# E-Commerce ChatGPT Plugins

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/e-commerce_chatgpt_plugins
> Updated: 2026-06-27
> Categories: ChatGPT, Enterprise AI, OpenAI
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

*See also: [ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/chatgpt_plugins), [ChatGPT Plugin Categories](/wiki/chatgpt_plugin_categories) and [E-Commerce](/wiki/e-commerce)*

**E-Commerce ChatGPT Plugins** were third party shopping integrations published in the [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt) plugin store that connected the chatbot to online shopping catalogs, price comparison engines, and merchant storefronts. They were a deprecated technology: [OpenAI](/wiki/openai) launched ChatGPT plugins in beta on March 23, 2023 [1], announced the wind down on November 6, 2023, disabled new plugin conversations on March 19, 2024, and fully shut the platform down on April 9, 2024 [6][8]. The best known commerce examples were Klarna, Shop by Shopify, and Instacart, three of the eleven inaugural launch partners chosen by OpenAI [1][3][4]. The category was OpenAI's first public demonstration that a [large language model](/wiki/large_language_model) could move past pure conversation and trigger live commerce APIs on behalf of a shopper.

The plugin program was succeeded by [Custom GPTs](/wiki/custom_gpts) and the [GPT Store](/wiki/gpt_store) (January 2024), then by GPT Actions, and later by the [Model Context Protocol](/wiki/model_context_protocol) (MCP), which OpenAI adopted for ChatGPT in 2025 [6][7][13]. Separately, OpenAI added native in chat shopping through Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol on September 29, 2025 [14]. This article preserves the original aiwiki entry and expands it into a historical reference page covering the timeline, verified plugins, typical workflows, deprecation, and the successor systems that replaced the plugin platform.

## What were e-commerce ChatGPT plugins?

E-commerce ChatGPT plugins were a category of third party plugin that let ChatGPT search products, compare prices, and assemble shopping carts from inside a chat. On March 23, 2023, OpenAI published a blog post titled "ChatGPT plugins" announcing what it called the company's first plugins for its chatbot [1]. OpenAI described plugins as "tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle," built to "help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services" [1].

Eleven third party launch partners were named alongside two first party plugins built by OpenAI: a Browsing plugin and a Code Interpreter sandbox [1]. The eleven third party partners were Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, and Wolfram [1]. Zapier joined inside the same announcement window [11]. Three of the eleven, Shopify, Klarna, and Instacart, were commerce focused, which is what anchored the e-commerce category [1][3][4][5].

Each plugin was defined by an OpenAPI specification and a manifest file that told the model what the plugin could do. The model decided when a user request matched a plugin's declared capabilities, called the relevant endpoint, received structured JSON, and summarized that JSON into chat readable text and clickable links. Payment never settled inside the chat: users completed checkout on the merchant's own site.

## When were ChatGPT plugins launched and made generally available?

Access on day one was gated behind a waitlist, with priority for a small number of developers and [ChatGPT Plus](/wiki/chatgpt) subscribers [1]. On May 12, 2023, OpenAI announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all Plus subscribers the following week [2]. On May 19, 2023, the plugin store opened to all ChatGPT Plus customers, which made the entire third party catalog generally accessible, including the e-commerce listings [2].

By late summer 2023 the store carried several hundred plugins organized into more than sixty topical groupings. The e-commerce grouping overlapped with the adjacent [Shopping ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/shopping_chatgpt_plugins) category and partially with the [Marketing ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/marketing_chatgpt_plugins) category, since plugins that surfaced merchant catalogs frequently doubled as advertising or marketing surfaces for the underlying retailers.

| Date | Event |
| --- | --- |
| March 23, 2023 | Plugins announced with eleven third party launch partners and two first party plugins [1] |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI announces general availability for Plus users [2] |
| May 19, 2023 | Plugin store generally available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers [2] |
| November 6, 2023 | Custom GPTs introduced at DevDay; plugin deprecation telegraphed [6] |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens to Plus subscribers [7] |
| March 19, 2024 | New conversations with plugins disabled [8][11] |
| April 9, 2024 | Plugin platform fully shut down [8][11] |

## What did e-commerce plugins do?

E-commerce plugins were defined by the kind of work they performed inside a chat. Three workflows recurred across almost every listing.

Product search was the first. A user typed a natural language description of what they wanted to buy, the plugin translated that into a structured query against a merchant catalog, and the response listed candidate products with names, prices, images, and links back to the seller's checkout page. Shopify and BuyWisely both centered on this workflow [5][12].

Price comparison was the second. A user asked the plugin to evaluate the same product across multiple retailers, and the response surfaced a ranked list of vendors with current prices, ratings, and any active discounts. Klarna built its plugin around this pattern, using its existing search and compare service that aggregated offers across roughly 500,000 retail partners [9].

Assisted cart building was the third. The user described a goal that implied multiple products, such as a recipe, and the plugin generated a basket of items that could be sent to a partner storefront for checkout. Instacart was the canonical example, since its plugin assembled grocery carts from recipe conversations and handed them off to the Instacart app for delivery [4].

In each workflow the plugin returned structured JSON to the model, and the model summarized that JSON into chat readable text and clickable links. Settlement of payment never happened inside the chat. Users completed checkout on the merchant site.

## Which e-commerce ChatGPT plugins were notable?

The table below lists the e-commerce plugins that have been verified in primary sources from the active 2023 to 2024 period. Plugins that cannot be confirmed from at least two independent sources have been omitted to keep the historical record accurate.

| Plugin | Image | Model | Release Date | Description | Available | Working |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [BuyWisely (ChatGPT Plugin)](/wiki/chatgpt_plugin) | [![BuyWisely.png](https://qqcb8dyk5bp2il4c.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/images/buywisely.png)](/wiki/file_buywisely_png) | [GPT-4](/wiki/gpt-4) | May 20, 2023 | Compare Prices & Discover the Latest Offers from thousands of online shops in Australia. | Yes | Yes |

Additional verified e-commerce category plugins from the active platform window are summarized below.

| Plugin | Launch | Origin | Function |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Shopify | March 23, 2023 (inaugural) | Canada | Searches products across millions of Shopify storefronts directly from chat [5] |
| Klarna | March 23, 2023 (inaugural) | Sweden | Compares prices across roughly 500,000 retail partners integrated with Klarna's search and compare service [3][9] |
| Instacart | March 23, 2023 (inaugural) | United States | Generates recipes and assembles a grocery cart for delivery from local stores [4] |
| BuyWisely | May 20, 2023 | Australia | Compares prices and surfaces offers across thousands of online shops in Australia [12] |

### Shopify

The Shopify plugin was one of the eleven inaugural launch partners on March 23, 2023 [1][5]. It made the merchant catalogs of Shopify storefronts searchable from inside ChatGPT, allowing a user to ask for products in natural language and receive a list of matching items from across the platform's millions of independent stores. Each result included a product name, a price, an image where available, and a link to the seller's checkout page. The plugin gave Shopify merchants a route into the new chat surface without requiring each store to publish its own integration.

### Klarna

The Klarna plugin was also part of the inaugural slate on March 23, 2023 [1][3]. Klarna's own announcement described it as "one of the first brands to work with OpenAI to use its protocol to build an integrated Plugin for ChatGPT" [3]. The plugin connected ChatGPT to Klarna's search and compare service, which at the time of the launch indexed offers across roughly 500,000 retail partners [9]. A user could ask a question such as "I have $150, which headphones can I afford?" and receive a curated list of candidate products with links into Klarna's comparison tool. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Co-founder and CEO of Klarna, said: "I'm super excited about our plugin with ChatGPT because it passes my 'north star' criteria that I call my 'mom test'" [3]. Klarna positioned the plugin as an extension of its existing buy now, pay later business, since most of the destinations the plugin linked to were already Klarna integrated checkouts.

### Instacart

Instacart's plugin shipped as part of the same March 23, 2023 announcement, and Instacart published its own plugin specific blog post on March 24, 2023 [1][4]. Instacart was assigned to the Food category in the plugin store rather than the strict e-commerce category, but the plugin sat on the boundary because its core function was the assembly of an online shopping cart. The plugin let a user describe a recipe, a meal idea, or a set of available pantry ingredients, and produced a structured order pulled from Instacart's catalog. The order was handed off to the Instacart app for last mile delivery [4]. Instacart described the workflow as "shoppable recipes" [4].

### BuyWisely

BuyWisely was a third party Australian price comparison plugin that launched on May 20, 2023, after the plugin store opened to all Plus subscribers [12]. It indexed millions of products across tens of thousands of Australian online stores and returned the lowest priced offers, along with discount data and price history, in response to natural language product queries [12]. BuyWisely is the e-commerce category example listed in this wiki's [List of ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/list_of_chatgpt_plugins) reference table and represented the regional, vertical, comparison style plugin that filled out the long tail of the category.

## How did shopping with a ChatGPT plugin work?

Users reached e-commerce plugins through the ChatGPT Plus interface. After selecting the [GPT-4](/wiki/gpt-4) model, a user opened the plugin store, installed up to three plugins per conversation, and toggled them on. Plugins remained idle until the model decided that a user request matched their declared capabilities.

A representative interaction with the Klarna plugin might begin with a prompt such as "recommend a pair of running shoes under $120 with at least four star reviews." ChatGPT recognized the shopping intent, generated a structured query against the plugin's OpenAPI surface, sent the call, and received a JSON list of products. The model summarized the list as a numbered set of recommendations and offered to refine the search.

With the Instacart plugin a session looked different. A user might paste a recipe or describe a meal, and the model would parse the recipe into ingredient line items, send those items to Instacart, and receive a deep link back to a populated Instacart cart [4]. Effective use often relied on careful [prompt engineering](/wiki/prompt_engineering), including substitution suggestions for missing pantry items.

With the Shopify plugin the model relied on free text product descriptions to query across the network of merchant stores, and the response surfaced a small set of cards with image, title, and price [5]. The response set was usually heterogeneous rather than store specific.

In all three cases the plugin acted as a discovery and assembly layer. Payment, shipping addresses, and account creation lived on the merchant's own site.

## When were ChatGPT plugins deprecated?

OpenAI began the wind down at its first DevDay on November 6, 2023, where it introduced [Custom GPTs](/wiki/custom_gpts) and told developers that plugins would be deprecated in favor of GPTs [6]. The plugin store stopped accepting new submissions soon afterward, and the [GPT Store](/wiki/gpt_store) opened to ChatGPT Plus subscribers on January 10, 2024 [7].

The shutdown then proceeded in two steps. On March 19, 2024, OpenAI disabled the ability to start any new conversation with a plugin [8][11]. As Zapier summarized in its own sunset notice, after March 19, 2024 users "won't be able to start any new conversations using the Zapier ChatGPT plugin," and on April 9, 2024 existing "ChatGPT conversations using the Zapier ChatGPT plugin will stop working" [11]. April 9, 2024 is the date OpenAI cites as the official sunset of the plugin program under the heading "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta" [8].

## Why was the plugin platform deprecated?

OpenAI gave several public reasons for sunsetting plugins in favor of GPTs and Actions [6]. Each reason applied to e-commerce listings.

Discovery was the first issue. The plugin store presented a flat catalog with limited filtering, and even high profile retailers competed for visibility against hundreds of smaller listings on the same surface. GPTs replaced this with named, branded assistants in a curated store with creator profiles [6][7].

Workflow scope was the second issue. A plugin could only expose API endpoints. A GPT bundled custom instructions, uploaded knowledge files, and Actions in one package [6]. For a retailer this meant that a GPT could include a brand voice, a knowledge base of product policies, and a checkout style API call inside a single shareable assistant.

Conversation friction was the third issue. Activating plugins required users to choose the GPT-4 model, open a separate plugin picker, and toggle individual listings. With GPTs the assistant carried its own configuration, so a user simply opened a branded GPT and started chatting.

Developer economics was the fourth issue. OpenAI announced at DevDay that GPT creators would eventually be eligible for revenue sharing through the GPT Store, an incentive the plugin program never offered [6].

The Actions framework that powered GPTs was a near direct evolution of the plugin specification, since it still used an OpenAPI document and supported the same authentication options [6]. Most plugin developers in the e-commerce category were able to port their backends to a GPT with limited code changes.

## What replaced e-commerce ChatGPT plugins?

Several parallel and successor systems took on the work that e-commerce plugins had performed.

[Custom GPTs](/wiki/custom_gpts) were the direct replacement, announced on November 6, 2023 and rolled out widely through late 2023 and early 2024 [6]. Many of the inaugural plugin partners shipped Custom GPTs that mirrored their old plugins, including Zapier, Expedia, KAYAK, Klarna, Wolfram, and OpenTable. Klarna's GPT in particular kept the same product comparison flow that had defined the original plugin.

The [GPT Store](/wiki/gpt_store), which opened to ChatGPT Plus subscribers on January 10, 2024, provided the curated discovery surface that the plugin store had lacked [7]. It allowed creators to publish branded assistants under named profiles and to surface them in editorial collections.

GPT Actions were the API calling layer inside a GPT, and they reused the OpenAPI based design of the original plugin manifest [6]. In 2025 OpenAI went further and adopted the [Model Context Protocol](/wiki/model_context_protocol) (MCP), an open standard for connecting models to external tools and data, as the way to integrate third party services with ChatGPT and the API. OpenAI added MCP support to ChatGPT during 2025 and shipped an Apps SDK that extends MCP so developers can build interactive interfaces that run inside ChatGPT [13]. MCP is therefore the modern technical descendant of the plugin idea: a single declared interface that lets the model call an external service.

| Successor | Introduced | What it added over plugins |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Custom GPTs | November 6, 2023 [6] | Branded assistants bundling instructions, knowledge files, and Actions |
| GPT Store | January 10, 2024 [7] | Curated discovery, creator profiles, planned revenue sharing |
| GPT Actions | November 6, 2023 [6] | OpenAPI based API calls inside a GPT (direct evolution of the plugin spec) |
| Model Context Protocol (MCP) | Adopted by OpenAI in 2025 [13] | Open standard connectors plus an Apps SDK for in chat UIs |
| Instant Checkout / Agentic Commerce Protocol | September 29, 2025 [14] | Native in chat purchase and payment, no handoff to a merchant site |

### How is native ChatGPT shopping different from the old plugins?

In the years after deprecation OpenAI moved from referral style plugins into native commerce. On September 29, 2025, OpenAI and Stripe launched Instant Checkout, branded "Buy it in ChatGPT," powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, a merchant friendly open standard the two companies codeveloped [14]. The key difference from the plugin era is settlement: where a 2023 e-commerce plugin always handed the shopper off to the merchant's website to pay, Instant Checkout lets a user complete the purchase inside the chat. At launch the feature covered single item purchases from Etsy sellers in the United States, with Shopify merchants such as Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori named as coming soon [14]. These later integrations sit outside the plugin era covered by the rest of this article and represent a separate, post plugin product line.

### Shopify Sidekick

Shopify Sidekick was a separate Shopify product announced on July 26, 2023 at the company's Editions conference [10]. Sidekick was an in admin assistant aimed at merchants rather than shoppers, tuned for tasks such as generating discount campaigns, summarizing sales data, and answering store administration questions. Although Sidekick is not a ChatGPT plugin, the timing of its launch sits within the plugin era and reflects how the same retailer addressed the merchant facing side of the question.

## How did e-commerce plugins relate to shopping and marketing categories?

The e-commerce category overlapped with the broader [Shopping ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/shopping_chatgpt_plugins) grouping, and curators of the plugin store sometimes assigned the same listing to either label depending on emphasis. Klarna, for example, is filed under Shopping in this wiki's reference index even though it functioned as an e-commerce comparison engine. The distinction commonly used inside the store was that e-commerce listings emphasized merchant storefronts and direct product purchase, while shopping listings emphasized discovery and recommendation across the wider retail landscape.

The category also touched [Marketing ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/marketing_chatgpt_plugins) at the edges. Several merchant facing plugins doubled as ad copy generators, audience analysis tools, and content marketing helpers, since the same partner integrations that surfaced products for a shopper could also surface campaign data for a marketer.

## ELI5: what were e-commerce ChatGPT plugins?

Imagine ChatGPT as a helpful clerk who, for about a year, could borrow special tools to go shopping for you. If you said "find me cheap running shoes," it could pick up the Klarna tool and check prices at hundreds of thousands of stores. If you said "I want to cook this recipe," it could pick up the Instacart tool and fill an online grocery cart. The clerk could not actually pay for anything: it would hand you the basket and you finished checkout yourself on the store's website. OpenAI turned these tools on in March 2023 and switched them off in April 2024, replacing them first with Custom GPTs and later with newer plumbing called MCP. In 2025 OpenAI added a way to pay right inside the chat, but that is a different, newer system.

## See also

- [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt)
- [OpenAI](/wiki/openai)
- [ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/chatgpt_plugins)
- [ChatGPT Plugin Categories](/wiki/chatgpt_plugin_categories)
- [Custom GPTs](/wiki/custom_gpts)
- [GPT Store](/wiki/gpt_store)
- [Model Context Protocol](/wiki/model_context_protocol)
- [GPT-4](/wiki/gpt-4)
- [Large Language Model](/wiki/large_language_model)
- [Prompt Engineering](/wiki/prompt_engineering)
- [Shopping ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/shopping_chatgpt_plugins)
- [Marketing ChatGPT Plugins](/wiki/marketing_chatgpt_plugins)
- [E-Commerce](/wiki/e-commerce)

## References

1. OpenAI, "ChatGPT plugins," OpenAI Blog, March 23, 2023. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/
2. OpenAI, "ChatGPT Release Notes," OpenAI Help Center (plugins to all Plus users, May 2023).
3. Klarna, "Klarna brings smoooth shopping to ChatGPT," Klarna press release / PR Newswire, March 23, 2023. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/klarna-brings-smoooth-shopping-to-chatgpt-301780170.html
4. Instacart, "Instacart Brings AI to Recipes With the New Instacart Plugin for ChatGPT," Instacart Company Updates, March 24, 2023.
5. Shopify, Shop / Shopify ChatGPT plugin announcement and documentation, 2023.
6. OpenAI, "Introducing GPTs," OpenAI Blog, November 6, 2023. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/
7. OpenAI, "Introducing the GPT Store," OpenAI Blog, January 10, 2024. https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-gpt-store/
8. OpenAI, "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta," OpenAI Help Center, 2024 (new conversations disabled March 19, 2024; full shutdown April 9, 2024).
9. TechCrunch, "Klarna plugs ChatGPT into its platform for faster product recommendations," March 23, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/23/klarna-chatgpt-shopping/
10. TechCrunch, "Shopify Sidekick is like ChatGPT, but for e-commerce merchants," July 26, 2023.
11. Zapier, "Sunsetting the Zapier ChatGPT plugin: what you need to know," Zapier Help Center, 2024. https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/24785309335565-Sunsetting-the-Zapier-ChatGPT-plugin-what-you-need-to-know
12. BuyWisely, official plugin listing and product database, 2023.
13. OpenAI, "Building MCP servers for ChatGPT and API integrations" and Apps SDK documentation, OpenAI Developers, 2025. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/mcp
14. OpenAI, "Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol," and Stripe, "Stripe powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT," September 29, 2025. https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-openai-instant-checkout