ChatGPT Giving up on In-Chat eCommerce?

Are you an eCommerce marketer wondering whether to invest in ChatGPT’s shopping features — only to learn that OpenAI is already scaling them back?

You’re not imagining the whiplash. OpenAI has pulled back from instant checkout inside ChatGPT, ditching the in-chat purchase flow in favour of retailer apps that connect to the platform instead. At the same time, Google is doing the exact opposite — doubling down on agentic commerce features inside AI Mode, adding cart functionality, loyalty programme integration, and one-click account creation.

For marketing leaders managing large-scale eCommerce operations, this creates a genuine strategic question. Do you chase the new checkout infrastructure Google is building? Do you write off ChatGPT as a sales channel entirely? Or is there a smarter way to think about where these platforms sit in your customer’s purchase journey?

In this article, we break down exactly what has changed, why it matters, and — most importantly — where eCommerce marketers should be focusing their time and budget right now to win in AI search.

Executive Summary

OpenAI has stepped back from instant checkout inside ChatGPT, moving instead towards retailer app integrations. This follows low uptake — Shopify’s president revealed that only around a dozen Shopify merchants were actively using the AI tool integrations. The shift suggests OpenAI has recognised that consumer trust for in-chat purchasing simply is not there yet.

Meanwhile, Google is aggressively expanding its own agentic commerce capabilities inside AI Mode: cart functionality across multiple products from the same retailer, loyalty programme points, one-click account creation through Google accounts, and payment via Google Wallet.

The practical takeaway for eCommerce marketers? ChatGPT is becoming a powerful discovery and research platform rather than a transactional one. Businesses already appearing in ChatGPT conversations are seeing significantly higher conversion rates when that traffic arrives on their websites — in one case, 7.3% compared to a 4.5% organic average. The opportunity is not in closing sales inside ChatGPT. It is in owning the top and middle of the funnel so that when those users do buy — whether through Google, directly, or through agentic checkout — your brand is the one they have already chosen.

Why Is ChatGPT Pulling Back From Instant Checkout?

The short answer is trust — or rather, the lack of it.

When we buy online, we gravitate towards platforms and retailers we already know. We use Amazon because we have Prime and the habit is ingrained. We go to the brand’s own website because we trust it. We buy from retailers like Schuh or Office because we have done it before and it felt safe.

Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, explains: “Building consumer trust takes a long time. If we’re thinking about eCommerce and buying products, we trust certain sites. A lot of the time someone will go to Amazon rather than buy from a small retailer, even, because they’ve just got Prime. It’s a habit that sticks.”

Introducing a completely new checkout experience inside an AI chatbot was always going to face that barrier. ChatGPT is not a shop. It is not a marketplace. Users have no purchase history there, no saved payment details they are comfortable with, and no returns process they understand.

The evidence backs this up. Shopify’s president acknowledged that only around a dozen Shopify merchants were actually using the AI tool integrations — despite the platform supporting them. That is a strikingly low number for a company with millions of stores.

There is also the question of how people actually use ChatGPT. The user base skews heavily towards research and education — students, academics, professionals looking for answers. It is a discovery tool, not a shopping destination. And crucially, the majority of ChatGPT users also use Google. They are not abandoning traditional search; they are adding a new layer on top of it.

Where Are ChatGPT Shoppers Actually Buying?

This is where it gets genuinely interesting for eCommerce marketers.

What we are seeing across client data is that people use ChatGPT for the research phase of their purchase journey — the top of the funnel discovery work — and then complete their purchase elsewhere.

Charlie explains: “People are having top-of-funnel conversations in ChatGPT. They’re doing all of their research phase, their discovery. They’re looking for the right running shoes. They’re looking for the right paint colour for their bedroom. They’re looking for a kitchen tap replacement. But when they’ve actually found the product that they want, they’re just going and typing it into Google.”

That final step might be a branded search — someone decides they want a product from B&Q and simply types the brand name into Google. Or it might be a product-specific search — they have narrowed down to a particular model and search for that exact item. Either way, the purchase happens outside of ChatGPT.

But here is the critical point: the traffic that does click through from ChatGPT converts at a significantly higher rate.

Charlie shared a recent example from a national window installer in the UK. Their average organic conversion rate sat at around 4.5%. But traffic arriving from ChatGPT was converting at 7.3% — a substantial uplift. And it makes sense. Windows are a complex, high-ticket, infrequent purchase. Someone who has already had a detailed research conversation with ChatGPT about what they need arrives on the website far further down the funnel than a cold organic visitor.

As Charlie puts it: “If you’ve been having that discovery conversation, you are going to move down the funnel faster into the consideration stage, into actually making an enquiry and getting a quote.”

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Why Does Google Have the Advantage in Agentic Commerce?

While OpenAI retreats from checkout, Google is building out a comprehensive agentic commerce infrastructure inside AI Mode. The new capabilities are significant.

Within Google’s AI Mode, shoppers can now:

• Add multiple items from the same retailer to a single cart without leaving the AI interface
• Browse a retailer’s full catalogue directly within the conversation
• Create retailer accounts instantly using their existing Google account with a single click
• Retain loyalty programme points and benefits as though they had shopped on the retailer’s own website
• Complete payment through Google Wallet, removing the need to enter card details

Google has built this through a Universal Commerce Protocol — a standardised framework working with major merchandising partners. It is a serious infrastructure play, not a feature bolt-on.

The reason Google can do this while OpenAI cannot comes down to one thing: existing trust. We are already used to Google as the starting point for purchases. We trust Google with our payment information through Google Pay. We have Google accounts linked to everything. The leap from “searching on Google” to “buying through Google’s AI” is far smaller than the leap from “chatting with an AI” to “giving it my credit card details.”

Charlie puts it plainly: “Google has the trust here. Agentic commerce is the future — that is the direction eCommerce is moving. The only question is the infrastructure to do it, which Google is building now. It’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s a lot going on with the UX, with consumer trust, with how we shop and what shopping habits online actually look like.”

How Should eCommerce Marketers Prioritise Right Now?

The answer depends on scale — but the principle is the same regardless of business size. You need to be visible where your customers are researching, not just where they are buying.

For large, market-leading eCommerce businesses

You need to be doing both. Large retailers should not be sleeping on agentic commerce — it is the future, and being an early mover matters. Getting set up with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and preparing your infrastructure for AI-powered checkout should be on the roadmap.

But you also need to dominate AI search visibility, because that is where the research conversations are happening right now. And there is a real risk of complacency here. We have seen very large brands performing well in traditional organic search but with almost zero visibility in AI features — not appearing in AI Overviews, not showing up in ChatGPT conversations, invisible in the places where their customers are increasingly starting their purchase journey.

For mid-market eCommerce businesses (up to £10–20 million turnover)

Your priority should be taking market share through AI search visibility. Agentic commerce will become easier for smaller retailers once it is rolled out at scale through platforms like Shopify and Magento — you do not need to solve that infrastructure problem today.

What you do need is to be showing up when potential customers are researching your product categories in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode. That means investing in the content, PR, and review strategies that get your brand surfaced in these AI conversations.

Charlie’s advice for teams managing thousands of products: “Don’t start by thinking, how am I getting 10,000 different products into ChatGPT? Think about how you’re getting this specific group of products — the ones with really good profit margins — into ChatGPT. That’s your test bed.”

The dangerous over-reliance on paid ads

One pattern we see consistently in eCommerce is an over-reliance on Google Ads. Paid search becomes the main revenue driver, the business starts depending on it, and then costs rise — as they inevitably do, year on year. A competitor gets investment and starts bidding more aggressively on your key terms. Google moves the ad placements around the search results page. Suddenly, what was a reliable channel becomes volatile.

Around 25–30% of search results now show AI Overviews. If you have keywords performing well in organic positions on page one or two, there is a significant opportunity to push those into the AI Overviews as well. The ideal position is saturation — your brand appearing in the ads, in the AI Overview, and in the organic results. Three touchpoints on a single search results page.

Now layer in the ChatGPT discovery effect. If someone has already seen your brand recommended during a top-of-funnel research conversation in ChatGPT, and they then search on Google and see you dominating the results page, it is as good as closed.

What Does This Mean for AI Search Visibility?

Whether OpenAI’s pullback is temporary or permanent (and Charlie believes it is temporary), the strategic implication for eCommerce marketers is the same: you need to be visible in AI search conversations.

This is not optional, and it is not something you can defer to next year. The brands investing in AI search visibility now are building an advantage that compounds over time.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

Get your technical foundations right. Make sure your website is set up to be crawled by AI platforms. Charlie spoke about this at eCommerce Scotland recently, and the finding was sobering — very large brands, household names, were accidentally blocking crawlers from ChatGPT and other AI tools through their Cloudflare setup. Their content was never going to be surfaced in AI search results, and they did not even know it.

Build a clear positioning and content strategy for AI search. This means understanding what you want to show up for and creating content that answers the questions your customers are asking in AI conversations. Product pages matter, but so does informational content that addresses the research-phase questions people are exploring before they are ready to buy.

Invest in digital PR and reviews. AI platforms do not just pull from your website. They reference third-party sources, reviews, and user-generated content. If you are in eCommerce and already running ads, you should have UGC as part of your strategy. That same content feeds directly into your AI search visibility.

Is This Pullback Permanent?

Almost certainly not.

Charlie believes this is a temporary recalibration: “I think some of it has perhaps just been a reaction to Shopify, because the Shopify president said that only a dozen Shopify merchants are actually using the AI tool integrations. I think this is probably just a short-term kickback where OpenAI are focusing on what they think is going to be the highest success rate. But over time, I think this will be back.”

OpenAI’s likely strategy is to focus on what is working — driving high-quality discovery traffic and getting users comfortable with navigating from ChatGPT to retailer websites. Once that behaviour is established, reintroducing checkout features will face far less resistance.

In the meantime, the smart move for eCommerce marketers is not to wait for the checkout features to return. It is to own the discovery conversation so thoroughly that when agentic commerce does arrive at scale — whether through ChatGPT, Google, or both — your brand is already the one being recommended.

Next Steps

This week

• Check whether your website is blocking AI crawlers.
• Review your Cloudflare and robots.txt configuration to ensure ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, and other AI platforms can access your content. This is a quick technical check that could reveal a significant blind spot.

In the next 30 days

• Identify your hero products — the ones with the strongest margins and the greatest strategic importance.
• Search for those product categories in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode to see where (and whether) your brand appears. This gives you a baseline for measuring progress.
• Audit your AI search visibility alongside your traditional organic performance. We are seeing large brands with strong Google rankings that are completely invisible in AI results. If that is you, you have a gap that needs closing.

In the next 90 days

• Develop a content and digital PR strategy specifically designed for AI search visibility. This should include informational content addressing the research-phase questions in your product categories, third-party placements on authoritative sites, and a plan for generating reviews and UGC that AI platforms can reference.

If you would like Exposure Ninja to audit your current AI search visibility and build a strategy for your eCommerce business, request a free review of your website and marketing here.

In Conclusion

ChatGPT’s retreat from in-chat checkout is not a sign that AI shopping is failing. It is a sign that the purchase journey is more nuanced than anyone expected — and that the real opportunity for eCommerce marketers is not in the transaction itself, but in the research and discovery phase that precedes it.

Google has the trust, the infrastructure, and the user behaviour to lead on agentic commerce. ChatGPT has the engagement, the conversation depth, and — critically — the ability to drive traffic that converts at a higher rate than traditional organic search. Both matter. Neither is optional.

The eCommerce businesses that will win are the ones treating AI search as a full-funnel visibility challenge, not a checkout feature to be plugged in later. Own the conversation your customers are having before they buy, and the sale will follow — wherever it happens.

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