Glance Adds PayPal Native Checkout, Letting Its AI Shopping App Go from Discovery to Purchase
InMobi-backed AI shopping platform Glance has integrated PayPal's agentic commerce services. A guide for e-commerce merchants on how in-app checkout works, what remains undisclosed, how it compares with Mastercard and others, and how PayPal merchants can join.
Key Takeaways
- Glance, the InMobi-backed AI shopping platform, has integrated PayPal's agentic commerce services so shoppers can go from discovery to a virtual try-on, a cart, and payment inside the app without leaving it. PayPal is the only partner providing native in-app checkout on Glance
- When Glance launched on Samsung TVs in June, its CEO said paying from a TV was hard and a phone was needed. This integration fills the missing "payment" piece in a discovery-led platform with a payments provider's layer
- Being a PayPal merchant does not automatically put your products on Glance; the entry point is a sign-up at paypal.ai. Fees, participating merchants, launch timing, and whether checkout works on TVs are undisclosed, and actual usage still needs to be proven
PayPal native checkout comes to the Glance app
Glance, an AI-powered personal shopping platform backed by global technology company InMobi, today announced an agentic commerce integration with PayPal, bringing real-time product data and native checkout directly to Glance for tens of millions of consumers in the United States.
www.financialcontent.comOn October 15, 2026, Glance and PayPal announced an agentic commerce integration. It targets "tens of millions of consumers" in the United States. Glance users can now find a product, visualize it on themselves, build a cart, and pay with PayPal without moving to another site.
Glance's signature feature is generating an AI avatar from a single photo so users can see themselves virtually trying on clothes. According to the announcement, shoppers can use PayPal at the purchase stage and complete checkout without being redirected. The release also states that PayPal is "the only partner to provide native in-app checkout on Glance."
The announcement comes with distribution numbers. Glance is pre-installed on phones through carriers and device makers, and through relationships with Samsung, Motorola, DirecTV, Google's Android TV, and two of the top three U.S. mobile operators, it says it is embedded in more than 60 million mobile and CTV (connected TV) devices. WWD (Sourcing Journal) reported the same figure.
How it works: reading the release through PayPal's two building blocks
The announcement itself is abstract, but matching its wording against the agentic commerce services PayPal launched in October 2025 brings the mechanics into focus. The services consist of two components.
The first is Store Sync. It makes a merchant's product data discoverable on AI shopping surfaces and drops orders into the merchant's existing order management and fulfillment systems. PayPal's developer documentation describes it as letting an AI connect to a store to find products, manage carts, and complete purchases. The "real-time product information such as availability and pricing" and the "cart" mentioned in this announcement overlap with what this component handles.
The second is Agent Ready, which accepts payments for purchases made on AI surfaces. The Agent Ready documentation, updated October 13, lists support for OpenAI's ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) for ChatGPT and Google's UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) for Google AI Mode and Gemini. Reach multiple AI surfaces through a single integration instead of building for each protocol has been PayPal's consistent pitch.
Laid out in order from the shopper's side, the elements in the release form this flow: Glance suggests a product and visualizes it on the user, availability and pricing come from real-time product data, and items in the cart are bought through PayPal checkout inside the app. The release's emphasis on completing transactions "while maintaining control of their customer relationship" points to the design described in the 2025 announcement, in which merchants remain the merchant of record (the seller of record for the transaction).
The release does not say which of Store Sync and Agent Ready this integration uses, or to what extent. Here is what was and was not disclosed.
| Item | What the announcement says |
|---|---|
| Region | United States |
| Scale | Tens of millions of U.S. consumers (Glance is embedded in more than 60 million mobile and CTV devices) |
| Checkout format | Native PayPal checkout inside the Glance app, without redirects |
| Payment partner | PayPal is the only native in-app checkout partner |
| Product data | Real-time product information such as availability and pricing |
| How merchants join | Get started at paypal.ai |
| PayPal components used (Store Sync, Agent Ready) | Undisclosed |
| Participating merchants and brands | Undisclosed |
| Fees and referral charges | Undisclosed |
| Launch timing and phases | Undisclosed |
| Checkout on TVs (CTV) | Undisclosed |
The lack of fee disclosure is a significant gap for merchants. There is currently no basis for judging whether Glance takes a referral fee or whether PayPal's standard processing fees are all that apply.
The "payment" gap left open in June
This announcement makes more sense next to the Samsung partnership in June. When Glance brought its shopping experience to Samsung smart TVs, Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi and Glance, acknowledged in an interview with Forbes that a second device was needed to pay. Paying from a TV is hard, he explained, so completing a transaction meant using a phone.
In other words, Glance kept adding discovery entry points while lacking its own way to close the sale. On September 30 it also announced an experience that can be invoked from Siri AI on iPhone, extending its entry points across the lock screen, TVs, and voice assistants. The PayPal integration puts a payment exit at the end of those entry points.
The checkout scenario described in the release, however, is "in-app" on the phone. It does not say whether PayPal checkout completes on the TV itself or still hands off to a phone as before. "60 million devices including CTV" and "native in-app checkout" appear in the same context but should be read as separate claims.
Where Glance sits on the agentic payments map
Whose payment rails close an AI agent's purchase has become a contest among major players over the past year. For PayPal, Glance is the U.S. counterpart of the native in-app checkout it launched in June with Hey Savi, a UK fashion search app. The strategy is to embed itself as the payment layer not only in general-purpose AI such as ChatGPT and Gemini, but also in specialized agents built around a particular shopping experience.
This direction matters because the trend of AI platforms owning checkout themselves has wavered. A report on Bernstein's September note summarizes that OpenAI abandoned Instant Checkout and that Google has focused more on infrastructure and standards than on controlling payments. If the owners of AI surfaces let go of checkout, the space they leave is filled by payments players such as PayPal, Stripe, and the card networks.
Note that Glance has not committed exclusively to one payments partner. In Agent Connect, which Mastercard announced in September, Glance is named alongside Samsung and Trip.com among companies expected to use it. Agent Connect links merchant catalog discovery, carts, and payments through a single integration, targeting almost the same territory as PayPal's pitch. The picture is one where several providers promise "one integration to many AIs," and agents can connect to more than one of them.
Caveats: usage scale and experience quality
The promoters' numbers do not translate directly into usage. "Embedded in 60 million devices" describes distribution reach, and how many people actually shop on Glance has not been disclosed. The same Bernstein note says agentic transactions account for less than 1% of overall e-commerce and cites a Visa survey in which only 23% of consumers trust AI agents to make payments on their behalf.
There are also questions about the experience itself. Glance spread as a way to show content on the lock screen. When its U.S. pilot began in 2024, 9to5Google noted that it shows ads in other countries and that, while it can be disabled, it was unclear whether it could be removed entirely. A design that takes users from a screen they did not choose to install all the way to a purchase sits on the line between convenience and intrusiveness. Until conversion figures emerge, a cautious reading is warranted.
What it means for e-commerce merchants
The first point to grasp is that being a PayPal merchant does not mean your products appear on Glance automatically. The release directs merchants who want to bring their products to Glance to get started at paypal.ai. The developer documentation likewise says access to the agentic commerce services requires submitting a form, after which PayPal's team guides onboarding. Store Sync's listed connection partners are Wix, Commerce (BigCommerce and Feedonomics), and Shopware.
In 2025, Agent Ready was pitched as requiring "no additional technical lift." The current documentation, though, describes ChatGPT support via token processing through Braintree and Google support via a Google Pay payment handler processed through Braintree or PayPal's Orders API, with implementation work depending on the integration type. There is still a step of sign-up and configuration between using PayPal and being able to sell on AI surfaces.
The other point is the nature of the products Glance handles. Generating try-on images from a photo fits apparel and accessories well, and the quality of product images and the granularity of attributes such as size, material, and color shape how products are presented. The service targets the United States, so this is not something Japanese merchants can join right away. Still, distributing products to multiple AI surfaces through a payments provider shows the direction to prepare for when similar arrangements arrive in other markets.
Conclusion
Glance has widened its discovery entry points from the lock screen to TVs and Siri, but payment was the one piece it lacked. With PayPal native checkout in place, at least within the phone app, the path from inspiration to purchase is now continuous.
What to watch next is the lineup of participating merchants and brands, the fee structure, and whether payment can be completed on the TV itself. How Glance combines PayPal with other payments providers such as Mastercard will also indicate who holds the "final nudge" in AI shopping.
