OpenAI unveiled an agentic AI shopping system that finds, compares, recommends and completes purchases. It could shift discovery from search engines and marketplaces to conversational agents, forcing merchants to adopt structured product feeds, instant checkout and secure payment integrations.
OpenAI announced an agentic shopping system on September 29, 2025 that lets an AI shopping assistant act end to end for shoppers. The agent can find products, compare options, surface personalized product recommendations and complete checkout with secure online payment flows. That frictionless, conversational experience could reroute how people discover and buy products online and shift attention from search engines and marketplaces toward AI driven assistants.
Today consumers move between search results, marketplace listings and brand sites to compare prices, read reviews and complete purchases. Agentic commerce collapses those steps into a single conversation. Rather than typing a keyword phrase a user might say, "Show me top rated wireless headphones under 100" or "Help me find a laptop for video editing and add to my cart." Optimizing for these natural language queries is key as users interact with conversational agents and voice interfaces.
Merchants that want to be discoverable by agentic systems should focus on clean, machine readable product data and reliable APIs for inventory and pricing. Invest in dynamic product feed management, explicit metadata about shipping and returns, and clear provenance for reviews. In practice that means publishing structured data such as product price, availability, ratings and review snippets so a conversational agent can confidently recommend your items.
In the new AI era focus on user intent over exact keywords. Prioritize content that answers practical buyer queries and matches conversational patterns. Examples of high value phrases to use naturally in product pages and help content include "buy [product] online", "fast checkout", "personalized product recommendations", "secure online payment" and "real time inventory." Pair those phrases with first hand experience content like customer stories and detailed reviews to build experience expertise authoritativeness trustworthiness.
Agentic systems can redirect traffic that once flowed to search engines and marketplaces. That creates new monetization options such as referral fees, affiliate arrangements or direct checkout routing through an agent. Regulators will likely focus on fairness in ranking and clear disclosure when recommendations are sponsored or prioritized.
Conversational commerce speeds purchases but centralizes decision making in a model. To earn user trust agents must offer clear receipts, easy cancellation and transparent provenance for recommendations. Merchants should make returns policies and fulfillment options explicit in their structured data so agents can surface them when asked, for example "Can I get free shipping for this item" or "Is this available for same day delivery".
OpenAI's agentic shopping system signals a larger shift toward conversational commerce where a conversation may replace a product page. For businesses the priority is technical and strategic adaptation: expose reliable product feeds, implement schema markup, enable instant checkout and secure payment integrations, and optimize content for natural language shopping queries. The next wave of commerce may live inside conversations. Will your product data be ready to be discovered there?
