What to know
- Perplexity’s released a new AI-assisted shopping experience that can simplify online shopping; currently only available in the US.
- The new shopping experience provides easy-to-read visual product cards when you ask it shopping related queries.
- For Pro users, there’s also a new one-click ‘Buy with Pro’ option that provides a seamless checkout process.
- There’s also a visual search feature that lets you look for products with just an image.
- To scale Perplexity’s AI-assisted shopping, the company has also launched a Merchant Program that comes with several benefits for the merchants.
Perplexity, the AI chatbot with search engine capabilities, has unveiled a new online shopping experience on the platform. The California-based AI assistant now lets your research as well as purchase products right within the chat. As the winter sales come online, this feature is expected to save tons of time (and possibly money) as you can find the best deals online in a matter of seconds.
Video: Perplexity
For buyers
For starters, when you ask Perplexity to look for products online, you’ll get visual product cards for items that are objectively relevant to your query and aren’t just sponsored items. Perplexity has integrated Shopify for this purpose so you can view all those products that sell and ship to the US.
There’s also a Buy with Pro option that lets you buy select products within the website or the app itself. Of course, you’ll need to have your shipping and billing information saved. But once that’s taken care of, you can simply click on Buy with Pro to get the item.
Perplexity also provides free shipping on all products bought on the platform. For items without the ‘Buy with Pro’ option, you’ll be redirected to the merchant’s website.
Lastly, there’s also a visual search tool called Snap to Shop that lets you look for products with just an image. This feature is sure to come in handy when you don’t know what the product is called or how to describe it.
For merchants
Perplexity has also introduced a Merchant Program to make it easy for merchants to share product specs with them. To encourage this, Perplexity is offering several benefits for merchants such as a higher likelihood of having their products be ‘recommended products’, getting payment integrations (for the one-click Buy with Pro checkout), free API access, and custom dashboard.
Perplexity’s new shopping experience is only available in US for now. For the rest of the world, there’s still some hope as Perplexity has mentioned that it will be “expanding the Perplexity shopping experience to new markets after [the] US launch.”
If Perplexity can scale this new AI-assisted shopping experience and bring it to more markets, this could bring about a revolution in online shopping. The fact that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested in Perplexity, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has praised the AI chatbot speaks volumes of the company’s growing popularity and trust.
