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Shopify is preparing its merchant base for a structural shift in online retail.
Shopify introduces 4% Agentic Commerce fee
From late January, products sold through AI chatbot checkouts will incur a new cost: a 4 per cent fee payable to OpenAI on transactions completed via ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout, in addition to Shopify’s existing charges.
The move coincides with Shopify making merchants’ catalogues available to AI-driven shopping interfaces, allowing consumers to search, compare and purchase products within a single conversational flow.
While checkouts via ChatGPT will carry an additional fee, transactions initiated through rival platforms — including Google’s AI Mode and Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot — will not, at least for now.
From Search Traffic to Priced Conversion
At first glance, a 4 per cent levy may appear steep, particularly for European merchants accustomed to lower card acceptance costs.
Yet in a US context, the rate broadly mirrors what many small businesses already pay for card processing.
Compared with early buy now, pay later pricing — where providers such as Klarna charged even higher merchant fees in exchange for promised sales uplift — OpenAI’s pricing sits firmly within established norms.
What differentiates this fee is not its size, but what it represents. Agentic commerce collapses the traditional funnel of discovery, evaluation and checkout into a single AI-mediated interaction.
Instead of paying for clicks or impressions, merchants are paying for resolved intent. The fee is effectively a toll on conversion itself.
Data suggests that premium may be justified.
According to insights cited by Shopify, AI-driven traffic to merchant sites has increased sevenfold year on year, while orders attributed to AI searches are up more than eleven times.
Separate analysis from Adobe indicates conversion uplifts of around 30 per cent when shoppers arrive via agentic interfaces, having already narrowed their preferences before landing on a product.
Control, Visibility and the Checkout Battle
Shopify’s strategic response has been to ensure that, even when discovery occurs inside third-party AI platforms, the transaction is routed through its own checkout.
Its Agentic Storefronts are designed to prevent merchants from becoming invisible suppliers behind AI interfaces they do not control.
This approach contrasts with OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, which allows purchases to be completed entirely within chat.
By charging for this capability, OpenAI is signalling confidence in the value of owning the agent — and the outcome — rather than the referral.
Merchants retain some control. Products will appear by default on AI platforms that do not levy additional fees, while paid channels require explicit opt-in.
However, visibility is hard to avoid entirely: listings may still surface in AI-generated responses unless merchants take active steps to block indexing.
New Economics of Digital Retail
The emergence of agentic checkouts marks a deeper shift in how digital commerce is priced. As AI systems move from directing shoppers to completing purchases, platforms are beginning to monetise certainty rather than attention.
For merchants, the calculus is likely to be pragmatic. Growth, not headline fees, remains the primary optimisation metric.
If agentic AI reliably delivers higher-intent customers and materially better conversion, many will conclude that paying for outcomes — not clicks — is a trade worth making.
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