We’re evolving how we approach commerce in ChatGPT to better meet merchants and users where they are,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement replying to questions from Digital Commerce 360.
The statement echoed points made in an earlier report published by The Information.
“We’re prioritizing making ChatGPT search and product discovery great, with ACP serving as the infrastructure that connects users to merchants across the full shopping journey,” the spokesperson told Digital Commerce 360. “Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases can happen more seamlessly.”
In making this move, ChatGPT seems to acknowledge that merchants’ concerns and the complexity of transactions — which intersect in-store stock status, sales tax collection and pricing — require constant updates and may be better addressed through individual apps. The changes reflect an iterative approach, based on what it has observed so far.
What OpenAI’s shift means for online retailers
“We appreciate our partners for learning with us and look forward to sharing more as we continue building in this area,” the OpenAI spokesperson stated.
The changes followed remarks from Harley Finkelstein, the president at ecommerce platform Shopify, on March 3. Shopify and Etsy were among the first participants to begin using ChatGPT’s checkout features in 2025. Speaking at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley in San Francisco, Finkelstein outlined concerns for Shopify related to agentic commerce, including the integrity of transaction activities as a protective moat.
“Now that is not just the payment,” he explained. “That is the checkout itself, that is subscriptions, that is the inventory, that is shipping taxes, all the different merchandising options that come with any type of transaction.”
In addition, he emphasized why he sees control over proprietary data remaining crucial over time.
“And the way that Shopify is set up, we have millions of stores, millions of merchants,” he said. “We also have billions of transactions and trillions of data points, which means that over time, our system actually gets smarter and it sort of creates this flywheel effect.”
Finkelstein cited three main partners that Shopify works with for AI discovery and agentic commerce, including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, which facilitate product discovery for Shopify merchants through agentic channels. Shopify has its own Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). He described UCP as “an open-source language every agent tool to speak to every one of our merchants or every merchant in general, so that the experience on the agentic application feels just as good as it does buying from an online store.”
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