According to Engadget, Perplexity is rolling out a new shopping feature to make buying things through its AI assistant easier and more personalized. The company’s new feature is free for all Perplexity users in the US and builds on Perplexity’s existing relationship with payment provider PayPal. The shopping experience lets users conduct personalized product searches while keeping chat context in mind, with the assistant incorporating details it’s learned about user preferences to tailor results. Products appear in formatted cards with pros, cons, and review details, and users can purchase directly through Perplexity using stored PayPal details via “Instant Buy.” This puts Perplexity in competition with similar shopping features from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI search mode, all while the company received a cease-and-desist from Amazon in early November for letting its Comet browser complete Amazon purchases automatically.
The mechanics behind the magic
Here’s how this actually functions in practice. You ask something like “What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take a ferry to work?” The system doesn’t just search for jackets – it considers the specific climate conditions, your commute method, and whatever else it’s learned about your preferences from previous conversations. That context awareness is what makes this different from traditional search.
The product cards it generates pull from reviews and guides across the web, synthesizing information into digestible pros and cons. But here’s the thing – you never actually visit the merchant’s website during the “Instant Buy” process. Perplexity claims merchants still get customer data and can handle returns just like normal, but doesn’t that fundamentally change the shopping experience? You’re basically outsourcing the entire discovery and decision-making process to an AI.
The AI commerce arms race
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. OpenAI recently added shopping research to ChatGPT, and Google’s been pushing AI shopping features hard. All these companies are chasing the same goal: becoming the intermediary between your intent to buy and the actual purchase. They’re essentially trying to insert themselves into the transaction flow where affiliate marketers and comparison sites used to live.
The revenue model here seems pretty clear – referral fees or transaction percentages. But I wonder how transparent this will be to users. When an AI recommends Product A over Product B, is it because it’s genuinely better, or because the commission structure favors it? That’s a question we should all be asking as these tools become more common.
Where this is heading
Perplexity’s ultimate goal appears to be complete automation. The company already got in trouble with Amazon for letting its Comet browser complete purchases automatically on users’ behalf. That cease-and-desist in early November shows how aggressive they’re being about removing humans from the loop entirely.
Think about that for a second. An AI that not only finds what you need but actually completes the purchase without your direct involvement. It’s convenient, sure, but it also raises questions about consumer protection, return policies, and whether we really want algorithms spending our money. The line between helpful assistant and automated spender is getting blurrier by the day.
