OpenAI's 4% fee for in-app purchases creates a risk for merchants. If consumers start using ChatGPT as their primary purchasing interface, it could intercept sales that originated from a brand's own marketing. A customer might see a product elsewhere, then buy it via ChatGPT, imposing a new tax on an otherwise organic conversion.
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Large brands like Target are using ChatGPT apps as high-intent lead generators rather than for full-funnel transactions. The app helps users build a shopping cart within the chat interface and then hands them off to the main website to complete the purchase. This reduces integration complexity while capturing high-value users.
Consumer search behavior is shifting from browsers to AI assistants. E-commerce brands must adapt by treating agents like ChatGPT as new traffic sources. This requires making product data discoverable via APIs to enable seamless research and purchasing directly within conversational AI platforms.
For OpenAI's commerce features to succeed, it's not enough to build one-click checkout. They must fundamentally retrain hundreds of millions of users to trust a new purchasing workflow inside a chatbot, breaking deeply ingrained habits of searching on ChatGPT then buying on Google or Amazon.
Ridge, an e-commerce wallet company, reveals that traffic originating from ChatGPT generates $12 per user session, a staggering 12 times higher than the $1 per user from Meta. This demonstrates the exceptionally high purchase intent of consumers who use AI for product research.
While a 4% fee seems reasonable for new customer acquisition, it becomes a burden if users who discovered a product organically then use ChatGPT for checkout convenience. This dynamic forces merchants to pay OpenAI for customers they didn't acquire through the platform.
By integrating shopping into ChatGPT, OpenAI can become a massive e-commerce engine. With a potential take rate of 15-30%, similar to Amazon or Meta, capturing just 20% of the $1.2T U.S. e-commerce market would generate tens of billions in new, high-margin revenue.
Amazon's potential commerce partnership with OpenAI is fraught with risk. Allowing ChatGPT to become the starting point for product searches threatens Amazon's highly profitable on-site advertising revenue, even if Amazon gains referral traffic. It's a classic battle to avoid being aggregated by another platform.
Traffic from ChatGPT to e-commerce sites converts at an exceptionally high rate (12% for one brand, compared to a typical 1-2%). This demonstrates that users turning to AI for product research have extremely high purchase intent by the time they click a link, making AI chat a powerful and potentially lucrative channel for advertisers.
OpenAI's partnership with Stripe to enable in-app purchases transforms ChatGPT from an information tool into a transactional platform. This creates a frictionless sales channel for e-commerce brands, directly challenging Google's established search-to-purchase business model.
A user arriving from ChatGPT has likely already used the AI to research, compare options, and make a decision. This pre-qualification process means the traffic is extremely high-intent, leading to conversion rates (12% for one brand) that are an order of magnitude higher than typical benchmarks.
