OpenAI rolled out two new shopping features inside ChatGPT globally on Thursday: a virtual try-on for clothing and accessories, and a Favorites tool that saves products for later. Taken together, they quietly reposition ChatGPT from a chat window into a discovery surface with over 1.2 billion weekly users browsing a catalog.
Here’s how the try-on works. In any shopping result, a “Try on” button lets shoppers upload a selfie or any screenshot of a garment taken from somewhere else on the web, and ChatGPT renders the item on the person. The feature runs on ChatGPT Images 2.5, released September 8, which OpenAI says cuts image generation latency by up to 50% compared with Images 2.0.
That matters because latency, in a fitting room, is the whole product.
The behavioral backdrop is already there. According to PYMNTS’ October intelligence report, nearly 23% of US consumers, almost 61 million people, start their online retail search with AI. About 28% of their most recent AI-assisted purchases were clothing, shoes, and accessories. Fashion isn’t an edge case on this surface; it’s the modal category.
For small apparel and accessories brands, this collapses the gap between a product image and an ad unit. If your photography is clean, well-lit, and feeding into the data sources ChatGPT draws from, you can land inside a shopper’s virtual fitting room without them ever opening your site. Favorites then creates a save-for-later layer, a shortlist built before a storefront visit. The parallel with ChatGPT’s Shopify-powered ads rollout is the point: OpenAI has drifted from Instant Checkout toward a merchant-feed model, and ChatGPT Ads, in testing only since February, already passed $1 billion in annualized revenue in under 200 days, the company says.
Two caveats sit next to the launch. OpenAI itself warns that try-on images may not accurately show the product or the user’s appearance, and can’t predict whether a size will fit. And by default, images uploaded from a personal account can be used for training unless the user opts out.
Google got here first with its own try-on tool. ChatGPT got here with the shoppers.
Sources
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/01/chatgpt-can-now-virtually-try-on-clothes-for-you/
- https://www.engadget.com/2275295/chatgpt-can-now-help-you-virtually-try-on-clothes/
- https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/openai-wants-you-to-try-on-clothes-inside-chatgpt-before-buying-them/
- https://www.technology.org/2026/10/02/chatgpt-virtual-try-on-clothes-images-2-5/
- https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/openai-adds-virtual-try-on-feature-chatgpt/
