OpenAI’s efforts to transform online shopping are faltering.
According to new reporting from The Information, the company is walking back its plan to allow users to buy products suggested by ChatGPT directly inside the chatbot. Now, the company will route users to a connected third-party app, where they can input payment information and finalize the purchase.
“We are evolving our commerce strategy within ChatGPT to better meet merchants and users where they are,” an OpenAI spokesperson told the outlet. “Instant checkout is transitioning to apps, where purchases can occur more seamlessly.”
It’s a small change that betrays a major shift in OpenAI’s approach to online shopping. Last September, it launched “Instant Checkout” for ChatGPT, which allowed users to browse products from selected retailers and complete purchases without leaving the chat window. The feature was launched in partnership with Shopify, Etsy, and other large shopping platforms like Walmart and Target followed, in a show of the effort’s ambition.
This, in theory, posed an existential threat to retailers that didn’t get on board. People are increasingly using AI chatbots to browse the web, look up information, and indeed find products, making it less likely for someone to directly access a brand’s website. If ChatGPT’s anaconda grip around the web tightened, then retailers faced getting iced out of its ecosystem, meaning fewer sales.
But OpenAI’s efforts have hit a few reality checks. One, according to The Information‘s reporting, was that OpenAI’s data showed few users were finalizing their purchases inside the chatbot, despite many of them using it to browse for products.
This gave OpenAI little incentive to address the other big issue: that acting as a storefront requires a lot of hard work. Providing live prices and other data on millions of products from countless merchants is an enormous undertaking. If ChatGPT provides data that’s slightly inaccurate or out of date, it could cause a transaction to fail. Then there’s the additional responsibility of dealing with refunds, cancellations, and fraud prevention, all while complying with tax and consumer protection laws.
News of OpenAI’s shopping scaleback sent shares of Expedia and Tripadvisor soaring by 8 percent and 13 percent respectively on Thursday. Investors had feared that AI agents could cut online travel agents out as middlemen to make bookings and travel itineraries.
While it’s cause for celebration for those companies, this isn’t OpenAI admitting defeat on online commerce. Many of its purported 700 million actively weekly users still use ChatGPT for product recommendations. But it’s a clear setback in its push to let ChatGPT act as an omnipotent department store, which could have implications for how other AI companies’ efforts in this area fare. Competition is heating up: Meta is testing its own AI shopping research tool to rival OpenAI’s, Bloomberg reported, which currently doesn’t offer a checkout or payment option within its chatbot.
In a note quoted by Business Insider, analysts at TD Cowen called OpenAI’s reversal a “stunning admission.”
“The news signals that AI platforms replacing apps to become the ‘new OS’ is either not playing out, or at a minimum is pushed back significantly,” the Thursday note to investors read.
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