ChatGPT was going to buy things for you — then they quietly killed it

The exact clicks

1. Ask ChatGPT to find or compare a product the way you'd ask a search engine.
2. Expect a recommendation and a link out to the merchant's own site or app — not a completed purchase inside the chat.
3. Do the actual checkout (payment, shipping, account login) on the merchant's own page, same as any other online purchase.
4. Don't build a workflow around "buy it in ChatGPT" — that specific feature (Instant Checkout) is retired.

What changes

• The real number, verified before publishing: fewer than fifteen of Shopify's millions of merchants ever turned Instant Checkout on before it was retired.
• Buying inside ChatGPT converted at roughly a third the rate of sending the same shopper straight to the merchant's own site.
• What's left is discovery, not purchase — the same shape as a search engine's results page, not a new capability.

What it will not do

• This isn't a criticism of ChatGPT generally — it's one specific, named feature (Instant Checkout) that launched and was retired within about six months.
• Agentic checkout hasn't disappeared industry-wide — other players (Google, Perplexity) have their own versions; this episode covers what ChatGPT itself does today, not the whole category.
• Check ChatGPT's own current shopping behavior if this episode is more than a few months old — this space is changing fast.