ChatGPT commerce has made its debut: what brands need to know

It’s a milestone in the AI roadmap and a shift we’ve been calling agentic commerce, where AI acts as a shopper’s personal assistant, browsing, comparing, and purchasing on their behalf.

This is no longer a futuristic scenario. Conversational buying is here, embedded directly into the customer journey. The real question for brands isn’t if their products will appear in AI-driven commerce, but whether they’ll be discoverable, trusted, and purchased.

This launch doesn’t live in isolation; it’s the next wave of a broader trend. For years, commerce has been fragmenting across the platforms where consumers spend their time:

• First, marketplaces (Amazon and eBay)
• Then, social commerce (TikTok Shop and Instagram Checkout)
• And now, AI-powered assistants like ChatGPT

With each wave, brands that moved first captured outsized benefits. For example, when TikTok Shop launched, DEPT® helped a skincare brand enter early, resulting in 48% of total sales from TikTok over several months. Today, social commerce already makes up 17.1% of global e-commerce, projected to grow to 18.1% by 2029.

The point? Early movers win. Brands that make their products shoppable in ChatGPT before competitors will capture mindshare and market share.

• Etsy is first: US Etsy sellers are already enabled for direct purchases in ChatGPT.
• Shopify is next: US merchants using Shopify Payments will gain access soon.
• Other platforms will follow: Salesforce, Adobe, and others are expected to adopt OpenAI’s open Agentic Commerce Protocol in the future.
• Merchants keep control: Sellers remain responsible for fulfillment, returns, and customer data, including emails and shipping details.

For anyone selling anything on the internet, the signal is clear: the pilot is small now, but expansion is inevitable.

Make data discoverable

ChatGPT isn’t clicking through carousels like a human. It’s parsing structured product data. That means:

• Taxonomy and tagging must be bulletproof: Products need clear categories, attributes, and variants.
• Feeds must be richer than before and machine-readable: Dimensions, materials, inventory, shipping, and returns should be fully structured. The number of fields is much wider and better suited to GPT-led questions than a generic shopping feed.
• Consumer intent should guide feeds: Map content to actual shopper queries (e.g. “best backpack under $150”), informed by SEO insights.

Think of this as moving from SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). Just as SEO was about being visible on Google, GEO is about being surfaced by AI agents.

A world of comparisons

ChatGPT excels at side-by-side recommendations. For example, “Which sneakers are better for running, Brand A or Brand B?” 

This means brands must be ready for constant comparison. Authentic reviews will play a critical role, with volume, recency, and positivity influencing whether your products are surfaced and trusted. At the same time, brands should anticipate potential weaknesses and clearly frame their value proposition, whether that’s durability, customer service, or flexible return policies. 

And it’s not just your own channels that matter: external trust signals like Wikipedia pages, Reddit discussions, and third-party reviews all shape how AI evaluates and positions your brand. In other words, comparison is the new battleground.

Conversational brand voice

With no website design to lean on, your tone and clarity must come through in the answers ChatGPT provides:

• Build structured Q&A data for common shopper questions.
• Make sure your brand voice is concise, clear, and consistent across all feeds.
• Put governance in place so AI-driven recommendations align with your brand promise.

Treat ChatGPT like your newest sales associate and train it well.

Conversational commerce changes how performance is measured:

• Attribution: Shopify will tag AI-driven orders, but new tracking frameworks will emerge.
• Margins and returns: AI may attract more first-time buyers. Brands should monitor return rates closely.
• Customer service: expect higher volumes of conversational inquiries and plan resourcing.
• Upsell opportunities: test prompts and feeds that encourage basket growth, not just single-item checkouts.
• Lifetime value: since merchants retain customer data, ChatGPT commerce can become a powerful acquisition engine if paired with strong retention strategies.

Beyond Shopify and Etsy, the Agentic Commerce Protocol is open-sourced, meaning other platforms will soon integrate. Google’s ecosystem is already moving this way, with Merchant Centre data feeding its algorithms. Gemini-powered direct purchases may not be far off.

For brands, this is the next evolution of digital shelves. The winners will be those who:

• Pilot early, with clean, discoverable product data
• Test conversational readiness against real shopper prompts
• Iterate product feeds as living datasets
• Integrate ChatGPT commerce into broader channel strategy
• Expand as the ecosystem scales

What makes this different from marketplace integrations is the ownership of the customer relationship. With Shopify ensuring merchants keep their customer data, brands can build long-term value instead of chasing one-off sales.

The brands should act now by optimising product feeds, strengthening reviews, preparing conversational answers, and aligning measurement frameworks to make it easy for consumers to discover, trust, and buy from them in this new era of AI-driven commerce.