OpenAI Rebuilds ChatGPT Shopping Around Visual Discovery and ACP

OpenAI is rolling out a richer, more visual shopping experience inside ChatGPT this week, and it is doing so by expanding the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to support product discovery across its free, Go, Plus, and Pro tiers. The update, announced on the company's blog, lets users browse products visually, compare options side-by-side with prices, reviews, and features, and upload images as inspiration for similar items — a shift OpenAI frames as replacing hours of tab-hopping with decisions made in seconds.

The company describes a specific behavioral change driving the work: people increasingly start their shopping in ChatGPT to explore, compare, and figure out what to buy. Shopping on the web works well when the shopper already knows what they want. The moment a purchase is still undecided, it typically means jumping between browser tabs, re-reading the same "best of" lists, and assembling an answer manually. OpenAI positions conversational, visual discovery as the fix for that undecided phase — users describe what they are looking for, refine it in conversation, and compare options that match their budget, preferences, and constraints.

The stakes here are commercial as much as experiential. Discovery is the part of the funnel that determines which merchants get seen at all, and OpenAI is positioning ChatGPT as a gatekeeper for high-intent shoppers who are already close to a purchase decision. For merchants, the company argues, the new experience "brings higher-intent shoppers who are closer to making a decision." For users, it turns shopping from what OpenAI calls "a fragmented, time-consuming process into a single, seamless experience."

What is actually new in the interface

Three concrete capabilities define the release. First, visual browsing: instead of scrolling through pages of text results, users get a shopping grid of product cards with selectable tags and filters, and results can be refined conversationally until the right option surfaces. Second, image-based search: users can upload photos as inspiration and ask ChatGPT to find similar items. Third, structured comparison: products appear side by side with key details such as price, reviews, and features, so shoppers can evaluate options without leaving ChatGPT or switching between retail sites.

Under the hood, OpenAI says it has improved speed, relevance, and product coverage, which the company says makes results more up-to-date and more useful than the earlier shopping features it has tested in the app.

The rollout covers all ChatGPT free, Go, Plus, and Pro users this week. OpenAI says more updates will follow as it continues to invest in product discovery.

ACP becomes the connective layer for AI-native commerce

The infrastructure story matters as much as the interface. To power the experience, OpenAI is extending the Agentic Commerce Protocol so that it serves as "the connective layer between merchants and users throughout discovery." Through ACP, merchants share product feeds and promotions so their catalogs are fully represented in ChatGPT conversations.

Integration is not limited to direct connections with OpenAI. ACP supports multiple delivery paths, including third-party providers such as Salesforce and Stripe, which means merchants can participate using the commerce systems they already run rather than building new pipes. Over time, OpenAI says ACP will serve as the foundation for broader AI-native commerce experiences, including personalization, local availability, and delivery ETAs — a roadmap that points toward ChatGPT becoming a full commerce surface rather than a search helper.

The retailer list backing the protocol at launch signals how seriously the industry is taking it. Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe's, Best Buy, The Home Depot, and Wayfair have already integrated into ACP for discovery, according to the announcement.

Shopify merchants get the easiest path of all. Their product data is already integrated into ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog, helping products appear more accurately and completely in relevant conversations, and OpenAI says no additional work is required from individual merchants.

Mani Fazeli, VP of Product at Shopify, framed the scale of the arrangement bluntly:

"Millions of Shopify merchants are open for business in ChatGPT. When buyers look for products, the Shopify Catalog offers the most relevant options from the brands that people love. They can complete purchases on the merchant's online store through an in-app browser, so everything happens seamlessly, with the merchant's brand front and center. This is AI shopping at scale."

Instant Checkout quietly steps back

The most strategically significant line in the announcement concerns what OpenAI is not doing. The company's initial version of Instant Checkout — the feature that let users buy directly inside ChatGPT without visiting a merchant's site — "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide," OpenAI writes. Merchants can now use their own checkout experiences while OpenAI focuses its engineering effort on product discovery.

That is a notable retreat from owning the transaction layer. It also reads as a concession to merchant anxiety: retailers have spent years guarding their checkout flows, customer data, loyalty programs, and payment relationships, and a chatbot that swallows the buy button threatened to sever the shopper from the brand. By ceding checkout back to merchants, OpenAI lowers the barrier to participation in ACP while it concentrates on the piece of the funnel it can realistically dominate — deciding what the shopper sees.

Merchants that still want deeper, native integration retain the option to build ChatGPT apps. Walmart is the first major example. Today it introduced an in-ChatGPT app experience that takes users from discovery in ChatGPT into a tailored Walmart environment supporting account linking, loyalty, and Walmart payments. The experience is live now in web browsers, with iOS and Android access to follow shortly.

Daniel Danker, EVP of AI Acceleration, Product and Design at Walmart, cast the partnership as a joint experiment in defining the category:

"By partnering closely with OpenAI, we've been able to learn together as we move quickly to shape what agentic commerce can become. Today's launch brings Walmart directly into the ChatGPT experience, combining leading conversational AI with the decades of retail expertise we've built serving customers."

Why this matters

Two years ago, ChatGPT was a text generator. With this release, it functions as a merchandising surface that decides how millions of shoppers encounter products from seven of the largest retailers in the United States, plus the entire Shopify Catalog. Whoever controls discovery controls a disproportionate share of downstream commerce value — that is the lesson of Google Shopping and Amazon search, and it is the position OpenAI is now constructing for the conversational era.

The decision to hand checkout back to merchants while doubling down on discovery is the tell. OpenAI appears to have concluded that owning the point of decision is worth more, and is less contested, than owning the point of sale. Whether that calculus holds depends on whether shoppers actually trust an AI assistant's product recommendations — and whether merchants keep participating if ChatGPT's answers start looking like a new kind of search rankings.

OpenAI says it is "building iteratively," learning from early launches, and incorporating feedback from both users and merchants, with more announcements to come as the work evolves.