Shopify is partnering with OpenAI so merchants can sell directly in ChatGPT (twitter.com)

Shopify has announced a partnership with OpenAI to let merchants sell directly inside ChatGPT, turning the chatbot into a conversational storefront. The integration will connect merchants’ Shopify catalogs, inventory and order systems with ChatGPT’s interface so users can discover, ask about, and buy products without leaving a chat. For merchants this promises a new low-friction sales channel that brings product discovery into natural-language conversations and leverages ChatGPT’s user base for reach and personalized recommendations. Technically, the deal hinges on API-level integration: catalogs and real-time inventory sync to ChatGPT, order creation and fulfillment routed back through Shopify, and conversational layers powered by OpenAI’s models to surface and personalize product suggestions. That raises important ML implications — more direct signals for recommendation and ranking models, new evaluation needs for conversational relevance and trust, and increased focus on multimodal product presentation. It also spotlights operational issues like checkout flows, fraud prevention, seller data control, and privacy/consent for customer data used to personalize chat experiences. For the AI/ML community, this is a major step toward mainstream conversational commerce and a live testbed for models that must balance utility, accuracy and safety in real transactions.