You can now browse and purchase products right from within a ChatGPT session—you never have to leave the site.
How It Works
The process is pretty straightforward. A user can ask ChatGPT to help them find a great housewarming gift, providing details like "handmade, ceramic, under $100." ChatGPT surfaces a number of products, and when you click into one of these, a mini session opens up on the right side. You're still within the ChatGPT session and window.
After you select the option—and by the way, you'll have a dropdown with a bunch of product options here based on what's set up in the store—you get a "Buy" button. You click this and go to checkout. This is, again, happening all within ChatGPT. Then you can click, in this instance, "Pay Etsy," and the checkout and purchase is completed. It says it right there: "Etsy confirmed your order."
Early Days, But Promising
This is a new experience. I've heard mixed reviews about it, but we're just in the first iteration, and it's very likely to improve. So it's good for e-commerce sites to be aware of this.
For now, this is already working for Etsy shops, which is great—you don't really have to do anything. But it is coming soon to Shopify, and according to OpenAI, other platforms. I'm not sure what those platforms are going to be, but for Etsy and Shopify, you probably don't have to do anything.
How to Get Your Store Connected
If you're an e-commerce site or merchant and you aren't using one of those platforms, you'll probably want to think about this. OpenAI released information on chatgpt.com/merchants. When you scroll down the page, you'll see a form. This is for e-commerce websites that aren't on Etsy, Shopify, or one of the soon-to-be-released platforms.
Go ahead and fill out this form, and OpenAI is going to respond to you. They're going to work with folks on a rolling basis to get your site hooked into this shopping and checkout experience.
The Technical Details
One of the key elements of this is going to be the product feed spec. Now, if you've set up Google Merchant Center before, or you've had it set up for you before, you're probably going to be okay because this looks really similar.
For the product feed, they give you a number of file format options—CSV is one of them, so that's pretty familiar and convenient. What you'll put in that product feed are a bunch of attributes and details, just like Merchant Center: product ID number, product title, product description—that sort of thing.
You can work with your developer or your agency to get this set up. My recommendation would be to just fill out this form and get that ball rolling, because we're not sure of the response time from OpenAI, and you definitely want to get hooked into this.
Why This Matters
From what I've seen, referral traffic from large language models like ChatGPT isn't a large percent of website traffic, but it does convert really well. That's because users can work with the large language model to do a lot of research, build trust, and get much closer to a purchase decision in a much shorter amount of time. It's really convenient.
E-commerce sites might see that here too. It might not account for a huge portion of their sales, but the conversion rates might be quite high. So I wouldn't miss out. Get yourself signed up and acquainted with this shopping experience. I think it's going to improve, and it's something you don't want to miss out on.
