February 28, 2026

Microsoft Copilot Checkout: The AI Shopping Channel Nobody Is Talking About

Microsoft published actual conversion numbers. They’re hard to ignore.

Everyone is watching ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. Meanwhile, Microsoft quietly launched Copilot Checkout at NRF 2026 on January 8, auto-enrolled Shopify merchants, published conversion data that no other AI shopping platform has shared, and got almost no coverage from the ecommerce press.

That’s a mistake. Here’s why.

What Copilot Checkout actually is

Copilot Checkout lets users complete a purchase without leaving the Copilot chat interface. You ask Copilot about a product, it surfaces options, and you buy - all inside the conversation. No redirect to a merchant site. No new tabs.

Payments are handled by PayPal and Stripe. Two payment providers from day one - more than ChatGPT had at launch.

Alongside checkout, Microsoft introduced Brand Agents: AI-powered conversational experiences that merchants can deploy on their own websites. Think of it as a branded chatbot built with Microsoft’s AI, installed on your store, that helps shoppers find products and get answers in your brand’s voice.

The conversion data nobody is talking about

This is the part that matters.

Microsoft’s ads team published actual performance metrics for shopping behavior involving Copilot:

Shopping journeys are 33% shorter compared to traditional search
53% increase in purchases within 30 minutes of a shopping query
194% more likely to result in a purchase when shopping intent is present

No other AI shopping platform has published numbers like these. OpenAI hasn’t shared conversion rates for Instant Checkout. Google hasn’t published UCP performance data. Perplexity hasn’t either.

You can argue about methodology. These are Microsoft’s own numbers from their own platform. But even with that caveat, the direction is clear: when someone shops through an AI conversation, the path to purchase compresses. Fewer steps, faster decisions, higher conversion.

This matches intuition. A traditional shopping journey goes: search query, scan ten blue links, click through to a few sites, compare, go back, search again, maybe buy. An AI shopping journey goes: describe what you want, get a curated answer, buy. The funnel collapses.

How merchants get enrolled

Shopify merchants are automatically enrolled in Copilot Checkout through their existing Bing Merchant Center feeds. If your products are in Bing Shopping, they can appear in Copilot conversations. There’s an opt-out window, but the default is in.

Etsy sellers were among the first partners, mirroring the ChatGPT rollout where Etsy also led.

The auto-enrollment approach is similar to what Amazon did with Buy for Me - merchants are included by default through standard product feeds. It drew less controversy than Amazon’s version, partly because Microsoft uses existing merchant feeds rather than sending an agent to browse and purchase on third-party sites. But the principle is the same: your products are in a new channel whether you chose to be there or not.

Copilot Checkout vs ChatGPT vs Google AI Mode

	Copilot Checkout	ChatGPT Instant Checkout	Google AI Mode
Launched	January 2026	September 2025	January 2026 (rolling out)
Payment providers	PayPal, Stripe	Stripe	Google Pay (more coming via UCP)
Merchant fee	Not disclosed	Rumored ~3-4%	Not announced
Enrollment	Auto-enrolled via Bing Merchant Center (opt-out)	Via Shopify ACP feed (opt-in rollout)	Via Google Merchant Center
Data source	Bing Shopping index	Merchant-hosted ACP feeds	Google Shopping Graph (50B listings)
Published conversion data	Yes (33% shorter journeys, 194% purchase lift)	No	No
Brand Agents	Yes	No	No
AI surface	Copilot, Bing Chat, Edge	ChatGPT	AI Mode, Gemini
Status	Live (US)	Live (US)	Rolling out (US)

Two things stand out. First, Microsoft is the only platform to publish conversion metrics. Second, Copilot Checkout is the only one with Brand Agents, giving merchants a way to shape the AI conversation around their products rather than just being a line item in a results list.

For a broader comparison of how these platforms fit into the agentic commerce landscape, see The Agentic Commerce War: Google vs OpenAI.

The Bing objection (and why it’s wrong)

The obvious pushback: “Nobody uses Bing.”

It’s true that Bing’s search market share is small - roughly 3-4% globally. But there are two problems with dismissing it.

First, the conversion data suggests AI-assisted shopping behaves differently from traditional search. A smaller audience with 194% higher purchase likelihood and 53% more purchases within 30 minutes might generate more revenue than a larger audience browsing passively. Volume matters less when conversion rates are dramatically higher.

Second, Copilot is embedded in places Bing never was. It’s in Windows, in Edge, in Microsoft 365 apps used by over 400 million people. The surface area for Copilot is not the Bing.com search bar. It’s every Microsoft product where a user might mention wanting to buy something.

As we covered in our map of AI shopping platforms, the number of AI surfaces where consumers can discover and buy products keeps growing. Copilot is one more, and it comes with an enterprise distribution channel that ChatGPT and Google don’t have.

The European angle

Here’s where it gets interesting for European merchants.

Bing’s market share in Europe is modest - around 4% in France, around 4-5% in the UK. Not dramatically different from the global average. But the real story isn’t Bing’s search share. In corporate environments running Microsoft 365, Copilot is the default AI assistant - not ChatGPT, not Gemini. That enterprise footprint matters far more than search bar market share.

Microsoft’s enterprise relationships could make Copilot a faster path to European agentic commerce than ChatGPT or Google AI Mode. Both OpenAI and Google have announced international expansion plans but haven’t given dates. Microsoft, with existing Bing Ads infrastructure in European markets and enterprise contracts with thousands of European companies, might not need a special “European launch.” The infrastructure is already there.

For European merchants watching agentic commerce from the sidelines - and right now, most are - Copilot Checkout is worth paying attention to precisely because it runs on infrastructure that already works in their markets.

What merchants should do this week

1. Check if your products appear in Bing Shopping. Search for your brand name and top products on Bing. If they’re not there, your products won’t surface in Copilot either.

2. Verify your Bing Merchant Center account. If you don’t have one, create it. If you have one, check that your product feed is current. Stale data means invisible products.

3. Decide on your enrollment. If you’re a Shopify merchant, you’re likely already enrolled. If you want to opt out, do it now rather than later. If you want to stay in, make sure your product data is complete.

4. Check your Shopify ACP feed while you’re at it. If you’re optimizing for Copilot, you should also see how your products appear to ChatGPT. You can check how your Shopify products look to AI agents with our feed previewer.

5. Watch for Brand Agents. This is early, but if Microsoft opens Brand Agents to more merchants, it’s a way to control your narrative inside an AI conversation - something no other platform offers yet.

The bottom line

Microsoft Copilot Checkout is not the biggest AI shopping channel. It’s not going to overtake ChatGPT or Google in reach. But it has the best published conversion data of any AI shopping platform, it auto-enrolls merchants through existing feeds, and it’s embedded in the enterprise stack that hundreds of millions of people use daily.

For merchants already optimizing for ChatGPT and Google, adding Copilot to the checklist is low effort. For European merchants waiting for agentic commerce to arrive in their markets, Copilot might get there first.

Either way, ignoring it is a choice. And given those conversion numbers, it’s a choice worth reconsidering.