• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, over 1 hour ago

OpenAI has been pushing further into ecommerce in recent months. Now, days before the Thanksgiving holiday, it introduced and has begun rolling out a way to research shopping -- a new experience in ChatGPT that does the research to help consumers find the ideal gifts.

The research integrates into a feature called “Instant Checkout” that the company launched in September, which allows users to make purchases directly from eligible merchants through ChatGPT.

Companies like Google have released AI-based shopping tools, but this one does the research from prompts such as “find the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment” or “help me choose between these three bikes,” and then builds a guide with pros and cons, relying on recommendations, to help the consumer decide which one to purchase. 

Through the shopping feature, OpenAI’s ChatGPT asks the consumer clarifying questions, researches in depth across the internet, and reviews high-quality sources. Since the AI has a memory, it builds on what the consumer has shared in the past to personalize a buyer’s guide.

The guides return information on products, key differences between them, and up-to-date information from retailers.

Marketers can ensure that their brand’s products are featured in the OpenAI shopping experience by optimizing content to bring it to users rather than taking users to the content, which is the difference between traditional search engines and ones powered by AI.

Product results are currently selected organically based on relevance, not paid media placement.

An OpenAI blog post explains how shopping research results are based on publicly available retail websites, and that it will not share users’ chats with retailers.

The company said the tool performs best in categories like electronics, beauty, home and garden, kitchen and appliances, and sports and outdoor. And it will offer nearly unlimited usage through the holidays. Although it is not stated, the goal of a free service is to gain traction for the slower shopping months — January and February.

A shopping-specialized GPT-5 mini variant trained on GPT-5-Thinking-mini powers the shopping feature.

OpenAI’s internal evaluation shows shopping research reached 52% product accuracy on multi-constraint queries, compared with 37% for ChatGPT Search.

Perplexity also launched a free U.S. shopping experience. Similar to OpenAI, users search through natural language. The platform also has a memory to remember preferences such as style, and tailors future product suggestions based on the data. It generates product cards with only the details tied to the user’s stated intent.

A partnership with PayPal gives consumers a way to quickly make a purchase. The shopping experience is live on desktop and the web now, with iOS and Android apps rolling out in the next few weeks, a company executive wrote in a post.

Perplexity recently partnered with PayPal to power checkout in the same user experience. Retailers have full visibility into their customers. They can process returns, build loyalty, and own the post-purchase relationship, just as they would on their own sites.