ChatGPT is making it easy for users to purchase goods right inside ChatGPT. The recently released Instant Checkout feature connects to a variety of merchants. Business owners interested in trying this feature can sign up here.
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed with Stripe, will be made open source so that other merchants and A.I. agents can support instant checkouts in A.I. platforms.
- Etsy was the first platform connected to Instant Checkout, with
- The idea is to take the natural next step from ChatGPT helping users find things to buy, to actually being able to buy things within ChatGPT.
- The term “agentic commerce” is one that business owners can expect to see used more frequently. It broadly refers to using A.I. agents to help users shop.
- OpenAI claims that ChatGPT’s product results are ranked according to relevance, meaning products that appear will match a user’s query. (Worth noting: ChatGPT users are referred to as “shoppers” in OpenAI’s posts about this feature.)
The Significance for Business Owners
Businesses connected to this feature have full control over orders.
If you are a business owner, you may be just glad that this feature exists. But there is opportunity here that must not be missed, namely that you will need to be able to think about A.I.O.: artificial-intelligence optimization.
To see what this is, give ChatGPT a somewhat vague product description and see what it surfaces. Much like on Google or Amazon, you will see a list of products to choose from.
How can you get on that list, specifically be the top item? Be sure of it, that will be an offshoot of search-engine optimization (S.E.O.), where now you are trying to rank well within a conversational-A.I. platform in addition to a traditional search engine.
Businesses and e-commerce platforms connected to these A.I. systems will be competing to be recommended by A.I.. Just how to do so is a source of speculation.
A.I. can search the web for users to surface links to products, with key metrics being accurate prices and availability. The more competitively priced your product is, the better. Conversely, if you set prices higher than competitors and have less available items, then your product is less likely to rank well.
Product Feed Specification for Instant Checkout
Consult this post by OpenAI that outlines the Product Feed Specification, a guide for how to share structured data with OpenAI.
If you want the full specification, just follow the link below. This blog will just give you a recommendation: there are a lot of Recommended and Optional attributes on the list; instead of doing the bare-mininum Required attributes, fill out as much attributes as you can.
Giving more specifications can be useful for ChatGPT, especially because people are able to give large language models prompts that are much more specific than the handful of keywords they would type into a search engine’s search bar.
One that you should be especially interested in making use of are the Reviews and Q&A attributes. These Recommended and Optional attributes can actually figure significantly into how ChatGPT could divine product quality, so you should definitely include these attributes.
One-Stop Shop
The writer of this blog post believes that OpenAI’s overriding ambition is to go beyond just multimodal generative-A.I. tools. The ultimate goal may be to become something like an “Everything” software company, or something like that.
We already have an OpenAI browser in the form of ChatGPT Atlas. The future may hold ChatGPT operating systems.
What this could entail is that much of online consumerism will be native to A.I. systems that become like the one-stop shop for finding and purchasing products.
As we inch toward such an online experience day by day, it is best for business owners to consider how A.I.O. can be used today to make sure their products show up in conversations with A.I. like ChatGPT.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Business owners must realize that online shopping as we know it is evolving for many people who are using A.I.. Chatbots are now playing the role of product-recommendation platforms as well as e-commerce portals to purchase goods.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
GO Deeper on Substack!
If you want to get a bigger-picture view on where A.I. is and is headed, then check out our Substack to learn about emerging and dominant themes in the A.I. industry that affect all kinds of businesses!
