OpenAI and Stripe team on ChatGPT payments

Editorial

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ChatGPT users in the US can now buy goods from US-based Etsy businesses directly in the chat. The feature will soon be extended to over a million Shopify merchants. Initially, the service is for single-item purchases, with multi-item carts and more merchants and regions to come.

Says OpenAI in a blog: “This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it. For shoppers, it’s seamless: go from chat to checkout in just a few taps. For sellers, it’s a new way to reach hundreds of millions of people while keeping full control of their payments, systems, and customer relationships.”

The feature – called Checkout in ChatGPT – is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a new open standard codeveloped by Stripe and OpenAI.

To make purchases, the ChatGPT user asks for product recommendations in the chat. When they are ready to buy, they are presented with a Stripe-powered checkout inline in the chat.

After the buyer uses their preferred payment method, Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token (SPT), a new payment primitive that lets applications like ChatGPT initiate a payment without exposing the buyer’s payment credentials. SPTs are scoped to a specific merchant and cart total. Once issued, ChatGPT passes the token to the merchant via API. The merchant can then process the transaction.

“Stripe has spent the last 15 years optimizing commerce for human buyers. Now, we are starting to do the same for agents,” says Kevin Miller, head of payments, Stripe.

OpenAI and Stripe say that by open sourcing the ACP, they are creating a shared language between businesses and AI agents. With a single integration, merchants will be able to start selling through AI agents while retaining full control.

“ACP provides the standardisation needed for businesses to participate in agentic commerce while preserving customer relationships and their existing systems,” says a statement.

However, ACP is not the only protocol in town: Earlier this month, Google lined up more than 60 partners – including Adyen, Coinbase, Mastercard and PayPal – behind its Agent Payments Protocol.