Table of Contents
Here’s a scenario that’s already playing out. A customer opens ChatGPT, asks “find me a good hotel in Goa for next weekend,” gets a recommendation, and decides to book. Then the conversation breaks. The chat tells them to “continue on our website” or “open the app to complete your booking.”
That redirect is where you lose them.
Today, there is no way for Indian businesses to accept payments inside ChatGPT or Claude that meets Indian compliance requirements. Customers discover, compare, and decide within AI chat interfaces, then are redirected to complete the transaction elsewhere. Every redirect leaks intent. In early testing, we’ve seen broken context reduce conversion rates by upto 40%.
We built Cashfree Here to close that gap.
A New Distribution Channel Is Forming, Fast!
In 2010, app stores became the new distribution channel. Now, AI chat interfaces are becoming the next platform where consumers discover, evaluate, and buy.
OpenAI launched the Apps SDK. Anthropic launched MCP Apps. Businesses are already building apps that enable customers to interact with their services within ChatGPT and Claude. But there’s been a critical missing piece: payments.
Think about what this means for a restaurant booking platform seeing 10% of discovery shifting to ChatGPT, or a travel company whose customers are researching trips in Claude. Demand is forming within these interfaces.
If you can’t capture the transaction there, you’re handing intent back to the user and hoping they come find you. That’s the equivalent of a storefront that lets people browse but makes them drive across town to pay.
What Cashfree Here Actually Is (and What It Isn’t)
Let’s be precise, because this space is new and the mental models are still forming.
Cashfree Here is not just a ChatGPT payment method. It’s not a payment link dropped into a chat window. And it’s not a chatbot with a “Pay Now” button.
It is a checkout-grade payment extension built from the ground up for AI chat interfaces – specifically OpenAI’s Apps SDK and Anthropic’s MCP Apps. It supports UPI, cards, and QR payments. It’s PCI-DSS compliant. And it’s designed so that the transaction becomes part of the conversation, not a separate step.
The key shift:
| Traditional Flow | With Cashfree Here |
| Search / discovery → Redirect → App / web checkout → Drop-offs → Payment | Conversation → Decision → Instant in-chat checkout → Payment done |
The transaction happens where the intent lives. No context switching. No app hopping. No re-entering details.
Why You Can’t Just Use Your Existing Payment APIs
If you’re a product leader at a consumer business, you might be thinking: we already have payments integrated, how hard can it be to extend this into chat?
Harder than it looks, for three specific reasons.
First, PCI-DSS compliance. Card payments inside chat interfaces require secure, isolated environments where card data never touches uncertified systems. In a traditional app, your payment aggregator handles this with SDKs or hosted checkout pages. In an MCP app, there’s no standard way to render a secure checkout page.
The transaction happens inside chat widgets. Building this yourself means getting your MCP app PCI DSS certified, which is a minimum 6-12-month undertaking.
Second, context preservation. In a chat interface, context is the product. When a user says “book that hotel” after a 20-message conversation, the system needs to remember which hotel, for which dates, at what price. If the payment flow breaks this context, or if a failed payment doesn’t return the user to the right place in the conversation, you lose the sale. This is where the 40% drop in conversion comes from.
Third, action integrity. In AI apps, you need to guarantee that the LLM cannot execute payment actions on behalf of the user. If a user types “yes, book it” and the LLM interprets that as a payment confirmation, you have a serious problem. All payment confirmations must be action-based. Explicit button clicks, not text-based. This prevents hallucinations and unintended actions that could complete transactions.
Cashfree Here solves all three. Your MCP app remains outside PCI scope, context is maintained throughout the entire payment flow, and the LLM can suggest actions but never execute them.
The Distribution Unlock Most People Are Missing
Here’s the part that’s underrated in this conversation. Cashfree Here doesn’t just solve a payment problem – it unlocks a distribution channel.
With this extension, businesses don’t need to “build a ChatGPT experience.” They plug into ChatGPT as a new demand channel, where checkout is bundled with discovery. The user discovers your product, decides in the conversation, and pays – all without ever visiting your app or website.
For product teams, the strategic question isn’t “should we build an AI app?” It’s “Are we ready to capture demand where it’s forming?”
A note on the Indian market specifically: OpenAI’s in-house payments aren’t available for Indian businesses yet. If you want to enable in-chat payments today, integrating with a payment extension like Cashfree Here is the way to go.
What’s Next
Cashfree Here is the first payment extension available for OpenAI’s Apps SDK and Anthropic’s MCP Apps. It takes less than 5 minutes to integrate, and it works with UPI, cards, and QR payments.
We’re launching with a limited number of early access partners. If you’re building or evaluating an AI app for your business, or if you’re just thinking through whether AI chat is the right distribution channel for you, we want to hear from you.
Join the waitlist: Click Here
The future of commerce is conversational. The payment infrastructure needs to be conversational, too.
