Despite reaching more than 700 million weekly users, dominating the generative AI market, and achieving staggering recurring annual revenue now surpassing the $10 billion mark, OpenAI will still close 2025 with a significant loss. The company is now exploring e-commerce as a new revenue opportunity.
ChatGPT, the company’s ubiquitous chatbot, is extremely expensive to train and operate. The more users it attracts, the higher the operational costs become. In search of additional business models that could help reverse its financial trajectory, OpenAI might tap into a proven and well-established method of generating revenue online: e-commerce.
Virtual Personal Shopper
According to the Financial Times, the AI company is developing a prototype checkout feature that could allow it to take a commission from purchases made by users through its platform.
Users frequently ask ChatGPT for online shopping advice, effectively turning the chatbot into a virtual personal shopper. This use case has become so common that OpenAI maintains a detailed support page explaining how the system handles shopping results. The company states:
“A product appears in the visual carousel when ChatGPT perceives it’s relevant to the user’s intent. ChatGPT assesses intent based on the user’s query and other available context, such as memories or custom instructions.”
The list of merchants selected by the AI is generated based on web store and product metadata collected by ChatGPT’s crawler, or provided directly by third-party sources. In other words, OpenAI acknowledges that this data isn’t directly ordered or managed by them. The company expects this to evolve into a new shopping experience and is exploring ways for merchants to provide direct product feeds, similar to what they already do with competitors like Google Shopping.
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New Revenue Opportunity
Managing the purchase process therefore represents an untapped revenue opportunity for OpenAI, which would be particularly valuable for monetizing users who access the free version of the service. Non-paying customers are currently believed to be the vast majority of ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly active users.
Currently, ChatGPT’s product carousel interface displays results with an option to click through and complete purchases on the retailer’s website. OpenAI’s vision is to bring the entire transaction flow in-house by offering users a secure platform not just to search for products, but also to purchase them and track shipments. Merchants who list their products for sale through ChatGPT would pay OpenAI a commission, with the company handling order fulfillment.
In April 2025, OpenAI signed a deal with e-commerce giant Shopify, which would serve as the technological partner for this project. Shopify has already demonstrated its ability to manage complex e-commerce integrations for platforms with massive user bases, notably powering TikTok’s marketplace, TikTok Shop.
Negative Impact on Competition?
OpenAI’s entry into e-commerce could negatively impact several direct and indirect competitors, including Google. A growing number of users are shifting away from traditional web search, preferring to find answers conversationally through ChatGPT. Offering product search capabilities would remove another revenue stream from Google’s own Shopping platform, which operates both as a standalone service and through featured and advertised products appearing at the top of search results.
Unlike Google, however, OpenAI doesn’t plan to generate revenue from advertising, at least initially. This includes not allowing merchants to pay for preferential positioning of their products in generative results.
In a March interview with Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained:
“We’re never going to take money to change placement or whatever, but if you buy something that you found through Deep Research ChatGPT’s research tool, we’re going to charge like a 2 percent affiliate fee or something.”
Not That Easy
But while the idea of a curated purchase experience might seem like a no-brainer to boost revenue, previous similar experiences have proven it might not be as easy or effective as it sounds. Google itself quietly discontinued its direct shopping checkout functionality in 2023, while Facebook removed native checkout from its platforms more recently, in July 2024. Even Pinterest, despite announcing hosted checkout years ago, never gained significant traction in the space.
It’s not a matter of technical limitations, as the integrations are straightforward and already exist. Instead, competitor’s projects were marred by low merchant adoption, insufficient data sharing, shifting internal priorities, and users simply never adapting to the new shopping flows. People seem to still shop primarily on dedicated marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart, or directly on brand websites. Will ChatGPT’s conversational nature be a sufficient advantage for OpenAI to succeed where Google, Facebook, and others have already failed?
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