April 28, 2025 | Seattle, WA
For years, people have talked about shopping inside chats. Clickable commerce inside iMessage, Facebook Messenger bots, even Instagram DMs. It all sounded revolutionary.
But it never really happened.
The missing piece wasn’t infrastructure. It wasn’t payments. It was intelligence.
It looks like that missing piece is arriving.
With OpenAI integrating Shopify directly into ChatGPT, conversational commerce isn’t longer hypothetical. It’s happening.
And it’s about to change everything about how people shop, and how brands have to sell.
OpenAI and Shopify AI Commerce: A New Commerce Layer Inside Chat
OpenAI is quietly rolling out a foundation for in-chat commerce that connects discovery, decision-making, and checkout into one seamless experience.
Here’s the short version of how it likely will work:
Shopify merchants will install an app that connects their products to ChatGPT.
Products — complete with images, descriptions, prices, and reviews- will surface naturally inside conversations.
When users find something they want, they’ll be able to buy it instantly without leaving the chat.
Payment will happen through a stored card in ChatGPT’s settings, with Shopify powering the checkout and fulfillment behind the scenes by the merchant.
It won’t feel like shopping on a website. It’ll feel like texting a personal shopper who already knows what you like, what you need, and how much you want to spend.
Merchant Control: Curating the AI Shelf
Brands won't want to place their entire store blindly into ChatGPT.
Merchants will be able to control what products show up, selecting individual items, curating collections, and even setting business rules around what gets recommended.
It’s not just about being present. It’s about being intentional.
Brands that think carefully about how they surface products inside AI conversations will have a massive edge over those who just dump their catalog in and hope for the best.
Why This Time Is Different Than iMessage Commerce
The idea of shopping inside a conversation isn’t new.
Back in 2016, companies tried to make iMessage commerce happen. Facebook Messenger bots promised it, too. But they flopped.
The reason is simple: there was no real intelligence behind it.
It was all clunky mini-websites stuffed into chat bubbles. You still had to click, search, and tap through menus. It didn’t feel easier. It felt worse.
Now, with AI, the entire experience changes.
You don’t need to search anymore. You just say what you want.
You don’t filter categories. You have a conversation.
You don’t bounce between ten product pages. You get a few curated options that you want.
The intelligence wasn’t ready back then. Now it is, and that unlocks everything.
The Competitive Threat to Shopping AI Startups
For the past couple of years, startups have been pitching brands on the idea of creating their own shopping AI agents.
With OpenAI making ChatGPT the default shopping assistant integrated natively with Shopify, with hundreds of millions of users already trusting OpenAI, the window for standalone shopping AI companies is closing fast.
Winning now will mean either specializing deeply in underserved niches, building extensions that enhance ChatGPT, or focusing on owned brand experiences where companies still control the interaction.
Trying to build a generic "shopping assistant" in a world where ChatGPT already exists? That’s going to be a losing game.
Impulse Buying: The Hidden Superpower of AI Chat
One thing a lot of people are missing about this shift:
Conversational commerce isn’t just more convenient, it’s going to drive more impulse buying than anything we've seen before.
If a user is mid-conversation, gets a perfect product suggestion, and can check out with one click, the traditional friction points disappear.
No second-guessing.
No shopping cart abandonment.
No pulling out a credit card or logging into yet another site.
It’s just yes — and done.
This will create a whole new psychology around purchasing, and brands that understand how to harness it will win big. This new consumer is easier to adopt as it becomes a part of the conversation.
The Future Risk: Brands Must Adapt or Get Abstracted
As exciting as this is, it also carries real risks for brands.
If ChatGPT owns discovery, recommendation, and checkout, brands may get abstracted away, becoming commodities that surface through an AI filter, losing direct access to customers and the ability to tell their own stories.
Brands that want to stay relevant need to adapt fast by feeding better data and richer narratives into their product listings, building loyalty outside of AI platforms, through community, email, and direct relationships, and finding ways to make their products so distinctive that when the AI curates a few options, theirs is the one that gets picked.
If you’re not training the AI on who you are, someone else’s brand is going to fill that space.
Conclusion: A New Era Has Already Started
The infrastructure is ready.
The intelligence is here. The consumer behavior shift is already happening.
OpenAI and Shopify are building the future of commerce, and it's going to happen inside conversations, not websites.
Brands that see this clearly, that prepare for this world, will have a massive head start.
Those who cling to the old playbook of SEO and homepage design will watch as the AI quietly moves the customer journey somewhere else.
The era of conversational shopping is here, and it’s moving faster than most brands are ready for.
