· Luca Moretti
Stripe in 2026: checkout inside ChatGPT, and what a small shop should set up
Stripe powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and processed $1.9 trillion in 2025. The parts a small shop actually needs are older and simpler.
In September 2025 Stripe started powering Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and released the Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with OpenAI. In December it bought Metronome for usage-based billing, and on 19 August 2026 it announced the acquisition of OpenRouter for $7.5 billion.
The scale
Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in 2025, 34% more than the year before, for about five million businesses. Its saved-payment wallet, Link, passed 200 million users in September 2025.
What a small shop needs first
- Payment Links: a no-code checkout link you can put in an e-mail, a bio or a QR code (available since 2021).
- Stripe Tax: calculates VAT in 102 countries, so a cross-border sale is not a guess.
- Webhooks into your accounting, so a payment becomes a booked invoice without retyping.
Selling through AI assistants will matter more each year. A clean product catalogue with real prices and descriptions is what those assistants read first.