Perplexity has launched a new AI-driven shopping experience for all U.S. users, aiming to fix one of online retail’s biggest gaps: helping people discover what they actually love. Traditional online shopping has made transactions faster, but it hasn’t made choosing easier. Search bars retrieve exact items, and editorial lists optimize for affiliate revenue — not personal needs.

Perplexity’s new shopping assistant changes this dynamic by offering context-aware, conversational shopping built on an AI system that learns your tastes and adapts in real time.

Perplexity’s shopping experience reflects its broader philosophy for AI assistants: systems that augment users rather than replace them.

Instead of dictating what to buy, the assistant remembers preferences, interprets intent, and helps people navigate choices in the same way they would naturally — only faster. This approach works across all tasks Perplexity supports, from browsing to email management to task execution.

For shopping, the benefit is especially pronounced. Buying a winter jacket, choosing furniture, or comparing tech products requires understanding personal lifestyle and tastes — something traditional algorithms optimized for advertising dollars haven’t been able to provide.

The platform is built around conversational discovery.

Users can ask a question like: “What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take a ferry to work?”

Perplexity responds with options tailored to your climate, commute, and style, not generic top-10 lists. Follow-up questions — “What about boots?” — stay within the same context, preserving your needs throughout the entire conversation.

This creates a continuous discovery process grounded in memory, preferences, and behavior patterns.

Unlike advertising-driven recommendation engines, Perplexity’s AI assistant builds a persistent understanding of each user:

If you’ve been browsing mid-century modern home décor, the AI surfaces lamps or accessories that match that aesthetic.

If you’ve researched minimalist running shoes for marathon training, the assistant leans toward simplicity when recommending a travel bag or jacket.

If you ask about kitchen gifts or small-space appliances, it prioritizes options designed for limited counter space.

The AI’s continuous learning makes the shopping journey more aligned with individual taste — not retailer incentives.

Instead of overwhelming shoppers with hundreds of near-identical items, Perplexity generates focused product cards that highlight information relevant to your specific query, such as:

This eliminates the friction of scrolling through infinite product grids, cuts through the overwhelm created by hundreds of similar products, and brings clarity back to decision-making.

Shoppers can complete purchases directly within the Perplexity interface thanks to a partnership with PayPal. This integration allows:

Whether you’re buying last-minute skis, tech accessories, or a travel bag, checkout happens without breaking the flow.

The design isn’t only consumer-focused. Through its partnership with PayPal, Perplexity built the system to keep retailers at the center of the transaction and the customer relationship. Retailers maintain:

This is a departure from many platforms that obscure buyer identity or keep the customer relationship for themselves, restoring the same level of customer insight retailers typically receive on their own ecommerce sites.

The biggest advantage for merchants is the high purchase intent of Perplexity shoppers. Instead of broad keyword searches optimized for clicks, shoppers arrive at checkout after an in-depth, personalized exploration — which means they’re more decisive, less likely to return products, and more likely to complete the transaction. Pairing that with instant PayPal checkout reduces cart abandonment, a major friction point in e-commerce.

Perplexity describes this launch as the version of online shopping that should have existed all along: personal, context-aware discovery paired with effortless action.

The new shopping experience is available now on desktop and web for all U.S. Perplexity users at no cost, with iOS and Android rolling out in the coming weeks.

Finding what you love should always be this easy. All it takes to begin is a question.

The launch places Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini in direct competition over how people discover and buy products through AI. All three systems now support conversational shopping, but each takes a different approach.

ChatGPT combines buyer’s-guide style recommendations with a growing instant-checkout feature that lets users purchase supported products directly inside the chat. It can refine choices through back-and-forth conversation and automate tasks like price tracking or purchase timing, making it useful for broad product exploration. However, because OpenAI often acts as the intermediary during checkout, retailers may not always receive the full customer relationship or post-purchase visibility.

Gemini, through Google’s Shopping Graph, excels at structured comparisons and depth of catalog coverage. It can pull product listings from billions of indexed items, generate comparison tables, and support tools such as virtual try-on for apparel. Gemini also includes agentic shopping actions, like automatically completing a purchase when a price drops or calling local stores to verify inventory. But most of these features are distributed across Google Search, Google Shopping, Gemini, and Chrome, rather than contained within a single unified flow.

Perplexity’s new experience centers on a single conversational thread that moves from discovery to decision to checkout when supported. Its personalization relies on persistent context and memory — style, prior searches, and lifestyle cues — and its integrations keep retailers as merchant of record, preserving loyalty programs, returns, and customer identity. The result is a more focused end-to-end shopping assistant that emphasizes clarity, relevance, and the continuity of the user’s own preferences.

Q: How is this different from Perplexity’s previous shopping experience?
A: Perplexity previously provided product information, but it didn’t support end-to-end discovery, memory, or integrated checkout. The new version acts as a continuous shopping companion that can refine style, intent, budget, and personal context across multiple questions.

Q: How does this compare to Google Shopping?
A: Google Shopping prioritizes advertiser inventory, SEO-driven pages, and product grids. Perplexity instead focuses on personal relevance, using conversational refinement rather than keyword matching or paid placement.

Q: How does this differ from ChatGPT’s shopping experience?
A: ChatGPT can offer suggestions but does not maintain multi-turn shopping context, style preferences, or integrated retail checkout. Perplexity’s approach is built around ongoing memory, product filtering tailored to lifestyle cues, and the ability to complete purchases within the same flow.

Q: Does the AI replace decision-making?
A: No — the system narrows choices using context, but shoppers remain fully in control.

Q: What do merchants gain from this?
A: Retailers get high-intent buyers, visibility into customer identity, and control over loyalty, returns, and post-purchase relationships through PayPal.

Online shopping has spent two decades focused on speed — faster searches, faster checkout, faster delivery — while ignoring the part of shopping that actually matters: choosing well. The rise of AI assistants marks a turning point where discovery becomes as important as the transaction itself.

Perplexity’s upgrade reflects this shift. Instead of treating shopping as a series of disconnected steps across tabs, filters, and product grids, it presents a single, coherent flow built around how people actually make decisions. The assistant remembers context, understands lifestyle cues, and narrows choices based on personal fit rather than advertiser priorities. That reduces cognitive load and gives shoppers more confidence in the products they choose.

This trend is bigger than Perplexity. As ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI systems evolve their own commerce integrations, they’re all moving toward a world where buying online starts with a conversation instead of a search bar. Interfaces that once prioritized exposure — showing every option — are giving way to AI systems that prioritize relevance. For consumers, that means less scrolling and more clarity. For merchants, it means meeting customers who are further along in the decision-making process and more likely to complete a purchase.

If the last era of ecommerce was about optimizing the transaction, the next era is about optimizing the decision. Perplexity’s new shopping experience shows what that could look like: more personal, more intuitive, and more aligned with how people actually shop.

Perplexity — “Shopping That Puts You First”
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/shopping-that-puts-you-first

Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.