Shopify merchants will soon be able to sell products through ChatGPT (www.cbc.ca)

Shopify has struck a partnership with OpenAI that will let ChatGPT surface and sell products from Shopify merchants: hundreds of millions of items will be ingested in an “AI-understandable” format so the chatbot can retrieve inventory, present purchase options directly in conversation, and route orders straight into merchants’ Shopify dashboards without redirecting shoppers to external sites. In practice this means when users ask ChatGPT for recommendations, the model can query live merchant catalogs and complete transactions inside the chat experience. For the AI/ML community this represents a major step toward scaled conversational commerce and real-time retrieval-driven applications. Technically it implies structured catalog ingestion, semantic indexing/embeddings or other retrieval pipelines to map natural-language queries to product metadata, plus real-time inventory APIs and order-routing integrations for consistency and fulfillment. It also raises practical ML challenges and research opportunities—improving recommendation and ranking models in conversational contexts, evaluation metrics for conversion and relevance, personalization under privacy constraints, and safety/fraud detection for in-chat purchases. The move could reshape traffic and attribution dynamics for merchants and motivate new tooling for catalog quality, latency-sensitive retrieval, and human-AI shopping experiences.