Shopping via ChatGPT in 2026: The Complete Guide for Czech E-shops

AI shopping has evolved more turbulently over the past nine months than most Czech articles on the topic have managed to capture — a large share of them still describe features that no longer exist. This guide summarizes the state as of July 2026: what actually works in ChatGPT, what OpenAI pulled and why, and above all what a Czech e-shop should do about it.

Can you shop in ChatGPT? (state as of July 2026)

The short answer: you can choose, but you can't pay directly in the chat. ChatGPT today works as a shopping advisor — it displays product cards, compares options and, via the Shopping research feature, builds personalized buying guides. The purchase itself happens on the merchant's website, where ChatGPT sends the user. Instant Checkout, the feature that allowed paying directly in the conversation, was withdrawn in March 2026.

For e-shops this means something fundamental: ChatGPT has become a discovery channel — it decides which shops the customer sees at all, but leaves the conversion to your website. The battle is over being in the recommendation.

What Instant Checkout was and why OpenAI pulled it after five months

Timeline

Why in-chat purchases failed

OpenAI's official statement said the first version of Instant Checkout "didn't offer the flexibility we're aiming for" — and that the company is focusing on product discovery while leaving checkout to merchants. Behind the diplomatic phrasing are three measurable reasons:

1. Users compared in the chat but didn't buy there. Data showed that people use ChatGPT extensively to choose a product, but want to complete the purchase on the e-shop — where they see the cart, the shipping options and a familiar environment.
2. Walmart measured roughly 3× worse conversion for checkout inside ChatGPT compared with a click-through to its own site.
3. Very few merchants joined. Of the announced "million Shopify merchants," only dozens had actually connected by February 2026. Multi-item carts and loyalty programs were missing, and by available accounts US sales-tax remittance wasn't solved either.

The lesson for e-shops: the AI platforms have just verified for themselves that their strength is in the recommendation, not at the till. That's good news for merchants — the conversion, the customer data and the margin stay with you. The condition is being visible in the recommendations.

How ChatGPT picks products for its answers

Shopping results are organic — there are no paid placements. ChatGPT assembles its recommendations from three data sources:

1. Crawling your website (OAI-SearchBot)

ChatGPT reads product pages directly via its own crawler OAI-SearchBot (for search and citations) and ChatGPT-User (when the user takes an action). If you block them in robots.txt, you don't exist for shopping answers. schema.org/Product markup plays a critical role — structured data with price, availability, GTIN and ratings is the most reliable way for the model to understand a product.

2. The product feed (chatgpt.com/merchants)

OpenAI runs an official feed program with a public specification (stable version 2026-01-30). The feed is pushed in JSONL, CSV/TSV or Parquet formats, with updates possible every 15 minutes. Registration happens via a form at chatgpt.com/merchants — and the form is open to non-US merchants too, so a Czech company can join the queue today. In practice you can derive the feed from an existing Google Merchant feed.

3. Partner data

Since August 2025 OpenAI has been drawing product data from the Shopify ecosystem, with the Bing index serving as a supplementary source — another reason a Czech website should have its indexing in Bing Webmaster Tools in order.

OpenAI doesn't disclose the exact weighting of the individual sources. What's certain is that an e-shop without a readable website, structured data or a feed has no path into shopping answers.

ACP vs. Google UCP vs. Perplexity: three approaches to agentic shopping

An interesting irony: in January 2026 Google finished exactly what OpenAI backed away from in March — checkout directly in AI answers. But Google has an advantage OpenAI didn't: twenty years of Merchant Center data. For Czech e-shops the takeaway is that a product feed is now a ticket into two worlds at once.

Does ChatGPT shopping work in the Czech Republic?

Partly, yes. Product recommendations and Shopping research work globally for signed-in users, so also in the Czech Republic and in Czech — ChatGPT routinely recommends specific shops and products to Czech users based on website crawls. What doesn't work in the Czech Republic (and the whole EU): shopping cards built on official feeds, and any form of checkout — those were always limited to the US.

The Czech ecosystem is preparing, though: Shoptet is developing an LLM feed integration and is on OpenAI's European waiting list, with similar preparations under way at Upgates and Eshop-rychle. The European rollout is believed to be slowed by EU regulatory requirements, although OpenAI hasn't officially confirmed that. Whoever prepares now — feed, structured data, readable website — will be first off the line the day OpenAI opens the European program.

And the main thing: the recommendation layer already runs in Czech today. When a Czech customer asks "which tent should I buy for a festival under CZK 5,000," ChatGPT already answers with specific products and shops. Whether yours is among them is a question of GEO — not of waiting for checkout.

7 steps to prepare a Czech e-shop today

1. Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt — at minimum OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User; consider GPTBot. Without this you're invisible to shopping answers. Guide: robots.txt for AI crawlers.
2. Deploy schema.org/Product on all product pages — JSON-LD with price, availability, GTIN/MPN and aggregate ratings. In detail: Schema markup for GEO.
3. Register at chatgpt.com/merchants and prepare a feed per the 2026-01-30 specification — start from your Google Merchant feed. Registration is free and the queue will eventually open for the EU.
4. Check your website's machine readability. According to Adobe, the average product page is only 66 % machine-readable — a third of the content (prices in images, JavaScript without SSR) doesn't exist for AI. Server-side rendering and clean HTML are the foundation.
5. Write citable content around your products — comparisons, buying guides, FAQs with the parameters in the text. ChatGPT builds recommendations from content it can extract: How to write content that AI cites.
6. Build reviews and mentions on third parties — Heureka, industry websites, communities. Brand mentions beyond your own website are a stronger signal for AI recommendations than backlinks.
7. Measure AI referrals in GA4 — set up a segment for the sources chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. Without measurement you won't know when AI becomes a relevant channel for you. Guide: How to measure GEO results.

The numbers: is it worth addressing now?

AI traffic volume is still in the low single digits of percent — but it's growing hundreds of percent a year and converts above average, because the customer arriving has already made up their mind. This is exactly the phase where preparedness pays off the most: little competition, steep curve.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)? An open standard by OpenAI and Stripe (September 2025) that defines how an AI agent hands an order and payment to a merchant — the merchant remains the merchant of record and can use any payment provider. After Instant Checkout was withdrawn, ACP mainly serves product feeds and transactions via apps inside ChatGPT.

How much does it cost to get an e-shop into ChatGPT? Nothing. Discovery (crawling, the feed program, product recommendations) is free with no paid placements. The historical 4 % fee applied only to Instant Checkout, which was withdrawn in March 2026.

Do I need a special module on Shoptet? Not yet — Shoptet is still building its LLM feed integration. But you can already have your robots.txt, schema markup and citable content in order, which are the main signals for the current (crawl-driven) recommendation phase.

Will ChatGPT shopping replace Google Shopping? More likely complement it. Google, with UCP, actually launched checkout in AI answers and has the advantage of Merchant Center data. The rational strategy for 2026 is to prepare one high-quality product feed and structured data that serve both worlds.

When will shopping via ChatGPT come to the EU? There's no official date. OpenAI declares the feed program will expand "during 2026"; checkout currently doesn't work anywhere. But the recommendation layer already runs in Czech today — and that's what the game is about.

How do I find out whether ChatGPT recommends me? Ask it your customers' questions ("which X should I buy under Y") and watch who shows up. The systematic answer is a GEO audit — it tests your e-shop on 4 AI platforms against your competitors.

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Updated: July 3, 2026. The article reflects the state after the withdrawal of Instant Checkout (March 2026); older Czech texts on this topic describe features that no longer exist. Key sources: OpenAI (Buy it in ChatGPT, developers.openai.com/commerce), Stripe, CNBC, Adobe Analytics Q1 2026, Salesforce Holiday Report 2025, Google (UCP), McKinsey.

About the author: Marek Nocar is the founder of NocarStudio, a specialized GEO agency (founded in 2025 as the first GEO studio in the Czech Republic). He helps B2B companies and e-shops become visible in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. → More about Marek