As Black Friday approaches, OpenAI updates ChatGPT’s shopping features just in time to make your shopping even easier. Starting today, the company has begun rolling out Shopping Research, a new ChatGPT feature designed to make it easier to compare different products.
The tool is available to all ChatGPT users, including those with free accounts. The company offers virtually unlimited use during the holidays. As long as you’re logged into your OpenAI account, you can try out the new experience by selecting Purchase Research from the + menu. ChatGPT also automatically forwards prompts that it believes would be best served by the new model that OpenAI has trained to answer commerce-related questions. For example, if you type “Find the quietest cordless vacuum cleaner for a small apartment,” ChatGPT knows what to do.
In addition to price comparisons, the new experience can help users search for deals, shop for gifts and even find similar products. For example, you can take a photo of an outfit and ask ChatGPT to find you something similar that costs less than $250. When you use the tool, ChatGPT asks clarifying questions to refine the recommendations. For ChatGPT Pulse users, the tool will also be proactive, generating cards that provide personalized buying guides based on past conversations.
This feature is supported by a variant of the GPT-5 mini specifically designed for retail-related activities. “We train you to read reputable websites, cite reliable sources, and synthesize information from many sources to produce high-quality product research,” OpenAI said. In practice, the purchasing assistant should be better at pricing product details accurately than the company’s other systems, including more powerful general-purpose models like GPT-5 Thinking. However, OpenAI warns that the tool is not perfect.
“When considering a purchase, there may be errors in product details such as price and availability. We recommend that you visit the retailer’s website for the most accurate information,” the company said. Additionally, OpenAI finds that the tool tends to perform best in categories such as electronics, beauty and home appliances, where there are many details and specifications that the model can compare to generate complete answers.
It’s no surprise that OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s purchasing capabilities. The company already offers the ability to buy items on Etsy through its chatbot, and competitors like Google have been aggressively adding to it in recent months.