AI search and assistant platform Perplexity is rolling out a new shopping feature designed to make buying products through its AI assistant more personalized and seamless. The feature, available free to all Perplexity users in the U.S., builds on the company’s existing partnership with PayPal to enable secure transactions.
How It Works
The new shopping experience allows users to conduct context-aware product searches using natural language queries. For example:
“What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take a ferry to work?”
Perplexity’s AI assistant can retain context from previous conversations, incorporate details about a user’s preferences, and deliver tailored recommendations. Products are presented in formatted cards that include:
- Pros and cons
- Key specifications
- Insights from reviews and buying guides
Once a user selects a product, they can complete the purchase directly within the assistant using PayPal’s Instant Buy, which works across all merchants that accept PayPal.
While this approach bypasses traditional e-commerce site visits, Perplexity emphasizes that merchants retain full visibility into customer data, manage returns, and maintain post-purchase relationships, ensuring loyalty programs and customer engagement remain intact.
Competitive Landscape and Monetization
Perplexity’s move mirrors similar initiatives by OpenAI, which recently added a shopping research feature to ChatGPT, and Google, which introduced product recommendation tools in AI Mode for Search. These AI-driven shopping tools aim to provide personalized alternatives to editorial buying guides, while monetizing through affiliate fees or transaction commissions.
End-to-End Shopping Ambitions and Challenges
Ultimately, Perplexity is pursuing an end-to-end shopping experience, where its AI agent handles everything from product discovery to purchase without human intervention. However, this ambition has already sparked controversy: in early November, Amazon issued a cease-and-desist after Perplexity’s Comet browser agent attempted to complete Amazon purchases on behalf of users.
