OpenAI’s plans to make ChatGPT more like Amazon are not going well

OpenAI’s plans to turn ChatGPT into an e-commerce hub haven’t exactly panned out, at least not yet. In an announcement on Tuesday, the company revealed that it is moving away from a recently launched feature that allows users to purchase items directly from the chatbot interface.

OpenAI originally launched ChatGPT’s purchasing capabilities last year, positioning itself as a “shopping assistant” that could connect consumers with relevant sellers. A feature called “Instant Checkout” launched in September and encouraged users to talk to the chatbot about what they were looking to buy and, as with a traditional e-commerce site, add products to the checkout cart within ChatGPT itself. The items were purchased from the sellers themselves, but ChatGPT served as a gateway for those purchases.

Instant Checkout wasn’t a huge success, however, because on Tuesday — amid other update announcements related to the ChatGPT shopping experience — OpenAI said it would scale back the feature.

“We found that the initial release of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility we hoped to provide, so we are allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery,” the company explained in a blog post. OpenAI explained to TechCrunch that merchants will still have the option to integrate the feature for the time being through apps within ChatGPT.

An OpenAI spokesperson said that the company will deprioritize development of Instant Checkout as a standalone feature, and that it instead plans to prioritize development of product discovery for consumers. They said OpenAI will continue to support a variety of payment paths, including through merchants’ own sites.

The Information and CNBC had previously reported that OpenAI’s new plan was for merchants to create their own apps within ChatGPT, which would then direct users to checkout experiences on the merchants’ websites. A source who spoke with The Information noted that ChatGPT users simply “weren’t using a chatbot to actually help them make purchases,” and an October study that looked at referral traffic from ChatGPT found that e-commerce sites weren’t making much money from ChatGPT users.

Instead of turning ChatGPT into a shopping portal, what OpenAI is doing now is turning the chatbot into a central hub for consumer information. This way, online shoppers will see it as a kind of intermediate research tool that can help them decide which product they will eventually buy.

This shopping experience is powered by the Proxy Commerce Protocol (ACP), its open standard for e-commerce, which the company developed in partnership with fintech giant Stripe. The protocol uses data provided by participating traders.

Going forward, OpenAI said ChatGPT will provide more detailed information about products — showing side-by-side images, while providing other comparison metrics for each item — such as pricing, features, and reviews.