Microsoft announced Copilot Checkout on January 8th at NRF 2026. The pitch: shop and pay inside the Copilot chat window, never touch a retailer's website. PayPal, Stripe, and Shopify handle the payments. Etsy, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Ashley Furniture are among the early merchants.
The timing is interesting. OpenAI launched essentially the same thing, called Instant Checkout, back on September 29th. Google rolled out its own agentic checkout in November. Microsoft is late to a party that barely existed a year ago.
The Shopify situation
Here's what caught my attention. Shopify merchants get enrolled automatically, with an opt-out window. Microsoft says Shopify will manage the opt-out process, but the default is you're in.
This matters because Amazon just spent the past week dealing with a revolt over the same approach. Their Buy for Me feature scraped product data from independent retailers' websites and started listing their products without asking. Over 180 merchants have complained to one business owner alone. Some found orders coming from anonymized Amazon email addresses for products they didn't even carry anymore. An IP attorney is now collecting affected merchants' information.
Amazon says businesses can opt out by emailing [email protected]. The process takes "a few days." Not great when you're already getting orders for stuff you don't sell.
Microsoft is being more careful. Their system works through existing Shopify infrastructure, merchants stay as the merchant of record, and the auto-enrollment happens through Shopify's admin panel rather than web scraping. But the opt-out-by-default model still raises questions. Shopify merchants who don't pay close attention to their admin settings might find themselves selling through Copilot without realizing it.
The numbers Microsoft wants you to see
According to Microsoft's internal data, shopping journeys involving Copilot are "194% more likely to result in a purchase" when shopping intent is present. They also claim journeys are 33% shorter and produce 53% more purchases within 30 minutes.
Compared to what? Their own alternative, which is... not having Copilot Checkout. The baseline isn't spelled out. These numbers sound impressive until you realize they're measuring "people who used our product to buy things" against "people who didn't use our product to buy things." The comparison baseline that actually matters, conversion against other AI checkout options, isn't provided.
The scale problem
Microsoft says Copilot apps have about 100 million monthly active users. OpenAI says ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users. The gap is significant.
OpenAI's Instant Checkout started with Etsy and announced "over a million Shopify merchants coming soon." Three and a half months later, Glossier, SKIMS, and Spanx are live. The full Shopify rollout still hasn't happened.
So Microsoft is chasing a market leader who is also still figuring this out. Neither has proven that people actually want to buy things inside their chatbots at scale.
What they're building on top
Beyond checkout, Microsoft announced Brand Agents for Shopify merchants. These are AI shopping assistants trained on a merchant's product catalog that can answer questions and guide purchases. The company claims they can be deployed "in hours" and deliver higher engagement and conversion.
There's also a catalog enrichment agent that extracts product attributes from images and automates categorization. Guess is an early user. And a personalized shopping agent template in Copilot Studio for custom implementations.
None of this is unique. OpenAI open-sourced the Agentic Commerce Protocol that powers their checkout, built with Stripe. Microsoft says it's "adopting open standards" like ACP, though the implementation details are vague.
Who this actually helps
If you're a merchant already on Shopify, this expands your distribution without much effort. Whether that distribution converts into real customers who actually want to buy through a chatbot remains unproven.
If you're a consumer who really doesn't want to open tabs, I suppose this saves some clicks. But the shopping experience inside these AI interfaces is still primitive. Single-item purchases only on OpenAI. Price tracking and alerts on Google. Microsoft's version appears more full-featured but isn't battle-tested.
PayPal seems genuinely excited. They're positioning themselves as the payment layer across multiple AI platforms, not just Microsoft. "By integrating PayPal's agentic commerce services" appears in their press release about four times.
What happens next
Microsoft is demoing this at the National Retail Federation conference through January 13th. Expansion to Bing, MSN, and Edge is planned but not dated. The catalog enrichment agent goes to public preview sometime in early 2026.
The bigger question is whether agentic commerce actually takes off or becomes another "shopping cart in VR" moment. Adobe claims AI-driven ecommerce traffic increased 693% during the 2025 holiday season. Morgan Stanley predicts half of online shoppers will use AI shopping agents by 2030.
But predictions about AI shopping have been wrong before. And right now, the major players are still sorting out basic issues like "should we auto-enroll merchants without asking" and "can we handle more than one item at a time."
Microsoft is betting its enterprise relationships and Shopify integration will matter more than ChatGPT's user count. They might be right. But they're definitely not early.
