What happened
Square shipped a ChatGPT app and a Claude plugin that let both AI platforms discover Square sellers and place real orders. The first wave is US food-and-beverage merchants with active Square Online Ordering profiles. Eligible sellers were enrolled automatically — no setup fees, no new dashboard to learn. Menus, hours, business information, and ordering capability sync in real time from the Square Dashboard merchants already use.
The commission detail is the part worth reading twice. Square is not taking an added marketplace cut on orders placed through these integrations. Compare that to what delivery platforms charge restaurants and you can see Square positioning AI ordering as a feature of the platform, not a toll booth.
This isn't a one-off experiment either. Square is working with Amazon on an Alexa+ voice commerce integration, and it holds seats in three standards efforts: the AAIF Agentic Commerce Working Group, the W3C Web Payments Working Group, and the Universal Commerce Protocol developed by Google. That's a company betting on agentic checkout as infrastructure, not a press release.
Why this matters
Food-and-beverage is the test lane, but nothing about the plumbing is restaurant-specific. The template is what matters: platform wires the catalog in, AI places orders out, merchant pays nothing extra. Every commerce platform is now under pressure to match that shape — including yours.
BigCommerce already names OpenAI and Perplexity as channels in its API. When the equivalent switch appears for your store, you won't get to redesign anything for it. The AI will read whatever catalog data you have on that day — product names, options, availability, shipping rules — and either sell you confidently or skip you. Square's merchants didn't opt in through a campaign; the data they had already maintained determined whether they were ready.
Honest caveat: early volume will be tiny. Ordering a sandwich through Claude is a novelty in mid-2026, and nobody should reforecast revenue around it. But rails get built before traffic arrives, and the merchants who treat this quarter as catalog-cleanup time will be the ones the first real wave of agentic orders actually reaches.
What to do about it
Audit your catalog like an AI will read it
Pull 20 products and read only the structured data: name, options, variants, availability, shipping info. If a machine reading those fields alone couldn't complete an accurate order, fix that before any AI channel opens. Square's rollout rewarded merchants whose ordering profiles were already clean.
Find out where your platform's agentic switch will live
BigCommerce merchants: watch the channels area of the control panel and the platform's API changelog, where OpenAI and Perplexity are already named as channels. Know where the toggle will appear so you're deciding on day one, not discovering it in month three.
Bank the commission precedent
Square set the marker: zero added take rate on AI-placed orders. When an AI shopping channel or marketplace quotes you a commission later this year, negotiate against that precedent. The platforms are competing for merchant catalogs right now, and that's your moment of maximum pricing power.