Just ahead of the holiday season, Perplexity has unveiled a new conversational shopping experience designed to make product discovery feel like chatting with a personal stylist. The launch comes mere hours after OpenAI rolled out its 'Shopping Research' feature in ChatGPT.
Perplexity's new tool is available for free to all US users on desktop and web. Mobile app users are slated for rollout in the coming weeks.
How to use the new Perplexity Shopping Experience
Perplexity's new shopping experience transforms the typically overwhelming online shopping research into intent-driven chats. Users can ask questions like, 'Find a winter jacket suitable for ferry commutes in San Francisco' and the chatbot responds with curated product cards featuring key specs, customer reviews, and tailored recommendations drawn from the user's conversation history and preferences. It remembers past interactions, such as a fondness for mid-century modern aesthetics, to suggest items like a matching desk lamp without prompting.
Perplexity has also integrated PayPal for one-click checkout keeping the entire process within the chatbot interface, reducing cart abandonment and emphasising security and speed. The company claims that the recommendations remain unsponsored, prioritising exact user prompt discovery over algorithmic upselling.
Alongside ChatGPT, Google also has rolled out enhancements in Gemini and AI Overviews ahead of the shopping season. To recall, Perplexity has also recently faced hurdles with a lawsuit from Amazon over alleged data scraping by its AI browser agents.
Perplexity's Shopping Tool and ChatGPT's Shopping Research: What's different?
1. Perplexity zeroes in on immediate discovery and purchase, delivering bite-sized product cards for quick decisions and enabling instant buy-through via PayPal today. ChatGPT's Shopping Research, powered by a specialised GPT-5 mini model, prioritises in-depth exploration, generating comprehensive buyer's guides with side-by-side comparisons, tradeoffs, real-time pricing, and deal alerts (like Black Friday discounts) after probing users with clarifying questions. It provides third-party links from Amazon and Flipkart to go and shop from. There is no integrated payment system on ChatGPT Shopping yet.
2. Both draw from conversation history, but Perplexity excels in pattern recognition for stylistic matches (e.g., aesthetic continuity across items), while ChatGPT adapts dynamically to real-time feedback, like dismissing 'not interested' options, and cites trusted sources for broader research across categories such as electronics, beauty, and outdoor gear.
3. Perplexity's feature is available only for US users. ChatGPT's new tool is globally accessible to logged-in users on every plan (Free through Pro), with 'nearly unlimited' holiday usage.
