Perplexity wants to make shopping easier and more personal with its AI assistant. 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 new shopping experience will allow Perplexity users to make more personalized product searches, such as asking, “What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take the ferry to work?” According to Perplexity, Assistant can track the context of your conversation when searching for products and record information about your life and preferences to personalize results. Once the assistant has found the products it wants to show you, it can present them in well-formatted product sheets, for example with the pros and cons of each jacket and other relevant details from reviews and guides.
If any of the products found by Perplexity suit you, you can also buy the product directly through the company’s assistant and pay for it with the payment details stored in a PayPal account. This confusion and the PayPal “instant buy” experience extends to all merchants that offer PayPal as a payment method. While this seems to remove a key part of the shopping experience for these online stores (you never visit their website), Perplexity says retailers still have the key elements. “They have full visibility into who their customer is, they can process returns, build loyalty and take control of the post-purchase relationship just as they would on their own websites,” the AI company says.
Perplexity’s venture into online shopping is similar to the store search feature that OpenAI recently added to chatgpt and with new product recommendation features. Google has been added in AI mode in google Search. Despite presenting themselves as a more personalized alternative to the buying guides on Engadget and other editorial sites, all of these tools tend to follow the same logic. By recommending a product to someone, AI companies hope to collect payment or transaction fees if the person makes a purchase.
Ultimately, Perplexity also aims to provide an end-to-end solution for searching and purchasing products without human intervention. The company received a cease and desist order from Amazon in early November to allow the agent to make Amazon purchases on behalf of users in its Comet browser.