ChatGPT Shopping: eligibility, rollout and how to prepare your feed

One retailer's launch does not tell you your odds

On March 26, 2026, Carrefour became the first grocery retailer to open shopping inside ChatGPT. A shopper can ask for recipe ideas, check stock on a product or build a basket, then complete checkout on the retailer's own site. It is one launch in one market, but the headline has travelled far enough that merchants everywhere are now asking whether it applies to them.

Two ChatGPT programs, one feed to prepare

The program that actually applies to most merchants runs on OpenAI's structured product feed specification, which Lengow already supports. That single feed powers two separate uses, each requiring its own approval from OpenAI.

Both programs require a separate application through OpenAI's merchant form. The feed itself only needs to be built once, whichever markets you sell into.

The attributes that actually move the needle

The required fields (ID, title, description, image, price, availability, brand, category) are enough to get a product indexed. They are not enough to make it the one ChatGPT actually cites in a comparison. The attributes that make the difference are the same ones that already drive visibility on Google Shopping: ratings and review counts, secondary images, GTIN identifiers, and clean variant grouping by size or colour. The full field-by-field list lives in our ChatGPT Product Feed specification guide.

Rollout timing: what is confirmed, what is not

OpenAI has not published eligibility criteria for the ChatGPT Shopping program, nor a market-by-market opening date. Applications go through the merchant form, and OpenAI's European teams remain small relative to demand, with response times that run noticeably longer than what merchants are used to with Google or Meta.

ChatGPT Ads gives a hint about the method rather than a date. The advertising channel opened in the US, then crossed the Atlantic on June 6, 2026 to land in the UK, the first market it opened in Europe, as we covered in our analysis of the early results, with Zalando, Tesco and Hiscox among the first live brands. OpenAI is moving market by market rather than opening a full region at once, and nothing guarantees that any two markets follow the same order or the same timeline.

Why the best preparation for ChatGPT is your Google feed

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol solves the same problem as OpenAI's product feed: exposing a structured catalogue to a conversational agent, for discovery and eventually native checkout. Lengow is already connected, and access there is considerably more predictable than with OpenAI today, market by market. Validating attribute quality on Google builds a feed that is ready to switch on for ChatGPT the moment the program opens at scale, wherever you sell. Waiting for OpenAI's approval before working on product data means losing time that will not be recoverable once the window opens.

How to prepare your feed in Lengow

The ChatGPT channel already exists in Lengow, built to OpenAI's specification, regardless of the country you sell from. You can activate it today, map the required attributes, then enrich the feed with the differentiating ones, without waiting for OpenAI's approval to start. The merchant form is what puts you in the queue for organic discovery, and a separate application does the same for Ads Manager. Once ready, the same feed serves both.

There is no solid performance data yet on the organic ChatGPT Shopping program in any market. It is still in pilot everywhere it exists. What is verifiable and actionable is that feed quality is the one lever entirely within your control, in a process where the timeline is not.

The question that launch does not answer is the same one every merchant waiting their turn is asking: when OpenAI opens the program at scale, market by market, only the catalogues that are already ready will benefit from day one.