Six months into making a big bet on shopping, OpenAI-owned ChatGPT is switching its strategy.
In September, ChatGPT launched a feature called Instant Checkout that allowed consumers to buy products through its platform—winning the support of Walmart, Shopify, Etsy, and PayPal.
ChatGPT has since gotten rid of that feature. Now, it is letting retailers steer the buying experience, by either pushing the checkout process to the retailer’s site, or by pushing it to an app within OpenAI that the retailers control.
“We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide, so we’re allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post.
