Agent checkout by OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Walmart
What OpenAI, Perplexity, Google and Walmart each did with agent checkout
OpenAI promised over a million Shopify merchants would be able to sell directly inside ChatGPT. Six months later, only 30 had checkout live.
Perplexity and Google didn't slow down.
Walmart didn't wait around either.
What actually shipped
Instant Checkout launched last September, riding the wave of what OpenAI called 700 million weekly ChatGPT users at the time.
US Etsy sellers could sell directly inside the chat on day one. Shopify was next in line with brands like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori.
Source: OpenAI
The whole thing ran on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe. Shopify's president, Harley Finkelstein, called it the new frontier for online retail.
At launch, it supported only single-item purchases - multi-item carts as the next step. Six months in, around 30 Shopify merchants actually live.
Walmart pushed this harder than almost anyone, making roughly 200,000 products available. Vitamins and protein supplements, automotive parts, beauty, and hardware accounted for more than half of every order that came through it.
Even those categories didn't convert. Walmart found checkout inside ChatGPT converting at roughly a third the rate of Walmart’s website itself.
In March, OpenAI made it official. Instant Checkout was moving to Apps, so purchases happen on the retailer's checkout instead of inside ChatGPT.
Their stated reason was flexibility. The feature "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide", so merchants get to run their checkout instead.
Days before that announcement, Shopify emailed merchants that they'd soon be able to "complete purchases inside ChatGPT". OpenAI had to clarify what that meant - products were discoverable there, but checkout ran through the retailer regardless.
The two that kept building
While ChatGPT pulled its checkout back, Perplexity and Google kept building theirs.
Perplexity's Instant Buy, running on PayPal, has been live since last November.
It now covers more than 5,000 merchants, Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics, and Ashley Furniture among them. It's arguably the most functional in-chat checkout running today and gets a fraction of the attention ChatGPT's retreat did.
Source: Google
Google runs Buy for Me through Google Pay, live for Wayfair, Chewy, Quince, and a set of Shopify merchants. At Google's I/O conference in May, Google went further and launched Universal Cart, a cart that follows a shopper across surfaces, tracks price drops, and flags compatibility issues. Alongside came an Agent Payments Protocol that lets an agent finish a purchase within limits the shopper sets ahead of time.
None of that was an isolated feature. The same event brought a faster Gemini model, AI agents placed directly inside the search box, and lower subscription pricing, all aimed at one thing: fewer reasons for a shopper to ever leave Google.
Shopify moved in the same window - and they opened a free Agentic Plan that lets brands who don't even run a Shopify storefront feed their catalog into the same index Google and ChatGPT both read from.
Where the three stand right now
ChatGPT stops at discovery.
Perplexity carries a shopper all the way through a purchase in the same thread. Google does the same and keeps adding to that, Universal Cart being the latest piece.
Three platforms, three genuinely different places. Whatever "AI shopping" means depends on which one you're talking about.
For a Shopify merchant specifically, the language in OpenAI's own retreat post is worth reading. Product data from Shopify Catalog already flows into ChatGPT, and per that post, no additional work is required to be included.
Shopify's VP of product, Mani Fazeli, described what happens next in the same post: the sale closes with the brand "front and center", on the site the shopper trusts.
Getting from included in the catalog to the one ChatGPT names runs on a separate mechanism, three signals I broke down a while back: quality data, citation-worthy content, and user sentiment. Read here →
The retailer that didn't wait
Walmart didn't wait to see how the Instant Checkout story ended.
Once the numbers came in, it built its own answer instead - its own chatbot, running on its own data, closing the sale on its own site.
Sparky, Walmart's assistant, went straight inside ChatGPT.
Shoppers log into their Walmart account, sync a cart across both surfaces, and complete the purchase inside Walmart's system rather than a generic checkout OpenAI built.
The difference showed up fast. Early numbers put Sparky's conversion meaningfully closer to Walmart's website’s rate than Instant Checkout ever reached.
Owning the interface did what renting one couldn't.
EVP of product, Daniel Danker, described the idea, saying that Sparky carries the store to where the shopper already is instead of routing them to someone else's checkout.
What it means for your store
Every platform that pushed checkout past a pilot either walked it back or built selectively. The one thing all three, plus Walmart's fix, still agree on is discovery.
A shopper describes what they want, the assistant narrows it down, and your product either shows up structured enough to be considered, or it doesn't.
"No additional work required" covers being present in the corpus.
It says nothing about being the option the assistant names when a shopper's search narrows down to exact specs.
Walmart's version of that fix was building something worth trusting instead of renting an interface. A Shopify brand's version is smaller in scale but the same shape - a catalog and storefront that earns the shopper's trust once the assistant hands them over.
Checkout was never the part worth chasing. Discovery was, and still is.
Some brands get a dedicated app inside these platforms.
Most just get read from a feed instead.
Run the free AI audit, check your score → It reads your Shopify Catalog the same way ChatGPT does and shows exactly which structured fields are empty.
That's the discovery half. The storefront half is Atomz - it fills in what’s missing, so the same catalog holds up once a shopper lands.
- Ankit
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