Shopify merchants will pay OpenAI a 4% transaction fee on sales through ChatGPT’s checkout feature beginning January 26, a Shopify spokesperson confirmed to The Information. At 11 percentage points below Amazon’s typical 15% referral fee and without forced advertising spend, the platform offers the potential for organic product discovery at scale – though at volumes still dwarfed by those of established marketplaces.
Market data shows measurable early traction. Northbeam, an e-commerce intelligence platform, tracked AI search’s contribution to website visits of its clients growing from 0.01% to 0.15% by year-end 2025 – a 15-fold increase that remains small in absolute terms but demonstrates accelerating consumer adoption. With over 1 million Shopify merchants accessible through ChatGPT’s checkout and an estimated 3.9 billion annual product queries, the channel moves from theoretical disruption to a functioning marketplace with concrete economics.
The fee differential reveals the scale of Amazon’s margin extraction. A typical Amazon seller moving $1 million annually pays roughly $150,000 in referral fees plus $100,000-$150,000 in advertising just to maintain discoverability – a combined 25-30% take rate before fulfillment costs. ChatGPT’s 4% transaction fee on top of Shopify’s standard 2.9% payment processing fee represents approximately $69,000 in total marketplace and processing costs for that same $1 million in sales, or roughly 7% total.
Even compared to other marketplaces – Walmart’s 6-15%, TikTok Shop’s 8%, or Etsy’s 6.5% – ChatGPT’s combined fee structure positions it competitively. The critical difference is zero advertising requirement. Walmart follows Amazon’s model of paid search placement, TikTok Shop demands constant content creation to maintain visibility, and Etsy remains a niche marketplace for handmade goods with declining GMV. ChatGPT offers broader category potential without forced promotion spend, though with over 1 million Shopify merchants now accessible, being selected by OpenAI’s recommendation algorithm presents its own discovery challenge – one that will likely intensify as more sellers adopt the channel.
The structural difference goes beyond simple fee comparison. OpenAI recently announced ad testing but stated that “ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you” and that “ads are always separate and clearly labeled.” This differentiates it from Amazon’s model, where sponsored products dominate search results and blur with organic listings. Amazon sellers paid $56.2 billion in advertising in 2024 because organic visibility became increasingly scarce as paid placements consumed screen space. If OpenAI maintains answer independence, it creates a marketplace where organic discovery coexists with advertising rather than being displaced by it – a fundamentally different economic model for sellers whose products benefit from contextual, conversational queries that surface niche solutions unreachable through keyword matching.
The scale opportunity remains modest but growing. Conservative conversion assumptions of 2% on ChatGPT’s 3.9 billion annual product queries at $70 average order value would generate roughly $5.5 billion in GMV – about half of Etsy’s global marketplace but less than 1% of Amazon’s estimated $575 billion third-party GMV.
Yet the rate of traffic growth and the favorable 4% fee structure create compelling early-adopter economics. The opt-in structure for paid checkout provides low-risk channel experimentation without committing inventory or restructuring operations. Google and Microsoft’s chatbot checkouts currently charge no additional fees beyond Shopify’s standard processing, though the zero-fee positioning from both platforms likely represents early market-share acquisition rather than sustainable long-term models.
Whether conversational commerce scales beyond its current 1% share depends on behavioral adoption, but the confirmed 4% fee makes the margin opportunity concrete. For sellers, ChatGPT represents the first organic discovery channel at meaningful scale since Amazon’s advertising business all but eliminated unpaid visibility. OpenAI will monetize attention through advertising – they’ve announced as much – but the critical unknown is whether their stated principles create a genuinely different marketplace model or eventually replicate the scarcity-based economics that drove Amazon’s $56.2 billion advertising business.
