This week, the way people discover and buy fashion online took another step forward.
AI-powered checkout went live, virtual try-on reached a major retailer,
and new data showed fashion is winning in AI-driven shopping.
1. ChatGPT Now Lets You Buy — and Shopify Says Checkout Still Goes Through Them
On February 16, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT.
US users can now ask ChatGPT to find a product, see recommendations, and buy —
all without leaving the chat.
Etsy sellers are live.
Over a million Shopify merchants, including Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori,
are coming next.
The numbers behind it are worth noting.
ChatGPT now handles roughly 50 million shopping-related queries per day.
About 59% of US consumers have used generative AI for shopping at least once.
OpenAI charges merchants a 4% transaction fee,
with a 30-day free trial for Shopify sellers —
significantly lower than Amazon’s 25–30% take rate.
On February 23, Shopify responded.
President Harley Finkelstein made the company’s position clear:
“LLMs do not bypass Shopify’s checkout.”
AI can help shoppers discover products and fill carts inside a conversation,
but the actual payment, inventory tracking,
and order processing still flow through Shopify.
AI-powered shopping orders through Shopify have jumped 15x since January 2025.
One strategic detail stands out: Amazon has blocked ChatGPT’s crawlers.
That means non-Amazon DTC brands have an opening in AI-native commerce that didn’t exist before.
The takeaway: Fashion brands selling direct-to-consumer should pay attention.
AI chat is becoming a real shopping channel,
and brands not on Amazon may actually have an advantage here.
2. ASOS Rolls Out Virtual Try-On — Upload Your Photo or Pick an AI Model
ASOS launched a hybrid virtual try-on feature on February 17 in partnership with AI fashion platform AIUTA.
The feature is live on the ASOS iOS app for select UK and US customers,
covering around 10,000 products.
The approach is interesting because it gives shoppers two options.
You can upload your own photo to see how an item looks on you.
Or you can choose from 20 AI-generated models that represent different body types,
sizes, and skin tones.
Each try-on loads in 4–7 seconds, faster than most industry solutions.
Melissa Lim, Head of Digital Product at ASOS, explained the thinking:
“We know customers want the confidence of seeing how something will really look but don’t want to be pushed into doing it one way.”
This launch follows ASOS’s January update that added return rate transparency —
letting shoppers see their own return behavior.
Together, these moves aim at the same goal: help people buy with more confidence and return less.
For a retailer serving 17 million active customers across 200+ markets,
even a small improvement in return rates has a large financial impact.
The takeaway: Virtual try-on is moving from experimental to standard.
If a major fast-fashion retailer is rolling it out at scale,
expect the technology to become a baseline expectation for online shoppers.
3. Fashion Brands Are Climbing the AI Shopping Rankings — While Others Fall
Digital Commerce 360 published new analysis on February 26 from its 2026 State of American Ecommerce Report,
comparing how AI-driven shopping rankings differ from traditional e-commerce rankings.
The standout finding: Apparel & Accessories merchants appear twice in the AI Commerce top 10,
but are entirely absent from the traditional top 10.
Fashion brands that aren’t prominent in conventional search are surfacing as top performers in AI-driven discovery.
This is a meaningful reshuffling.
In traditional e-commerce, visibility comes from domain authority, ad spend,
and category dominance.
In AI-driven shopping, the model surfaces products based on how well the listing matches the query.
Product descriptions, image quality, fit information,
and material details all become ranking inputs.
Categories like home improvement and specialty retail showed weaker AI performance compared to their traditional rankings.
Fashion, it seems, is one category where AI shopping is creating new winners.
The takeaway: Fashion brands that have invested in clean,
detailed product content are positioned to benefit as AI shopping grows.
Brands that haven’t may find themselves invisible in the fastest-growing channel.
What This Means for Your Brand
Three stories, one direction: the interface between fashion brands and buyers is shifting to AI.
- On shopping: Consumers are already buying through ChatGPT,
and Shopify is processing those orders at 15x the rate of a year ago.
This is not a pilot — it’s a live channel with real transaction volume. - On confidence: Virtual try-on is no longer experimental.
When ASOS deploys it across 10,000 products with 4-second load times,
it sets a new baseline for what shoppers expect from any fashion retailer. - On content: In all three stories, product content quality is the common thread.
AI shopping surfaces products based on descriptions, imagery, and metadata.
Brands with weak content get skipped.
For brands producing fashion content at scale — lookbooks, model shots,
product imagery — tools like LaonGEN let you generate on-model images from product photos, which helps with both the volume problem and the AI-discoverability problem at the same time.
Sources: ChatGPT Instant Checkout: ACP Protocol Retailer Guide —
Ekamoira, Shopify Says AI Shopping Will Not Bypass Its Checkout — Retail Brew, ASOS Launches Hybrid Virtual Try-On with AIUTA — TheIndustry.fashion, What Shoppers Are Using AI to Buy — Digital Commerce 360