Digital Horizons

Zero-Click Shopping Comes To ChatGPT

• James Walker & Brian Hastings

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We break down how ChatGPT’s instant checkout compresses research and purchase into a single flow and what that means for Google Shopping, merchants, and the next wave of SEO. We share real buying journeys, explore integrations with Shopify, Etsy, and Stripe, and forecast how ads and trust will evolve inside AI.

• Zero‑click commerce and compressed purchase journeys
• OpenAI’s instant checkout and product cards with images
• Shopify, Etsy, and Stripe integrations for fast onboarding
• Merchant fees on the platform side, no user surcharge
• Google Shopping pressure and PLA shifts into AI summaries
• Real example of buying without using Google
• The rise of AI‑native SEO and answer equity
• Possible ads inside AI results and trust implications
• How to prepare feeds, content, and measurement

Thanks for watching


The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:

James Walker - Managing Director WHD
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous

SPEAKER_01:

It's going to accelerate the zero click movement. Tom and I from a team came up as number two in the recommendation in the ChatGPT overview as to information around threads.

SPEAKER_00:

It's going to be the new link equity SEO approach of trying to figure out what are the signals that Google used to look at.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome back to Digital Horizons. Today we are talking about the instant checkout experience that is going to be introduced by OpenAI on ChatGPT.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we're going to uncover what this can mean for merchants, for users, and what does it actually mean for Google and their product listing ads and the grass cutting that OpenAI is going to do in that space.

SPEAKER_01:

What this is, is the ability for users who are having a chat on ChatGPT to be able to push a single button and be able to purchase the product that has been recommended to them by OpenAI.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, OpenAI and ChatGPT is really becoming a thorn in Google's side. You know, Google has product listing ads and the shopping page and its uh search results page and its summaries are getting a direct competitor in OpenAI's ability to research the internet and provide you answers, effectively replicating the search results page, and now taking over the shopping page by if they're suggesting products in your research, having a button right there that you can just check out. Yeah, I think it's really cool seeing I I couldn't have imagined a competitor to Google until AI has come along this far and started delivering these sorts of tools. So how does it work for users when researching products in ChatGPT? Instead of just having reference links, there will be pictures, descriptions, and buy now links.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep, and they'll directly integrate with Shopify to start with and Etsy.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. OpenAI will take a small commission or markup from the transaction.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep, and that's from the merchant side. So nothing on the user side. So it doesn't cost anything to actual purchase. But if the merchants want to be featured on there, you'd be paying a percentage. But I think that percentage will be on top of your Shopify and Etsy fees as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And they're using a new protocol, the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which is what's enabling this connection for e-commerce between Shopify and OpenAI. So for merchants, it should be as easy as connecting to OpenAI with your Shopify account. With your Shopify account. Yeah. It says that there will be a Strype integration as well. I'm not sure if that's the only payment method that they're going to be integrating, but I presume it will add more.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I mean, if the integration is through Shopify, you would expect that it would just plug into your Shopify checkout, which would then have all your Shopify payment options. But I guess and potentially the sho the Stripe integration may just be for people who aren't even on Shopify. They just want to be able to sell digital products or whatever through a Stripe payment gateway.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it says Stripe integration are businesses already using Stripe can enable payments with a single line of code while others can connect via shared payment token API or delegated payments. So yeah, you can use anything that Stripe has a simpler integration. Yeah, and it's simpler integration.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, we we talked about on an episode recently where I went through the process of buying a washing machine without even going to Google search. Like the entire process was researching product on ChatGPT. I even found coupons and best place to buy and all that kind of stuff. And then I made a purchase without ever using Google, which was the first time I ever did this. This takes it another step further where I didn't even need to go to the supplier's website. I could just have done that whole process through ChatGPT from discovery. Well, I mean, I knew I needed a dishwasher washing machine, but I didn't know which one I wanted. So going through the whole research stage, going through it all, finding coupons, finding the best deal, so that whole funnel of the process and then purchasing without a single Google search.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's um or even trip to a website. It's becoming wild. And I think having more than just text in your chat GPT conversation lists, and it's certain to spill over into the other large language models as well. It's going to accelerate that zero-click movement. And we will spend some time talking about this in a full episode. What this means for websites, for advertisers, for brands. What will your website become if not just a home for content that's read by other platforms and served within their network, within their platform?

SPEAKER_01:

And what does it, where does it leave Google Shopping and search as well? Yeah. Because if this uh I think we've obviously seen a lot of traffic not no longer getting clicks through the website because of the AI overviews. But then if people are now not using Google Shopping for search intent, because we're always looking at it's like, oh, you know, cont commercial intent keywords, normally for those kind of searches, you're going to go use Google because you want to be able to compare all the pricing, you want to be able to see the shopping ads, you want to be able to do all this kind of stuff in your research. But if that's taken away from that, it's really going to, I guess, move and shift the way that people are using these platforms for their purchase decisions and really shift people away, or I guess make Google ads a less valuable marketing tool, as what it has been is because it's always been for e-commerce brands, it's always been such a key driver for revenue.

SPEAKER_00:

We were talking earlier off-camera about the likelihood of OpenAI introducing ads within its platform over time as well. They've introduced, well, we can talk about this in another brand news, but the Pulse tool, which is their opportunity to push and proactively serve content you'd find interesting. Maybe it's about products you've been researching. I am certain ads will find their way in there over time.

SPEAKER_01:

100%. I'd love to be able to put ads in this into that. But I was talking to someone about this, and they were like, no, Sam Altman hates ads. And I'm like, I don't know who your source is on this. Maybe that's a thing that has been openly against ads, but I'm like, so was Zuckerberg. Look at Facebook.

SPEAKER_00:

Like, yeah, like the they hate ads and your users and then start selling shit. Yeah, until they need to find um a value other than investment to drive the company. So I'm sure we will see some sort of advertiser placement become available in open AI. But I also think, yes, they might be cutting Google's grasps, but Google's already transitioning to a lot of AI summaries. Over 60% of searches are resulting in a zero-click path to the answer. There's not much more of a leap for Google to introduce its product listing ads into the search engine AI summary that it serves on its home page. They've already got all of that infrastructure there. Being able to pull the products in that people have already connected in via their ads, it would diminish the unbiased view that I have of uh ChatGPT's answers or research. But I think what we're going to see over time is people gaming the AI platforms and the summaries with ways of serving their content as the right possible answer. And then if there is ad platforms available, we're going to have a lot of trust in these AI summaries. And then just like everything else, when there's spun up SEO articles to make things like the top 10 batteries to get for your car in 2025, or the top 10 laptops on CNET, we're going to start realizing oh, this stuff is kind of sponsored and paid for. And I don't think it's there yet. I still think it's trusted content that, you know, it's going and finding this content somewhere. Yeah. But over time, I think Google's big battle will be copying what OpenAI is doing and improving its experience so they get less people leaking out to OpenAI.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, for sure. I um speaking of getting found on things, I I got featured recently on a um one of the one of our team were doing some research on meta threads, um, the platform. And I was just asking some information about it. And Tom and I from our team came up as number two in the recommendation in the ChatGPT overview as to um information around threads. And I was like, at that time we'd only done about a handful of episodes on our thing. So I'm wondering how did that get ranked? We've got a brand new website, we've got a new YouTube channel, but there was either that few people talking about threads that it was like John Loomer, who's like Facebook ads everywhere. Like he's been a resource. I've been following that guy for like 10 years on Facebook ads, and then me and Tom. And I was like, where is this coming from? There's like no interest in threads, or somehow we've we've done something that we didn't know that got us found and and fed back into the into the results in in ChatGPT, which was great. Um, it got posted to our Wins channel, but I have no idea how that happened. So it'd be great to be able to work out how to come up on these lists. And I'm sure there's people, I mean, there are people out there working this out right now. Because there's gonna be so much value, especially when the the commercial side of things, when people are purchasing through the AI platforms, that's where it's gonna be so valuable to be started to show up there.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's going to be the new link equity SEO approach of trying to figure out what are the signals that Google used to look at to determine whether your website was the most relevant will be now what does Chat GPT look at to determine what answer is the most appropriate, and then trying to manage those signals so that we're, you know, oh, if it's the most references in answers, or is it the most engaged with answer, or is it threads in different platforms? Yeah, it's a whole new world and it's gonna be a whole lot of work. So that's Digital Horizons for this week. Really excited to see how this progresses, and as soon as it's available, we'll be connecting our clients' accounts up to see whether we get sales and conversions through it, and we'll report back to you. Thanks for watching.

Contributor

Brian Hastings

Co-host