For the past two years, AI in commerce has been driven more by hype than hard economics. Platforms have focused on capability, experience and experimentation, while the commercial model has remained largely unresolved. Now that is starting to change. As AI moves from discovery and into transaction, the pressure is shifting from novelty to outcomes and from engagement to monetisation. For the first time, a major platform has put a clear price on AI-driven conversion.

Shopify’s US merchants selling via ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout will pay a 4% fee on those sales. This is a conversion toll, a charge for delivering a high-intent buyer who is already qualified, informed and ready to purchase inside an AI native flow. That shift matters far more than the headline number.

Merchants will naturally compare a 4% fee to card processing, and many will instinctively recoil. In Europe, where acceptance costs are typically lower than in the US, it will feel particularly expensive. But the commercial question is not whether 4% feels high. It is what a high-intent, agent-sourced buyer is worth when discovery, comparison and purchase are collapsed into one interaction. For context, Shopify’s own published US card processing rates can easily move into the 3% to 5% range in practice. Viewed through that lens, the 4% agentic conversion fee starts to look less like an outlier and more like a premium placed on delivering a buyer whose intent is already resolved.

That is where the structural shift sits. In an agentic journey, preferences are gathered, constraints are applied and intent is resolved before the consumer ever reaches checkout. Data from Adobe Analytics shows AI-driven traffic converting around 31% better than other traffic sources and delivering more revenue per visit. These trends show value moving away from simple traffic generation and towards outcomes merchants actually care about, namely conversion. If the agent does the work, the value moves to the outcome.

The decision to charge at the point of purchase is therefore strategic. If you sit inside the agent’s transaction flow, you gain the ability to monetise the conversion. This follows the same platform logic seen in marketplaces and app ecosystems. Control discovery and you charge for access. Control demand and you charge a take rate. Sit at the point of transaction and you can price the outcome.

But behind this sits a broader structural issue, agents have a monetisation problem. Their cost base is variable, driven by LLM usage which consumers neither understand nor care about, while many revenue models still rely on fixed subscriptions. That mismatch does not scale cleanly as agents are expected to deliver more value across more contexts. This is why the industry is moving towards outcome-based pricing, charging for completed actions rather than access or time.

In commerce, this creates two clear paths. One is monetisation inside the payment, taking a share of the transaction. This is clean, measurable and aligned to value, but it runs into an ecosystem where merchants are highly price sensitive and acceptance costs are already optimised. The other is monetisation around the payment through affiliate economics, sponsored placement or advertising budgets. Margins can be higher here, but trust becomes the central issue, as consumers struggle to distinguish between the best recommendation and the paid one.

OpenAI’s 4% signals a decisive move and sets a precedent for how agentic commerce is likely to be commercialised. European merchants may feel the fee shock more than their US counterparts, because the cost of payment processing is relatively lower. However, if agentic journeys deliver new customers, with materially higher conversion, many will pay a premium. That shifts the conversation from payment fees as a cost of doing business to conversion fees as a cost of winning demand.

Strip away the headlines and the mechanics are clear. Shopping is moving into AI interfaces. The agent is compressing the funnel. Platforms are learning they can monetise the outcome, not the referral.

Agentic AI is starting to reprice conversion itself and that is the shift every merchant, platform and investor should be watching closely.