OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in September 2025. By March 2026, it was dead. Five months, roughly 30 merchants out of millions adopted it, and they've since pivoted back to routing users to merchant sites. Most coverage focused on what went wrong technically: product data too messy to standardize at scale, no sales tax infrastructure, merchant onboarding described as "arduous." Those things are all true. But there's a more fundamental reason the post-mortems have mostly missed.
Urgency works on humans. Scarcity works on humans. Beautiful photography works on humans. You've spent years getting these things right — the above-the-fold her
When an AI agent visits your store, it doesn't see your homepage or your brand story. It reads product identifiers, schema markup, protocol manifests, and check
The next wave of buyers won't have feelings about your brand. They'll have decision criteria. AI agents are already making purchasing decisions in software, and
ChatGPT Instant Checkout launched on February 16. Within days, 800 million users had a direct checkout path through an AI agent. Glossier, SKIMS, Vuori — alread