What just happened?
OpenAI just nixed its “Instant Checkout” functionality that enabled shoppers to complete their orders directly in ChatGPT.
The Information broke the story, which cites a statement from OpenAI that includes words like “temporary” and “scale back.” The story says checkout is moving into merchants’ apps within ChatGPT, or back to merchants’ websites (which, of course, makes the answer engine just a referral, as search engines always have been).
Where were we before this change?
For months, shopping in answer engines has been the shiny new object in digital selling conversations. The hype would have us all believe that every consumer will ask questions about products in answer engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity, will buy right there in the thread, and will never visit a retail website again. The market broadly refers to answer engine shopping as “agentic commerce” though agentic processes technically require more autonomy than these processes currently include.
Are consumers even shopping this way?
Although it’s growing, consumer adoption of answer engines for just shopping (i.e., browsing, not purchasing) is still relatively low. Just 23% of GenX US online adults have used ChatGPT (the most popular answer engine in the US) in the past month to search for products, per Forrester’s December 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey. Adoption climbs for Millennials (32%) and GenZ (35%). For older generations, it’s in the single digits.
The OpenAI news, per The Information, reminds us that the market is in an experimental phase when it comes to “agentic commerce.” In fact, folks across the market are appropriating the term with endlessly different definitions. (Note: Forrester’s Agentic Commerce Glossary is set to publish this month.)
What does this mean for Shopify’s exclusive partnership with OpenAI?
When it was announced in late 2025, Shopify’s partnership with OpenAI sent other commerce solution competitors scrambling. Shopify recently announced a catalog service for merchants that don’t use Shopify for commerce, which will create product catalogs that will flow directly into ChatGPT. Per The Information article, only a dozen Shopify merchants were live with this feature, though Shopify confirmed to Forrester a month ago that the number was closer to 30 and climbing. Still, that’s a drop in the bucket of Shopify’s millions of merchants, and Shopify’s chatGPT-specific landing page now redirects to its homepage.
Prior to this week’s announcement, the partnership enabled native checkout for Shopify merchants in ChatGPT, supported by Shopify Payments, which resulted in the orders flowing back into Shopify (which was a meaningful differentiator for native checkouts). Shopify officially confirmed on Friday (March 6) to Forrester that it continues to provide its merchants with syndication to ChatGPT. However, per OpenAI’s statement to The Information, the native checkout within ChatGPT is now gone. Instead, merchants can build apps within ChatGPT or allow answer engines to function as search engines have, and refer shoppers to the merchants’ websites to order.
How should merchants interpret this move?
Answer engines themselves are still nascent. The market is learning, all together, how – and how quickly – consumers will adopt conversational commerce journeys. Remember that:
Agentic commerce is not the “death of the retail website.” We’re working with our colleague Joe Stanhope on a project on this topic, which we’ll have out in about a month. Websites will need to change, but they’re not over.
Inventory management has been disastrously absent from the plan. Because most product feeds into answer engines were either pulled in by the engine (via crawling merchant websites and scraping the product data) or via feed (like from commerce solutions like Shopify), the engines usually only saw what was available for sale on the site. The lack of visibility into planned inventory for the channel created issues. A strategic approach to the channel would require assortment plan with intentionally allocated inventory for the channel. From showing out of stock items to offering exclusive products never intended for selling in the channel, this was a big miss.
Commerce isn’t just checkout, and buying directly in answer engines was unproven. The checkout moment is proving to be the most squirrely to replicate in this channel, as this announcement confirms. Payments are complex and require heavy compliance. Order completion is actually emotional and it’s easy to lose customers’ patience, trust, and even attention, before it’s done. In our latest consumer data (Forrester’s ConsumerVoices Market Research Online Community Survey March 2026), online adults in the US, UK, and Canada who regularly use answer engines note that completing a purchase of a product/service within the answer engine is their least-adopted use case. Unsurprisingly, asking general questions and researching a product/service were their top two use cases. It’s too soon to know what native checkout in answer engines will look like in the long run, but it appears OpenAI made the call to pull the plug on native checkout early.
Hedging the Hype: What should merchants do about this now?
We’ve been talking our clients through this all along. Our advice remains the same. For now, here’s what we need you to hear:
Evaluate every new digital channel and strategy, including answer engines. The fast and furious announcements, partnerships, launches, and “This changes everything!” promises make it easy to forget that answer engines are just another digital channel that each require their own strategy. But our advice is clear and consistent: evaluate the opportunity and build a strategy for answer engine selling. Don’t fling yourself into it because you think everyone else has it figured out already.
Diversify your approach. Hedge your bets: no merchant should be 100% reliant on any one digital channel or partnership for their strategy. OpenAI’s pivot is your reminder to spread risk. Move cautiously into new channels, assessing the opportunity and limiting your exposure. Minimize investment until the channel proves its value.
Focus on discoverability, not giving up the checkout moment. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) should be a part of every digital marketer’s playbook now. The fight for visibility in answer engines is real. Hold on to the checkout process and its related data and margin protection and focus, as always, on thorough, valuable, and authoritative product content.
Create a culture of perpetual learning. As genAI evolves, we will continue to see new technologies, opportunities, channels, modes of interaction, and processes. Encourage your teams to experiment, observe, and stay agile. See every new development as a learning opportunity.
Want to discuss how your organization is thinking about agentic commerce? Forrester clients can book a Guidance Session or inquiry with us.
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