ChatGPT users will soon be able to buy anything, from sneakers to skincare, without ever leaving a chat. PayPal’s wallet will sit under the hood, turning AI-generated suggestions into instant checkouts. Tens of millions of PayPal merchants, the company says, will automatically become discoverable inside ChatGPT and other AI platforms like Perplexity.
For consumers, it sounds like magic. For small sellers, it could be a mixed blessing. The same automation that makes buying seamless might make the seller invisible. For small merchants, frictionless may also mean faceless.
Frictionless, but at what cost to the face of a brand?
PayPal’s new Agentic Commerce Services, announced October 28, 2025, include two components. Store Sync promises to make any merchant’s catalog “discoverable within leading AI channels,” while Agent Ready will let merchants accept payments “on AI surfaces” with PayPal’s fraud detection and buyer protection baked in. The idea is that a single PayPal integration will beam a shop’s products into multiple AI ecosystems: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and PayPal’s own in-app shopping agent, without any new code.
Michelle Gill, PayPal’s GM for small business and financial services, called it a “low-touch” way for merchants to appear across every major large-language-model platform. On paper, that’s liberating. A craft jeweler in Jaipur or a home-goods startup in Kansas City could, theoretically, reach hundreds of millions of AI users overnight.
But the reality of AI-mediated discovery looks very different from running your own storefront.
In PayPal’s language, merchants will “remain the merchant of record and retain control of brand visibility and customer communications.” In practice, merchant of record means legal and financial responsibility for a sale, not necessarily front-of-screen visibility. Product recommendations in ChatGPT or Perplexity appear as neutral cards (image, title, price, and a “Buy with PayPal” button). The buyer’s emotional connection: the story, tone, or aesthetic that small brands spend years crafting, gets flattened into metadata.
Public documentation from OpenAI’s Instant Checkout shows that the merchant name appears on a product detail view, but the initial discovery card emphasizes the product itself. There’s no guarantee that a shopper will even notice who’s behind it before purchasing. And unlike on Shopify or Etsy, the merchant has no control over layout, tone, or related-product curation. The AI decides what shows up and in what order.
Brand consultants call this de-branding: when a platform intermediates not just payment but perception. McKinsey’s recent report on agentic commerce warns that “brand differentiation risks collapsing into feature comparison unless LLM interfaces evolve to include brand signaling.” The phenomenon already played out once on Amazon Marketplace, where independent sellers became indistinguishable under Amazon’s logistics-first design.
For small sellers, the danger isn’t just aesthetic. Visibility drives data, and data drives survival. Every time an AI agent completes a sale, the learning happens inside the model, not the merchant’s analytics. PayPal and the platform retain the behavioral insight, that is, the prompts that led to the purchase, the price sensitivity, the language of intent, while the seller gets only an order confirmation.
The new middlemen of the AI marketplace
The real winners of agentic commerce, at least so far, are the intermediaries.
For PayPal, embedding itself in ChatGPT is a distribution coup. Its 400-million-user wallet and tens of millions of merchants gain exposure to OpenAI’s estimated 700-million weekly visitors. Every AI-mediated purchase will still generate PayPal’s standard transaction fees, roughly 3 percent plus a fixed charge, unless new pricing is announced. No public document shows special rates for Store Sync or Agent Ready. Add in potential orchestration or routing fees later, and PayPal has positioned itself as the payments backbone of the AI web.
Meanwhile, platforms like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity retain ownership of the discovery interface and the consumer relationship. They decide which products surface, how they’re ranked, and what information users see. Even if the merchant processes the sale, the AI agent owns the context and the data trail.
That asymmetry explains why PayPal stock jumped nearly 5 percent after the announcement. Investors see a payments company reinventing itself as a high-margin infrastructure provider in a trillion-dollar emerging category. Analysts at McKinsey estimate that agentic commerce could account for more than $1 trillion in U.S. retail by 2030. If PayPal can take even a fraction of those transactions, the math is obvious.
For merchants, the math is fuzzier. Without published pricing or case studies, it’s impossible to quantify whether agentic discovery drives incremental sales or simply reshuffles them under a new fee structure. No performance data from PayPal’s early Perplexity pilots has been released, and neither company has shared conversion or customer-acquisition metrics.
Even if the economics work in the short term, control may not. Today’s small seller could wake up tomorrow dependent on whichever algorithmic agent deems them relevant. “How do you decide if you’re going to spend your time integrating with Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT or Perplexity?” Gill asked VentureBeat in October. Her answer: use PayPal as the one-to-many intermediary, also cements PayPal as the toll collector at every bridge.
Saving face in a faceless economy
PayPal’s pitch is seductively simple: more reach, less friction. But reach without recognition may prove a hollow victory for the small brands that built the internet’s first generation of independent commerce. If agentic shopping succeeds, consumers will transact with AI agents, not stores; with wallets, not brands.
To keep their identities alive, merchants may need to find new touchpoints: post-purchase storytelling, loyalty emails, or even metadata tags that teach AI agents to treat brand identity as part of product quality. Regulators may eventually step in: the EU AI Act and U.S. FTC have both floated transparency requirements that could force clearer merchant attribution in automated commerce.
Until then, the power dynamic is clear. PayPal gets transaction volume. Platforms get data. Small merchants get reach while risking losing visibility.
