Shopify confirmed that merchants will pay OpenAI a 4% fee on sales made through ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature, on top of the typical transaction fees Shopify charges for payment processing. This means that AI sales will cost merchants a total of around 7% depending on which Shopify plan they're on, or more if the merchant uses a 3rd party payment processor, to which Shopify tacks on an additional 2% fee for not using Shopify Payments.
Beginning today, Jan 26th, Shopify will begin making its merchants' products available for purchase through AI checkouts including those from ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, as previously announced, with Perplexity on the future roadmap. However for the moment, OpenAI will be the only one taking a cut of those transactions.
It'll be interesting to see how this decision to charge a fee impacts ChatGPT's growth in the space.
Shopify made it clear a few weeks ago that merchants will have the ability to pick and choose which AI channels to include their products in. It's not an all or nothing scenario, which means merchants could choose to gravitate towards the AI platforms that don't take a cut of their sales to test the AI waters, ultimately reducing the number of products available through ChatGPT.
Is OpenAI going about this the wrong way?
Usually it's market share first and then monetize — but OpenAI is attempting monetization from day one. While they might command a leading market share of consumers who use their chatbot for answers, with an estimated more than one billion monthly active users, they've yet to build a significant roster of merchants feeding their products directly into their platform, which is a necessary step for commerce domination, as scraping websites isn't a reliable enough long term solution. They need the feed.
If OpenAI hinders its product selection due to merchants bypassing the platform to avoid the 4% fee in favor of other AI platforms that don't charge, this could ultimately push consumers to chatbots with a bigger product selection. “Why is X brand not surfacing? Let me try Gemini.”
Then again, if less merchants participate, it could mean more sales for the ones that do, which could encourage more to participate, despite the 4% fee, resulting in a FOMO loop that ultimately proves the 4% fee to be inconsequential to OpenAI's commerce growth. After all, merchants are accustomed to paying a lot more than 4% for discovery on other platforms.
It's also important to note that the opt-in from Shopify is only for including products in ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature, meaning it doesn't prevent the merchant's products from surfacing in ChatGPT's normal answer results, with links to the products on their website. To opt-out of that, merchants must contact OpenAI directly, but there is little reason to do so, as the risk is lower (since customers are checking out on the merchant's own website).
The other TBD question is — do merchants even want these AI-generated sales?
It's very possible that the return rate of these purchases is significantly higher due to consumers relying too hard on ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting in regards to product research and due diligence.
Could AI-generated sales lead to a higher rate of returns? More negative reviews? Less customer satisfaction? Or will the volume of sales outweigh the potential consequences? As a merchant, I would keep an eye on these metrics.
There's a cost to AI checkout above and beyond the 4% that has yet to be determined.
What are your thoughts? Hit reply and let me now or join the conversation on LinkedIn.
