Shopify Merchants to Pay 4% Fee on ChatGPT Checkout Sales

When Shopify enables sales through artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots later this month, the merchants using its platform will pay OpenAI a 4% fee on sales made through the ChatGPT checkout, on top of the fees charged by Shopify, The Information reported Wednesday, citing a Shopify spokesperson.

Sales made through the chatbot checkouts offered by Google’s AI Mode and Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot will have no additional fees, for now, according to the report.

Shopify will begin making merchants’ products available through these checkout features on Monday (Jan. 26), through a data-sharing program the company announced late last year, the report said.

These products will be available for purchase by default on platforms that don’t charge an additional free, while merchants will have to opt in to make their products available on those that do charge a free, per the report.

Merchants will be able to choose which channels to sell in by toggling each AI platform on or off, according to the report. However, their products will appear in AI responses, together with links to their own websites, unless they contact the AI companies or block their listings from being indexed by web crawlers, per the report.

Shopify announced in December that its Agentic Storefronts would put merchants’ products directly into AI chat interfaces so that shoppers could ask questions, compare items and complete purchases in a single thread.

With Agentic Storefronts, the agent routes the order into Shopify’s checkout. The company said that centralizing these inputs reduces the risk of losing visibility inside AI ecosystems it does not control.

OpenAI announced in September that it was launching Instant Checkout, a feature that enables shoppers to complete purchases inside the chat, rather than being redirected to external sites. The company said this feature would initially support Etsy products in the United States and would then be expanded to include Shopify’s merchants.

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said during a November earnings call that since the previous January, Shopify had seen AI-driven traffic to its stores increase by seven times and orders attributed to AI searches increase by 11 times.