Will You Be Using Open AI's Instant Checkout In ChatGPT As A Consumer Or As A Merchant?

I tried to emulate the typical response that ChatGPT might give when you order something through Instant Checkout.

Let’s be honest, we’ve all felt that tug when ChatGPT feels like our smartest research assistant. But here’s where things get wild: now it wants to sell stuff for you or maybe to you. Yep, you read that right. OpenAI’s new “Buy It in ChatGPT / Instant Checkout” is turning ChatGPT into your shopping sidekick, a digital concierge that finds, recommends, and completes a purchase, all inside the chat interface.

If you’re in e‑commerce, digital products, or just curious about what’s next in commerce + AI, this is not a “nice to know” it’s a “must understand”. Because this shift rewrites key rules for discovery, traffic, and where the point of sale actually happens. It’s not just about SEO or funnels anymore; now your product might live inside AI, not just on your site.

In my original post, I walked through how to apply to build your product into ChatGPT, explained the technology (Agentic Commerce Protocol + Stripe), and explored the potential & risk for brands, sellers, and funnel builders. Below is a highlight (because I know you love a good quote). Then I’ll boil it down so you get the essence fast with enough ammo to decide whether you jump in, test, or wait.

More than 700 million people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks, including finding products they love. Starting today, we’re taking the first steps toward ChatGPT helping people buy them too—beginning with Instant Checkout, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe.

U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers right in chat, with over a million Shopify merchants, like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx and Vuori, coming soon. Today, Instant Checkout supports single-item purchases. Next, we’ll add multi-item carts and expand merchants and regions.

Yeah I noticed it too. The dreaded em-dash. They let ChatGPT write the announcement. That’s kind of funny when you think about it.

Bottom line: “Buy It in ChatGPT” (OpenAI’s Instant Checkout) is a gamechanger. It lets users go from “Hey ChatGPT, find me X” to “Yep, buy it” all in one interface. No redirects, no leaving the chat. Merchant integrations (like Shopify, Etsy) via the Agentic Commerce Protocol make this possible.

This matters for your business because it flips part of the funnel inside AI. The user may never actually visit your website. They just transact in ChatGPT. And they won’t be the only one. Google also just made a deal with PayPal for Agentic E-Commerce.

It is more important than ever to make sure AI knows the who, what, when, where and why of your brand and your products. At Chris McElroy SEO Agency, we are doing our best to help people understand how to make their brand and their products or services more visible to AI. Entity SEO is extremely important if you want to future proof your online business.

Entity SEO is not the same as traditional SEO. Google uses AI to understand you personally and your brand and your products for it’s knowledge base. It also has to understand the relationship between your website, social media profiles, company pages, products and activity forming an Entity Graph. ChatGPT and other AI search tools train on that same data.

It’s more complicated than “write some content, buy some links, and put in some schema markup hoping to get a rich snippet in Google. I’ll be writing a lot more about this, but if you have questions, feel free to DM me here on Substack or click here to set up a free 15 minute consultation.

Your visibility, conversion, branding, and customer data pipeline all change. There is more to track and you have to make sure the AI really understands your brand, your products, the problems they solve and more. It really doesn’t make things easier. It’s getting a bit more complicated, but it can be achieved. You just have to drop the old SEO mindset.

The risks? Algorithmic control (ChatGPT decides which products to show), loss of immersive brand experience, and dependency on OpenAI’s standards.

The opportunity? Access to billions of users already using ChatGPT for discovery, frictionless checkout that beats cart abandonment, and a new channel for selling digital or physical products.

The challenge? Anyone that does eCommerce is used to being able to track a lot of details like cart abandonment so you can offer a discount or find a way to get them back or retargeting. That type of information isn’t going to be available. I can say that with confidence because they don’t help us track our results when optimizing for brand mentions in AI efficiently. They aren’t likely to suddenly be more transparent with eCommerce. The only tracking you will have is the number of purchases that occur on their platform.

Another challenge? As I wrote above. How well does ChatGPT or other upcoming Agentic E-Commerce platforms understand your entity? That will be crucial for your products to be one of the recommended choices.

My take: This isn’t a “wait and see” bet. Entity SEO is something you want to start now. Just building a lot of social media profiles and posting or promoting your products on multiple platforms isn’t going to help if AI doesn’t understand the relationship across all of that, what your value proposition is, and more. Entity building is something we specialize in and I can tell you now; there are no shortcuts.

Of course if you are on Etsy, Shopify or one of the other platforms that is working with OpenAI, you can site back and “hope” it picks your product over someone else’s product that it understands better. /sarcasm.

So back to my first question…

Will You Be Using Open AI’s Instant Checkout In ChatGPT As A Consumer Or As A Merchant Or Not At All?

Another question…

How long do you think it will be before Perplexity or Gemini have a similar setup?

I would love to hear your thoughts on Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.