ChatGPT now lets some US businesses chat with shoppers, but not take payment

What OpenAI launched

As eWeek reported, OpenAI has begun a beta test called Businesses in ChatGPT, launched on Nov. 10. Until now, a company could be mentioned in a ChatGPT answer without having any say in what was said. This lets eligible companies take part in the conversation.

The headline feature is the Business Agent, an assistant that speaks for a company and answers customer questions. For now it is open to eligible US ecommerce and online service businesses. A shopper who sees a company in a ChatGPT answer can open its profile and talk to the agent directly.

How a company gets set up

A business owner or authorized representative first claims an existing profile through a tool called Business Hub. Ownership can be proven with a company email address or a website domain. After approval, the person must pass a separate identity check run by Persona before any changes go live.

Once verified, a company can manage three things:

• Business information: descriptions and policies, so ChatGPT has accurate details.
• Product catalogs: feeds with prices and availability that ChatGPT may draw on for shopping questions.
• Customer insights: how often the company's site shows up in answers, how often people click through, and which topics draw interest.

The insights are aggregated. Businesses do not see individual conversations, including chats with their own agent.

What the agents can and can't do

Shoppers can ask an agent about products, compare options or learn about services. Companies shape the agent with their own instructions and reference material. OpenAI's rules say an agent must identify itself as a company representative, and those chats are labeled separately from ordinary ChatGPT answers.

There is a commercial angle too. Brands can pay to sponsor their agents, or use them as a landing spot for ads shown in ChatGPT.

The big limit is that agents cannot complete purchases, make bookings or look up an existing order. Anyone who wants to buy must go to the merchant's website to finish. So the agent works more like a knowledgeable shop assistant at the door than a cashier.

Will it actually drive sales?

eWeek looked at research from Aimerce, which covers Shopify merchants that use its service. Of 19,278,605 orders between May 19 and Sept. 16, 13,246 were attributed to ChatGPT. eWeek calculated that as 0.0687%, or roughly seven in every 10,000.

That figure has caveats. It covers only Aimerce's merchants, not retail overall. It counts only the last click before a purchase, so it misses people who got ideas from ChatGPT and bought by another route. And it predates Business Agents, so it says nothing about how well they work.

Separate research from Adobe found that shoppers sent by AI tools did better than other visitors to US retail sites in Sept. 2026. But Adobe looked at several AI platforms together, not ChatGPT alone.

OpenAI has tried a more direct approach before. Instant Checkout, introduced last year, let eligible customers buy without leaving the chatbot. In a Mar. 2026 update, OpenAI said it had not given merchants enough flexibility, and shifted its focus to helping people discover products and then buy through stores' existing checkout systems.

What businesses should check first

Claiming a profile does not guarantee more visibility, and it gives no control over what ChatGPT recommends on its own. So eWeek suggests treating this as a pilot before committing more effort.

• Record a baseline before launch: ChatGPT-referred visits, completed purchases and revenue per visit.
• Check how visits are tracked. Aimerce found that 81.8% of ChatGPT-referred pageviews had no HTTP referrer, the label a browser normally sends to say where a visitor came from. Combine referral data with tagged links instead of trusting that label alone.
• Test the answers on prices, availability, delivery and returns against current company information.
• Name an owner to refresh the source material and retest whenever products or policies change.

Results should be compared over a set period. Sales promotions, ad campaigns and seasonal demand can all lift orders, so they should be ruled out before the agent gets credit.