ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, has partnered with Shopify to bring a native online shopping experience within the ChatGPT platform. This partnership established an integration that allows for ChatGPT users to browse catalogs, compare features or pricing, and purchase products from various Shopify marketplaces — all without leaving the ChatGPT interface.
Online shopping has become an integral part of the internet since its creation in the 1990s. The online shopping industry has primarily focused on a retailer-focused approach — getting an online retailer’s entire website to rank higher than competitors with a browsing experience within that singular retailer’s online catalog. While traditional search engines have shopping tabs like Google Shopping that allow for easier comparisons, it’s still a manual process of searching and filtering products. Plus, traditional search engines still lead you to a third-party retailer website to complete the transaction.
This revolutionary AI-powered shopping experience will change user behavior in a significant way by turning it into a much more conversational, product-focused dynamic comparing exact products from different retailers within the same chat experience.
What This Means For Your E-Commerce Experience
Your product data — technical data and front-end product pages — matters more than ever. Having a secure website with a great shopping experience for users is still incredibly important, but that alone isn’t enough to get by anymore. It’s confirmed by ChatGPT technical documentation that merchants are ranked by the image data and structured metadata they receive from third-party data providers (Shopify and Bing) about the individual products. Optimizing every product in your catalog with proper metadata will build a foundation with the goal of increasing visibility in the ever-changing ChatGPT interface.
If Your Business Doesn’t Use Shopify
Products don’t just simply appear in Google searches, and the same applies to AI search engines. For traditional search engines like Google, you have to submit your website sitemap to Google’s index to be stored, scanned and ranked in future search queries. Similarly, AI search engines have to be granted access to your website’s content. To get your products to appear in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, you must first grant access to OpenAI’s web crawler, OAI-SearchBot. From there, product optimization is the same regardless of what merchant platform you are using.
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