ChatGPT Upgrades Shopping With Side-by-Side Product Comparisons

OpenAI retires Instant Checkout and shifts focus to product discovery, rolling out richer comparison tools, image-based search, and conversational browsing to all free and paid users this week.

OpenAI on March 24 expanded ChatGPT’s shopping capabilities, introducing side-by-side product comparisons that display price, reviews, and features within the chat interface, as the company steps back from its short-lived Instant Checkout offering.

The update, confirmed in ChatGPT’s official release notes, allows users to upload images to find similar products, refine results through follow-up conversations, and compare items without switching between browser tabs. OpenAI said the improvements are rolling out to all ChatGPT users this week across free and paid tiers.

The move follows OpenAI’s retreat from Instant Checkout, a feature introduced last year that enabled purchases from retailers such as Walmart, Etsy, and Shopify directly within the chatbot. OpenAI said in its March 24 post that Instant Checkout “did not offer the level of flexibility” it aimed to provide, and that it would instead allow merchants to handle their own checkout while it focused on product discovery. 

The new experience is built on OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, which enables merchants to share product feeds and promotions so their inventory is represented accurately in ChatGPT. Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Wayfair have already integrated with the protocol, OpenAI said. 

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Merchants seeking more control can build custom apps within ChatGPT. Walmart introduced an in-app ChatGPT service supporting loyalty program linking and Walmart payments, OpenAI confirmed. Integrations from Instacart and Target were announced at OpenAI’s developer conference in October.

Shopify said it is upgrading its ChatGPT presence to let merchants connect storefronts and complete purchases via an in-app browser. The company also announced a new Agentic Plan service that enables merchants without a Shopify storefront to surface products via Shopify’s tools in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other AI platforms.

It is unclear whether the updated experience addresses the core obstacles that undermined Instant Checkout. Building a reliable commerce infrastructure inside a chat interface requires real-time inventory data, payment handling, and fraud prevention. Product mentions in ChatGPT search results may contain inaccuracies, which pose significant challenges to consumer trust and merchant adoption.

The move comes as AI-assisted shopping remains a narrow behavior. Just 16.7% of U.S. AI users begin product searches with an AI assistant, according to a survey conducted by EMARKETER and Publicis. Shifting that figure will depend on whether ChatGPT’s results prove consistently reliable.

OpenAI said speed, relevance, and product data coverage have all been improved in this update, with results designed to be more current and useful than in prior versions. 

Disclaimer: This reporting is based on publicly available reports, including OpenAI’s official update. Nervnow has not independently verified the claims. 

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