From Shopify to ChatGPT Shopping: the end-to-end

From the moment you decide to get your Shopify store into ChatGPT Shopping to the moment your products start appearing in ChatGPT's recommendations — here's everything that happens, in order, with the specific details most guides leave out.

Phase 1: Merchant registration (Days 1–7)

Visit chatgpt.com/merchants. You'll need: business name, registered address, company number, website URL, trading categories, and average order value. Shopify merchants have a faster path through verification due to the OpenAI–Shopify partnership. After approval: you receive your SFTP credentials — hostname, port, username, and password.

Phase 2: Connecting your Shopify store (Day 7–8)

In your Shopify admin: Settings > Apps and sales channels > Develop apps > Create an app. Grant read_products, read_inventory, read_content. Install and copy the Admin API access token (shown once only). In Trajekt: Add Store > Shopify > paste your URL + token. Trajekt fetches your first catalogue sync in 2–15 minutes.

Phase 3: Field mapping (Day 8)

Most fields map automatically: Shopify variant ID → item_id, product title → title, description HTML → description (stripped), product URL → url, variant price → price (formatted "12.50 GBP"), availability → in_stock. You configure in Trajekt settings: seller_name, seller_url, return_policy URL, target_countries.

Trajekt calculates variant_dict automatically — analysing which option dimensions genuinely vary per product group before including them.

Phase 4: SFTP delivery (Day 8)

Trajekt compresses your JSONL to .jsonl.gz and pushes to your OpenAI SFTP endpoint. Key rules: filename stays consistent across updates (e.g. catalogue.jsonl.gz, no date suffix), file overwrites previous version cleanly, full catalogue snapshots required — no incrementals.

Phase 5: OpenAI processing (Days 8–10)

OpenAI processes through three stages: ingestion (file received and parsed — minutes), validation (fields checked, URLs verified — products failing validation are rejected individually), indexing (24–48 hours for initial submissions). Check your merchant dashboard at chatgpt.com/merchants for status.

The fastest path from Shopify to ChatGPT Shopping

Trajekt handles every technical step — GraphQL API connection, HTML stripping, variant_dict calculation, SFTP delivery. Your products, live in ChatGPT.

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What to monitor after go-live

Validation error rate: Target below 5%. Common errors: URL returning non-200, HTML in description, price mismatch.
Indexed count vs submitted count: Significant shortfall means validation failures. Review the error report.
Product count inflation: If indexed count is higher than submitted (e.g. 15,000 from 10,000 submitted), your variant_dict has an issue. Trajekt resolves this automatically.

OpenAI merchant onboarding: what the process actually looks like

OpenAI's merchant registration for ChatGPT Shopping is separate from any Trajekt setup — it's the agreement you enter into with OpenAI to have your products indexed. The process involves completing OpenAI's merchant application, agreeing to their commerce policies (which mirror Google Shopping's prohibited products list closely), and receiving SFTP credentials for feed delivery. Processing time varies but typically runs 1–2 weeks from application to credential issuance.

While waiting for SFTP credentials, the most productive use of time is generating and validating your JSONL feed. Trajekt produces your ChatGPT JSONL as soon as your store is connected — you can review the output, verify the field mapping, and check that descriptions are HTML-free and factually accurate before the SFTP endpoint is live. This means the day your credentials arrive, you can push your first feed immediately rather than starting the setup process.

Validating your JSONL output before first delivery

The ChatGPT Shopping feed spec requires strictly valid JSONL — each line must be a complete, parseable JSON object with no line breaks within field values. A single malformed line can cause the entire file to be rejected. Before your first SFTP delivery, run a local validation check: parse each line independently and confirm every line returns valid JSON, every required field (item_id, title, description, link, image_link, price, availability) is present on every row, no description field contains HTML tags, and the price format matches the spec (numeric value followed by ISO currency code, e.g. "49.99 GBP").

Trajekt validates each output row against the ChatGPT spec before writing the JSONL file and before each SFTP delivery. Any row that would fail validation is excluded with a log entry — so your delivered file is always spec-compliant, even if some source products have data quality issues that would otherwise cause failures.

What to expect in the first 30 days after go-live

The initial indexing period after your first successful SFTP delivery typically takes 7–14 days. During this period your products are being evaluated against OpenAI's quality and policy standards. You may see a subset of products appear in ChatGPT Shopping results before your full catalogue is indexed — this is normal and reflects OpenAI's phased evaluation approach.

In the first 30 days, monitor: SFTP delivery confirmations (Trajekt logs each delivery attempt and result), any error notifications from OpenAI about file format issues, and referral traffic from chatgpt.com in your analytics. The latter may be very low initially — ChatGPT Shopping UK access is expanding gradually and you may not see significant volume until UK access widens. The purpose of early setup is to be in the index when traffic scales, not to expect immediate high volume from day one.

From Shopify to ChatGPT Shopping: the end-to-end feed journey in 2026