- OpenAI makes it easy to discover new products and compare them in ChatGPT
- Shoppers Didn’t Like Instant Checkout That Much, Company Admits
- Companies like Walmart connect their own environment to ChatGPT
OpenAI announced a new shopping experience on ChatGPT, designed to better help users discover new products and compare multiple options.
The updates are primarily about a more visual interface: ChatGPT users can upload images as well as text, setting budget constraints and preferences, and the results are also now more visual with clearer side-by-side comparisons.
Besides the customer-facing interface, OpenAI has also made under-the-hood changes to improve speed, relevance, and product coverage.
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However, the company also recognized that while buyers are interested in learning more about potential purchases through AI, they are not very inclined to purchase through ChatGPT. As a result, Instant Checkout is scaled back and ChatGPT will focus on more conventional shopping journeys for merchants.
There are still opportunities for marketers to partner more closely with chatbot interaction. For example, Walmart (a company that was at the top for years before being dethroned by Amazon) will support Walmart account linking, loyalty, and payments within ChatGPT.
“By working closely with OpenAI, we have been able to learn together as we rapidly move forward to shape what agent commerce can become,” wrote Daniel Danker, executive vice president of Walmart.
And while Anthropic has been praised for opening MCP, OpenAI wants to be known for ACP, the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which acts as a backend layer to connect merchants to users. The latest ACP enhancements make product discovery easier.
“As with other parts of ChatGPT, we are building iteratively,” the company wrote, suggesting it could continue to change course as it did with Instant Checkout. “We learn from early launches, incorporating user and merchant feedback, and continuing to improve the experience over time.”
The updated shopping experience is now rolling out to Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users.
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