ChatGPT Can Now Buy Things. Stripe Just Became the Tollbooth of AI Commerce.
(Reading time: 7-8 minutes)
Hi, I’m Kyle Kelly. Each week Line of Sight breaks down how AI, strategy, and revenue growth architecture turn complexity into leverage.
800 million people use ChatGPT every week. Now they can buy things without leaving the chat. Here’s how Stripe and OpenAI just rebuilt commerce.
I spent the last week analyzing their integration and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). As someone who has spent years in the trenches of e-commerce and logistics, including at Zappos/Amazon, I see this as more than just a new feature. It’s a fundamental re-architecting of how we buy and sell online. By the end of the read, you will understand the stack end-to-end, how you might run your own tiny experiments, and why it matters.
This partnership solves the transaction layer in agentic commerce. Agents can now complete purchases, not just recommend them. That’s a big deal. Here’s why.
1. What the Partnership Actually Is
On September 29, 2025, Stripe and OpenAI announced that ChatGPT users can now buy products directly within the chat interface, powered by a new open standard called the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) [3]. This isn’t just another checkout button. It’s a new set of rails for AI-driven transactions.
So what does this unlock? The protocol defines a standardized way for AI agents, like ChatGPT, to interact with merchant systems. It breaks the process into three core components: a Product Feed, an Agentic Checkout, and a Delegated Payment mechanism [4].
This means developers can now build applications where an AI agent can discover products from a merchant’s catalog, manage a checkout process rendered within the AI’s interface, and securely handle payments without ever exposing the user’s raw credit card details. It’s a conversational, programmatic approach to commerce.
2. I Analyzed the Integration from an Operator’s Lens. Here’s the Reality.
The live integration is currently limited to approved partners like Etsy and Shopify, so I couldn’t test it hands-on. Instead, I did something more useful: I spent three weeks since OpenAI Dev Day analyzing the complete technical documentation from an operator’s perspective.
The question I wanted to answer: What would it actually take to get this running in production?
The process involves three key implementation phases: integrating the product feed, building the checkout endpoint, and handling the new payment tokens. The product feed requires merchants to provide structured data in near real-time, with updates as frequent as every 15 minutes. This is a significant operational lift compared to the daily or hourly updates common today, if you know you know.
What surprised me most was the architecture. OpenAI is explicitly not the merchant of record. The merchant retains full control over payment processing, fraud detection, and order validation. The Agentic Commerce Protocol is also open source, a strategic move that has already prompted PayPal to adopt it rather than build a competing standard [5].
This architecture is brilliant. It allows merchants to leverage their existing infrastructure and compliance while tapping into a massive new distribution channel. The checkout UI is in ChatGPT, but the transaction logic and customer data remain with the merchant.
3. The Business Model Implications
How does this change the flow of money? For OpenAI, it creates a new, potentially massive revenue stream. The company will take a transaction fee, determined by confidential agreements with partners like Etsy and Shopify [6] who have early access. With 800 million weekly users, even a small fee on a fraction of their commercial-intent queries could generate billions.
For developers and merchants, the return on investment appears immediate. My analysis suggests that even a conservative 5% lift in conversion rate would generate a net gain of approximately $3,300 per month on a baseline of 1,000 orders, easily covering the estimated infrastructure costs. The payback period is effectively zero.
This model also shifts the competitive landscape. It’s no longer just about having the best website or app. It’s about having the best data and the most seamless integration with the AI agents that will increasingly guide consumer purchasing.
4. The Strategic Chess Move
Why did Stripe and OpenAI make this move? For Stripe, I believe it’s about cementing its position as the economic infrastructure for the AI era. By co-authoring the protocol and being the first to offer a compatible payment primitive, the Shared Payment Token (SPT), Stripe embeds itself at the heart of the next wave of commerce. With 78% of the Forbes AI 50 that accept payments already using their platform, this move creates a powerful network effect [1].
For OpenAI, it’s about moving beyond information retrieval to action. ChatGPT becomes a tool that not only answers questions but gets things done. This deepens user engagement and unlocks a transactional revenue model, reducing reliance on subscriptions and API usage alone.
Who wins? The user gets a frictionless experience. The merchant gets a new, high-intent sales channel. And the payment processors who adapt fastest, like Stripe and now PayPal, position themselves as the tollbooths for the agentic economy.
5. How You Can Benefit from This
This partnership creates distinct opportunities for different players in the ecosystem.
For E-commerce Operators: The most immediate use case is AI-powered checkout optimization. By integrating your product feed, you can reduce purchase friction and potentially see a significant conversion lift. Start by auditing your product data quality and inventory sync frequency; the 15-minute update requirement is a high bar.
For SaaS Founders: Think about how you can leverage this for your own billing. Can you build an AI agent that handles subscription management, answers billing questions, and even processes payments for plan upgrades conversationally? The underlying protocol is not limited to physical goods.
For Developers: This is a greenfield opportunity. You can build AI agents that automate complex purchasing workflows, from corporate procurement to personal shopping. The open-source nature of ACP means you can build on top of this standard without being locked into a single vendor.
6. What This Means for Agentic Commerce
This partnership is the starting gun for agentic commerce. As I wrote previously in “Agentic Commerce Will Break the Ad Business,” the real disruption comes when AI agents can not only discover but also transact on behalf of users. The Stripe-OpenAI collaboration provides the critical transaction layer that was missing.
The market opportunity is staggering. McKinsey projects that agentic commerce could orchestrate up to $1 trillion in the US B2C retail market alone by 2030, with global projections reaching as high as $5 trillion [7]. This isn’t a niche market; it’s the future of how we interact with the digital economy.
This shift raises profound questions. Does this move power to the agent platforms or to the merchants? Initially, it seems to benefit both. But over time, as users come to trust their AI agents, the platform that controls the agent may become the new gatekeeper of commerce, a position once held by search engines and social media.
7. The Future is Conversational
The key takeaway is this: the internet is becoming conversational, and commerce is following suit. The Stripe-OpenAI partnership has laid the rails for this new economy.
My prediction: By Q4 2027, 25% of single-item online purchases will start in an AI chat interface. The companies that will win are not those who treat this as another sales channel, but those who re-architect their business around the new reality of agent-mediated transactions.
What do you think? Are you preparing your saas business or product catalog for agentic commerce? Drop a comment below or DM me, I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about this shift.
References
[1] Stripe. (2025, February 27). Stripe’s total payment volume reaches $1.4T, fueled by long-standing investments in AI. Stripe Newsroom.
[2] Bellan, R. (2025, October 6). Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users. TechCrunch.
[3] Stripe. (2025, September 29). Stripe powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and releases Agentic Commerce Protocol codeveloped with OpenAI. Stripe Newsroom.
[4] OpenAI. Get Started. OpenAI Developers.
[5] PayPal. (2025, October 28). OpenAI and PayPal Team Up to Power Instant Checkout and Agentic Commerce in ChatGPT. PayPal Newsroom.
[6] Capoot, A. (2025, September 29). Etsy pops 16% as OpenAI announces ChatGPT Instant Checkout for the shopping site. CNBC.
[7] Schumacher, K., & Roberts, R. (2025, October 17). The agentic commerce opportunity: How AI agents are ushering in a new era for consumers and merchants. McKinsey.