How to Sell on ChatGPT with WooCommerce

When someone opens ChatGPT and types "recommend a good espresso machine under $200 for a small apartment." A few seconds later, they're looking at three real products, with real prices, from real stores. They tap one, land on that store's website, and check out. No Google search, no scrolling through ten review sites, no ads.

That store didn't get lucky. It registered its catalog with OpenAI, cleaned up its product data, and made itself readable to ChatGPT the same way it once made itself readable to Google. If you sell on WooCommerce, that same door is open to you right now, and this guide covers exactly how to walk through it.

How OpenAI’s ChatGPT Shopping Program Works for WooCommerce Stores

OpenAI runs a merchant program that lets ChatGPT pull real products into its answers when someone asks a shopping question. The technical name for the connection is the Agentic Commerce Protocol, or ACP, built by OpenAI alongside Stripe. It lets your store's product data, and in some cases your checkout, communicate directly with ChatGPT.

One thing to get straight before anything else: for almost every WooCommerce store, ChatGPT handles the recommendation, not the sale. The shopper still clicks through and buys on your own site. You're not handing your customer to OpenAI. You're getting found by someone who was about to buy from whoever answered their question first, and making sure that's you instead of a competitor.

The program opened to merchants in late 2025 and is currently rolling out to U.S. sellers first, with other regions following.

What You Need Before You Start

• A working WooCommerce store with products that have accurate titles, descriptions, prices, and stock status
• Product identifiers (GTIN or MPN) for every product you want listed, covered in detail below
• A product feed plugin capable of generating a feed in OpenAI's required format

Why Sell on ChatGPT with WooCommerce is Beneficial

It's fair to ask whether this is premature or a genuine opportunity. A few honest points on both sides:

• There's no guaranteed traffic number: This behaves more like appearing in a new organic channel than buying ad placement; some stores will see meaningful traffic, others less so, depending on their category and how well their data matches what people are asking.
• You keep full ownership of the customer: Because the sale closes on your own WooCommerce checkout, you capture the email address, the order history, and the chance to build a repeat customer, instead of a middleman owning that relationship.
• You can still upsell: Sending shoppers to your own site means your cross-sells, order bumps, and related-product suggestions still work at checkout, something a fully native in-chat purchase wouldn't allow.
• The setup cost is mostly time, not money: Registering as a merchant is free, and most of the actual work, meaning accurate stock levels, real product identifiers, and decent product images, is work that improves how you perform on Google Shopping and comparison sites too. You're not building something single-purpose.
• Getting in early has a real advantage: Fewer WooCommerce stores have gone through this setup so far, which means less competition for the same product queries right now than there will be in a year.

How to Sell on ChatGPT with WooCommerce (Explained Step-by-step)

There are five distinct steps here. Skipping ahead or doing them out of order is the single biggest reason store owners get stuck, so it's worth reading through each one fully before touching your admin dashboard.

Step 1: Register as a Merchant with OpenAI

Start here, before anything else, because this step has the longest and least predictable wait time.

Head to OpenAI's merchant application at ChatGPT merchants and begin the sign-up. You'll be asked for:

• Your business name and legal details
• The region or country you operate in
• The general categories of products you sell
• Agreement to OpenAI's commerce policies and terms

Once submitted, you'll receive a confirmation email. From there, your application sits in OpenAI's review queue. There's no published SLA or guaranteed turnaround, but based on what merchants have shared publicly, initial review has run anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on volume.

When your application clears review, OpenAI reaches out with next steps, which is when they'll ask you to provide your product feed URL. That's your cue to move to the technical steps below, if you haven't already prepared them in parallel.

Why this needs to happen first: everything else in this guide, your identifiers, your feed, and your validation can be prepared while you wait. The approval clock only starts once you've applied, so applying late means everything downstream gets delayed too, even if your technical setup is flawless.

Step 2: Add GTIN or MPN Identifiers to Every Product

This is the step most WooCommerce store owners get stuck on, and it deserves the most careful walkthrough.

OpenAI requires every product in your feed to carry one of two identifier types:

• GTIN (Global Trade Item Number): The barcode number on a product. It covers UPCs (12-digit codes, most common for U.S. products), EANs (13-digit codes, common internationally), and ISBNs for books. If you resell products made by other brands, this number already exists, it's just a matter of finding it.
• MPN (Manufacturer Part Number): A reference number that identifies a specific product. If you manufacture your own products or sell under your own brand, you create and assign this number yourself.

Where to add these in WooCommerce, exactly:

1. Go to Products > All Products in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Open the product you want to edit.
3. Scroll down to the Product Data panel, which sits below the main description editor.
4. Look for the SKU field first. Directly below or near it, you'll find dedicated fields for GTIN, UPC, EAN, and ISBN, depending on your WooCommerce version and any extensions you have active.
5. If your setup doesn't show a separate GTIN field, use the SKU field to hold your MPN instead; OpenAI's feed mapping can pull from either location.

How to actually find or create these numbers, by situation:

• You resell branded products: Check the barcode printed on the physical packaging first. If you don't have the item in hand, your supplier's product spec sheet almost always lists it, or the manufacturer's own product page.
• You manufacture or private-label your own products: Create a consistent MPN format and stick to it across your entire catalog. Something like ZAV-RING-014 (brand-category-number) works well because it stays sortable and readable as your catalog grows.
• You sell handmade or one-of-a-kind pieces: Assign a unique MPN per item, following whatever numbering system your inventory already uses.
• You sell books: Use the ISBN. It's already a globally recognized identifier, so there's no extra work here.
• You genuinely can't find a GTIN for a resold product: Fall back to creating your own MPN for that product rather than leaving the field blank. A blank identifier field is what causes feed rejection, not which identifier type you used.

Doing this at scale without losing a week to it:

Editing products one at a time is fine for a catalog of a few dozen items, but painfully slow past that. Instead:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Products and click Export.
2. Download your full catalog as a CSV file.
3. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets.
4. Add a GTIN or MPN value for every row that's missing one.
5. Save the file, then go to WooCommerce > Products > Import and re-upload it, mapping the GTIN/MPN column to the matching WooCommerce field during import.

This turns what could be days of manual product editing into an afternoon of spreadsheet work.

Step 3: Install and Set Up a Product Feed Plugin

To generate a feed in the format OpenAI expects, you need a WooCommerce product feed plugin. Several are available, and most support OpenAI as a destination channel alongside Google Shopping, Meta, and other advertising or comparison platforms, so this is a configuration task, not custom development.

The general setup, regardless of which plugin you choose, looks like this:

1. Install and activate the plugin the same way you would any WordPress plugin, through Plugins > Add New or by uploading it manually.
2. Activate your license, if the plugin requires one, usually from a dedicated license or Settings tab inside the plugin's own admin menu. You'll typically find your license key in the account dashboard on the plugin provider's website.
3. Once activated, you're ready to move into building the actual feed.