OpenAI introduces 4% fee on e-commerce sales

SAN FRANCISCO – OpenAI is now charging merchants a 4% fee on purchases by shoppers who buy via its ChatGPT interface.

The assessment — initially rolled out with Shopify in the U.S. — represents the next step in the evolution of AI assistants from a discovery tool to a direct sales channel.

OpenAI began last fall allowing consumers using ChatGPT to buy products from Etsy sellers without being redirected to external sites.

Shopify began making merchants’ products available on January 26 through its Agentic Storefronts program, which inserts products into AI chat interfaces so that shoppers can ask questions, compare items and make purchases in a single thread.

The 4% fee is less than what merchants pay for sales through marketplaces operated by rivals such as TikTok and Amazon, according to a report in The Information, a tech industry news site, which said the lower up-front cost might encourage some merchants to give conversational commerce a try.

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Merchants must opt into the Instant Checkout program to enable direct shopping within ChatGPT.

“When ranking multiple merchants that sell the same product, ChatGPT considers factors like availability, price, quality, whether a merchant is the primary seller, and whether Instant Checkout is enabled, to optimize the user experience,” OpenAI said in a statement.

OpenAI last month announced it was getting ready to serve ads inside ChatGPT. The company said it would begin testing ads in the free version of the online chatbot and a low-cost version called ChatGPT Go, which costs $8 a month.

Ads will be tailored to what people are looking for when they query the chatbot and what they have looked for in the past, the company said, though users could opt out of personalized ads.