OpenAI has picked Shopify Inc. as its first e-commerce partner for ChatGPT Ads, a new advertising product that lets merchants buy ad space inside the chatbot, the San Francisco company said Sept. 16, 2026.
The rollout, confirmed a day later in a Shopify app store listing reported by Canadian tech outlet BetaKit, means merchants on the Ottawa-based platform can sync their product catalogues, set campaign budgets and track conversions without leaving Shopify’s dashboard. HubSpot was named OpenAI’s first customer relationship management partner in the same announcement.
The ads are free to install and are paired with a new format OpenAI calls sponsored agents, which let a ChatGPT user who clicks an ad start a branded conversation with that business before deciding whether to visit its website, according to OpenAI’s own announcement of the advertising push.
For now, the program is limited to merchants in the United States. OpenAI said it plans to expand ChatGPT Ads to international markets starting Sept. 23, 2026, though neither company has confirmed whether Canadian merchants will be included in that first wave, according to BetaKit, which said it asked OpenAI directly for clarity on Canadian availability and did not receive one.
The stakes for Canada extend well beyond a single product launch. Shopify counts more than a million merchants worldwide and ranks among the country’s largest publicly traded companies, and it has spent much of the past year racing rivals to build so-called agentic commerce tools that let AI systems shop and check out on a customer’s behalf. Shopify struck an earlier deal with OpenAI in September 2025 that let ChatGPT users complete purchases through its Instant Checkout system, and it has separately built shopping integrations with Google’s and Microsoft’s chatbots.
OpenAI is chasing an ambitious revenue target of its own. The company is aiming to build a $100 billion a year advertising business by 2030, according to reporting cited by research firm eMarketer, and ChatGPT’s roughly one billion monthly active users as of May 2026 give it a large but still narrow audience next to Google search. eMarketer estimates just 34.9 per cent of the U.S. population will use ChatGPT this year, compared with 77.7 per cent for search engines generally.
That gap is a large part of why eMarketer is advising marketers to treat ChatGPT ad budgets as a small add-on to search spending for now, rather than a replacement, until OpenAI ships stronger measurement tools. For Canadian small businesses that rely on Shopify’s storefronts, the near-term choice looks similarly cautious: sign up early to test a new sales channel in the U.S., or wait for OpenAI to say when, or whether, the ads reach Canadian shoppers directly.
