What went wrong with ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout

Digital Marketing Redux // March 27, 2026 What went wrong with ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout By Mitchell Parton and Julia Waldow Ivy Liu About six months ago, ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout was a hot topic among retailers, positioned as a way to get in early on the next wave of commerce.

Now, both retailers and OpenAI have pivoted to new solutions after lackluster results. The feature allowed users to ask ChatGPT what they’re looking for and receive recommendations of relevant products from across the web. For merchants with Instant Checkout enabled, buyers would confirm shipping details and pay the merchants directly from the ChatGPT app.

The retailers would handle fulfillment, returns and customer support themselves. Earlier this month, The Information reported that OpenAI would scale back Instant Checkout by focusing on having checkouts take place inside specific apps that plug into ChatGPT, rather than directly from product listings in ChatGPT search results.

The outlet said, based on a conversation with a person familiar with the project, OpenAI staff realized that ChatGPT users were researching products to buy but weren’t using it to help them make purchases. Retailers simply aren’t ready to hand off the checkout experience to an AI agent.

Several people involved with Instant Checkout told Modern Retail and other outlets that the program didn’t drive sales, and that merchants have decided to let ChatGPT handle the discovery process and own the rest of the transaction themselves.

This decision was made in conjunction with OpenAI, which said in a blog post on March 24 that it decided to let merchants use their own checkout experience and instead focus on discovery. “The best consumer experiences are powered by deep partnership with merchants,” OpenAI wrote in the blog post.

“To build these deep partnerships, we want to offer merchants options for how they convert consumers. We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide.” ‘Disappointing’ results Etsy was one of the first merchants to launch Instant Checkout in September 2025.

At the time, an Etsy spokesperson confirmed to Modern Retail that millions of items — from vases to keychains — were available to buy via the platform. Etsy did not end up seeing a large volume of sales from Instant Checkout, a spokesperson told Modern Retail in an interview earlier this month.

The spokesperson said that ChatGPT is still a nascent channel for many shoppers and that it wasn’t necessarily surprising that people weren’t clamoring to buy products within ChatGPT.

At the same time, Etsy has found ChatGPT to be a valuable discovery tool, as the engine’s recommendations are providing Etsy with referral traffic and getting more eyeballs on Etsy merchants’ products. The fact that Instant Checkout is going away won’t result in a major strategy shift on Etsy’s part, the spokesperson added.

However, Etsy still wants to have a presence on ChatGPT, so it’s working to build an app within the platform. While details are still being ironed out, Etsy is hoping to build an app that highlights its sellers, as well as the original items they create.

Etsy believes that building an app with ChatGPT — as opposed to operating within the confines of an existing Instant Checkout template — will give it more control over the user experience, the spokesperson said.

Daniel Danker, evp of AI acceleration, product and design for Walmart, told Wired that sales through Instant Checkout were disappointing — with conversion rates three times lower for the selection sold directly inside the chatbot than those that require clicking out.

Customers “fear that when checkout happens automatically after every single item that they’re going to receive five boxes when they actually just want it all in one,” Danker told Wired. “They generally don’t want to split the checkout experience, where it buys the one item, even though they had other items in their Walmart cart already.”

Retailers are vying for control Retail executives have been skeptical of how quickly Instant Checkout would shape into an effective sales driver and offer the technology capabilities retailers and brands expect out of a shopping platform.

One C-suite executive at a large specialty retailer told Modern Retail in October that for Instant Checkout to be “ready for prime time,” it would need features such as real-time inventory tracking, coupons, promotions, customer data collection, integration to the retailer’s loyalty program and store pick-up integration. It never got there.

The ChatGPT apps, on the other hand, are designed to offer deeper integration and native experiences. The Walmart app in ChatGPT, for example, supports account linking, loyalty and payments through the retailer. Walmart’s chatbo