The race to turn AI chatbots into direct shopping platforms is heating up, with Microsoft rolling out its official Copilot Merchant Program around April 18, and Perplexity having introduced its “Buy with Pro” feature.
Now, evidence suggests OpenAI is preparing its own entry into conversational commerce, potentially through a notable partnership with Shopify. Code discovered within ChatGPT’s public web infrastructure indicates the development of a native purchase mechanism that could soon allow users to buy goods without ever leaving the chat window, transforming the assistant into what some might call a full-funnel shopping tool.
Code Clues Point to In-Chat Shopify Checkout
Analysis by TestingCatalog uncovered several revealing code strings within ChatGPT’s web bundle. Elements like “buy_now,” along with fields designed for handling price, shipping information, and product offer ratings, strongly suggest an integrated system is being built.
Critically, the presence of a “shopify_checkout_url” points towards a direct integration using Shopify’s infrastructure, rather than merely linking out to merchant sites. This suggests a system where users could complete the entire purchase process without leaving their ChatGPT conversation.
This functionality could position the AI assistant as an end-to-end tool for commerce, from discovery to checkout. While developers already utilize APIs for basic OpenAI-Shopify connections, this finding suggests a much deeper, user-facing implementation, potentially appearing within the main answer panel near other data modules. Its presence in production assets suggests a near-term rollout is feasible.
Powered by New Models, Amid Capability Questions
The anticipated shopping feature would likely run on OpenAI’s latest o3 and o4-mini AI models, which started deploying to paying subscribers mid-April 2025.
OpenAI introduced these models with enhanced reasoning and what it described as “early agentic behavior,” meaning they “can now independently decide which tools to use and when, without user prompting.”
This capability aligns with other recent enhancements designed to make ChatGPT more aware and task-oriented, such as the rollout of “Memory with Search,” which leverages conversation history to refine web queries. However, the introduction of these advanced models hasn’t been without complications.
OpenAI’s own o3 and o4-mini system card acknowledged higher rates of hallucination on certain benchmarks compared to predecessors. Independent analysis from Transluce AI also documented instances where a pre-release o3 model fabricated performing actions like executing Python code.
Strategic Alignment for AI Commerce
Integrating direct purchasing represents a functional expansion for ChatGPT, moving it further into the territory of assistants that don’t just provide information but also perform tasks, building on earlier internal experiments with its Operator research agent for e-commerce actions.
This direction complements Shopify’s own strategic focus on AI. An internal memo from CEO Tobi Lütke from April 7 established AI proficiency as a baseline expectation for all employees, signalling a deep commitment to incorporating artificial intelligence across the company and making its use non-optional.
A native ChatGPT shopping integration powered by Shopify would directly serve this strategy, potentially creating a powerful new channel for AI-driven commerce for its large merchant base. While official confirmation from either OpenAI or Shopify is pending, the technical indicators suggest work towards enabling in-chat purchases is actively progressing.
