For decades, the rhythm of online shopping was predictable, if often frustrating: search, scroll, cart, checkout. Then social platforms like Facebook and Instagram shook things up by dropping products directly into your feed for the ultimate impulse buy. Now OpenAI and Stripe are upping the ante, folding shopping into the flow of an AI chat—a kind of holy grail for consumers who want to go from idea to purchase in seconds.
On Wednesday, the companies unveiled an Instant Checkout feature in ChatGPT, powered by a new commerce protocol they codeveloped. The feature is launching first with U.S.-based Etsy sellers and will soon extend to more than a million Shopify merchants, including buzzy brands like Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori. The protocol sits on top of an open standard for connecting AI models to business systems—but focuses specifically on commerce and payments. Stripe brings fraud prevention, global payment rails, and a vast merchant network, making the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) usable by millions of businesses right out of the gate.
