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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Shopping
Shopping ChatGPT Plugins were third party tools published in the ChatGPT plugin store between March 23, 2023 and April 9, 2024 that connected the chatbot to product catalogs, price comparison engines, coupon databases, and merchant storefronts. The shopping grouping was one of the most heavily populated verticals in the official plugin store and overlapped with the adjacent E-Commerce ChatGPT Plugins and Fashion ChatGPT Plugins categories. Two of the eleven third party launch partners chosen by OpenAI on the original announcement date were dedicated retail providers, Klarna and Shopify, and a third partner, Instacart, bridged grocery shopping and recipe discovery.
This article expands the original aiwiki entry into a historical reference page covering the timeline, the verified shopping plugins, the typical user workflow, the deprecation in 2024, and the successor systems.
On March 23, 2023, OpenAI published a blog post titled "ChatGPT plugins" announcing what it described as the company's first plugins for the chatbot. The post framed plugins as a way to help ChatGPT "access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services," and it listed eleven third party launch partners alongside two first party plugins built by OpenAI itself, a Browsing plugin and a Code Interpreter sandbox. The eleven third party partners were Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, and Wolfram. Zapier joined inside the same launch window.
Day one access was gated behind a waitlist for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and a small number of developers. On May 12, 2023, OpenAI announced that web browsing and plugins would be enabled for all Plus customers the following week, and on May 19, 2023, the broader plugin store became available across the Plus tier. That broader rollout opened roughly seventy plugins to a wide paying audience, with shopping listings prominently represented because early consumer use cases of recipe ordering, gift discovery, and price comparison drove a large share of public coverage of the program.
By late 2023 the plugin store carried several hundred third party plugins organized into more than sixty topical groupings, reaching roughly one thousand plugins at its peak. The announcement of Custom GPTs at OpenAI's first DevDay on November 6, 2023 began the wind down. OpenAI told developers that plugins would be deprecated in favor of GPTs, and the plugin store stopped accepting new submissions soon afterward. The GPT Store opened to ChatGPT Plus subscribers on January 10, 2024. On March 19, 2024, OpenAI disabled the ability to install new plugins or start new conversations with existing plugins, and on April 9, 2024 the company shut down all remaining plugin sessions.
The shopping grouping inside the plugin store was loosely defined and frequently overlapped with neighboring categories. Plugins appeared in shopping when their primary function involved searching across multiple online retailers, comparing prices on a specific product, retrieving coupon codes or cashback offers, surfacing personalized product recommendations, or discovering items inside a single merchant's catalog. Many also surfaced under the e-commerce label because they connected to merchant backends. Unlike the e-commerce category, which leaned toward merchant facing tools, shopping was almost entirely consumer facing. A typical user prompt looked like "find me a wireless headset under one hundred dollars" or "what can I make for dinner with chicken and lemon," and the underlying plugin handled the structured search against its own catalog or partner network. Results were returned as a list of products with images, prices, and direct links to the retailer or comparison site.
The following table lists shopping plugins that can be confirmed in at least two independent contemporaneous sources, including OpenAI's launch announcement, official press releases, news coverage, and archived plugin store mirrors. Entries where the developer, listing date, or core function could not be cross checked have been omitted.
| Plugin | Developer | First seen | Primary function |
|---|---|---|---|
| Klarna Shopping | Klarna AB | March 23, 2023 | Curated product recommendations and price comparison across the company's retailer network |
| Instacart | Instacart | March 23, 2023 | Grocery shopping list creation tied to recipe and meal conversations, with same day delivery |
| Shop | Shopify | Plugin era 2023 | Search across millions of products from Shopify connected merchants and brands |
| BuyWisely | BuyWisely | May 2023 | Price comparison across thousands of online shops in Australia |
| Coupert | Coupert | 2023 | Coupon code and cashback retrieval from thousands of online stores |
| PriceRunner | PriceRunner | 2023 | Product recommendations and price comparison from a long running comparison engine |
Each entry is described in more detail below.
Klarna, the Swedish payments and shopping company, was one of the original eleven third party launch partners. Its plugin was announced on March 23, 2023, the same day OpenAI revealed the plugin framework. The Klarna press release positioned the integration as a way to bring "smoooth shopping" into ChatGPT and let users ask the chatbot for shopping inspiration in natural language.
The canonical worked example, used in both the Klarna press release and TechCrunch's launch coverage, was a prompt such as "I have one hundred fifty dollars, which headphones can I afford," which would prompt ChatGPT to call the Klarna plugin and return a curated list of products. Each result included a direct link into Klarna's search and compare tool, where the user could filter by color, size, and customer rating across the company's retail partner network. Klarna's press release at the time cited a partner network of more than five hundred thousand retailers. The plugin was rolled out gradually starting with ChatGPT Plus subscribers in the United States and Canada and was later extended to additional regions. Klarna's chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski described the integration as one of the first commercial rollouts of OpenAI's plugin protocol in retail.
Instacart, the United States grocery delivery platform, was the second consumer commerce launch partner. Its plugin was announced on March 23, 2023 and was tied to the company's broader generative AI effort that later included the Ask Instacart in app search tool. The distinctive contribution was that it merged ChatGPT's conversational ability to suggest recipes, meal plans, and dietary alternatives with Instacart's catalog of more than one and a half million grocery products and its same day delivery network.
A typical workflow began with the user asking ChatGPT something open ended about cooking, for example "what can I make for a vegetarian dinner tonight." ChatGPT would respond with a recipe or meal plan and, when the Instacart plugin was activated, return a shoppable ingredient list. Tapping the list opened a new browser window with an Instacart cart that the user could check out for delivery in as little as one hour. Instacart's documentation described the integration as "a custom, constrained tool that will be triggered only in response to relevant food related ChatGPT questions." The plugin shipped first to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and expanded over the following weeks.
Shopify, named in OpenAI's launch announcement as one of the eleven inaugural third party partners, exposed its catalog through a plugin commonly identified in third party plugin store mirrors as Shop. The listed description was "search for millions of products from the world's greatest brands," and its function was to surface relevant items from Shopify connected merchants when ChatGPT users asked for shopping recommendations. The plugin allowed shoppers to specify budgets and brand or style preferences and returned product cards with images, prices, and links into the merchant storefront on the Shop application.
The Shop plugin should not be confused with later Shopify products. Shopify Sidekick, announced on July 26, 2023, was a merchant facing assistant inside the Shopify admin and was not a ChatGPT plugin. The deeper integration that surfaces merchant catalogs as Agentic Storefronts inside ChatGPT itself was rolled out separately starting in 2025 and is unrelated to the original plugin program. The Shop plugin was retired with the rest of the program on April 9, 2024.
BuyWisely was a price comparison plugin focused on the Australian market that listed in the plugin store during the broader rollout in mid 2023. Independent plugin trackers recorded the listing as active by late May 2023. The plugin compared prices across thousands of Australian online shops and returned the top five offers per product sorted by price, including the lowest current price, the highest current price, the number of active discounts, and the most recent discount details. The flow used follow up questions to refine the user's request, asking about budget, preferred brands, and required features before returning a structured comparison. The plugin filled an important gap for Australian users, since most of the larger comparison tools at the time were oriented toward the United States or the United Kingdom market.
Coupert was a coupon and cashback plugin that joined the ChatGPT plugin store during 2023. Its store description read "search for the internet's best coupons from thousands of online stores," and its function was to retrieve active coupon codes, success rates, and cashback offers for a specific retailer. The plugin returned answers in a structured three part format: a paragraph naming the store and any cashback rate, a bulleted list of coupons with codes and historical success rates, and a follow up question. Coupert's plugin sat next to its longer running browser extension, which performed a similar coupon discovery function at checkout.
PriceRunner, a long running European price comparison engine, listed a plugin in the official store under the name "Pricerunner product recommendations." Its function was to provide product suggestions for any shopping or research request. Documentation noted that the plugin worked best when queries used specific product attributes such as the product name, brand, model number, or category. The plugin returned a list of products with prices and links into PriceRunner's web catalog. It overlapped functionally with Klarna Shopping and BuyWisely; the practical difference was the geographic emphasis of the underlying comparison data and the scope of the retailer network.
A shopping plugin session inside ChatGPT during the 2023 to 2024 plugin era typically followed a recognizable pattern. The user opened ChatGPT on a paid Plus or Enterprise subscription running on the GPT-4 model, switched to the plugins beta in settings, and selected up to three plugins to enable for the conversation. After enabling, for example, the Klarna and Coupert plugins, the user issued a shopping prompt in natural language. The chatbot interpreted the prompt as a request that required a tool call, sent a structured query to the relevant plugin's OpenAPI endpoint, and stitched the result back into its response. Results were rendered inline, and the user could ask follow up questions, request additional recommendations, narrow the budget, or pivot to a related product. Each plugin had to be explicitly selected at the start of the conversation and could not be added mid stream, a friction point that later pushed OpenAI toward the more flexible Custom GPTs system.
On November 6, 2023, the same day OpenAI announced GPTs at its first DevDay, the company began signaling that the plugin platform would not be developed further. New plugin submissions were paused inside the plugin store soon afterward, and developers were directed to migrate their integrations to Actions inside Custom GPTs, a feature that exposed the same OpenAPI tool calling but lived inside individually packaged GPTs rather than a centralized plugin store. The GPT Store launched on January 10, 2024 as the long term distribution surface for those Custom GPTs.
The formal sunset came in two stages. On March 19, 2024, OpenAI disabled the installation of new plugins and the start of new conversations with any existing plugin. On April 9, 2024, those existing threads were retired, fully closing the program. Most of the larger shopping plugins eventually launched separate Custom GPTs that replicated their original functionality. Klarna in particular continued to operate consumer facing AI products outside the plugin format.
The shopping experience inside ChatGPT continued to evolve after the plugin shutdown through later product launches by OpenAI, including dedicated shopping research features rolled out in 2025, but those subsequent products were built on different distribution and tool use architectures and are unrelated to the plugin program described in this article.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | ChatGPT Plugins announced; Klarna, Shopify, and Instacart among launch partners |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI announces broader plugin rollout to ChatGPT Plus |
| May 19, 2023 | Plugin store opens to ChatGPT Plus customers, around seventy plugins available |
| Mid 2023 | BuyWisely, Coupert, PriceRunner, and other shopping plugins added |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI announces Custom GPTs at the first DevDay |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens to ChatGPT Plus subscribers |
| March 19, 2024 | New ChatGPT plugin conversations and installs disabled |
| April 9, 2024 | Existing ChatGPT plugin sessions shut down |
The shopping plugins relied on the broader ChatGPT Plugins framework and on the underlying capabilities of the large language model behind the chatbot. Effective use frequently required basic prompt engineering, since users learned that specifying a budget, brand preference, or attribute set in the initial message produced more useful structured results than an open ended question. The full taxonomy of plugin verticals is documented in ChatGPT Plugin Categories.