Perplexity is launching a new shopping feature to make buying things easier and more personalized through its AI assistant. The company’s new feature is free to all Perplexity users in the US and builds on Perplexity’s existing relationship with payments provider PayPal.
The new shopping experience lets Perplexity users make more personalized product searches, such as “What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take the ferry to work?” Perplexity says its Assistant can take into account the context of your chats when searching for products, and incorporate details learned about your life and preferences to customize results. Once the Assistant finds products it wants to show you, it can present them in well-formatted product cards, for example, with pros and cons about each jacket, and other relevant details gleaned from reviews and guides.
If Perplexity finds a product right, you can also purchase the product directly through the company’s subsidiary, and pay with payment details stored in the PayPal account. This “instant purchase” experience provided by Perplexity and PayPal extends to all merchants that offer PayPal as a payment method. While this may seem like it might make a key element of the shopping experience for these online stores obsolete (you never actually visit their website), Perplexity claims that merchants still have the most important parts. “They have full visibility into who their customer is, they can process returns, build loyalty and own the post-purchase relationship, just as they do on their own sites,” the AI company says.
Perplexity’s push into online shopping is similar to the “Shopping Research” feature OpenAI recently added to ChatGPT, and the new product recommendation feature Google added to AI mode in Google Search. Although all of these tools are touted as more personalized alternatives to the shopping guides found on Engadget and other editorial sites, they often operate under the same logic. By referring someone to a product, AI companies hope to receive payment or a fee from the transaction if the person makes a purchase.
Ultimately, Perplexity is equally interested in offering an end-to-end solution where it finds and buys products without any human intervention. The company received a ban from Amazon in early November for allowing agents in its Comet browser to complete Amazon purchases on behalf of users.
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