New Delhi: Perplexity has recently added a conversational shopping experience to its service, rolling out the latest feature free to all users in the US. The tool pairs the company’s AI assistant with the product discovery and with an integrated checkout flow powered by PayPal. The availability of this tool for India has not yet been announced by Perplexity. This latest feature comes on the heels of OpenAI and Google recently announcing the rollout of similar shopping assistant tools in their respective AI services.
The shopping experience lets the users search and refine product queries in a back-and-forth conversation rather than using traditional search lists and long product grids. Perplexity stated that the assistant keeps the shopping context from one question to the following and surfaces product cards that include specifications and reviews. Perplexity has integrated PayPal to enable checkout inside the shopping flow. According to the company, retailers remain the merchant of record, the seller retains visibility into the customer, handles returns and loyalty and keeps the post-purchase relationship. Perplexity also stated that the approach is intended to reduce cart abandonment by shortening the time between decision and payment.
Perplexity also describes the system as remembering prior searches and user patterns to prioritise results that match shopper preferences. The company frames the assistant as maintaining conversational context, so follow-up requests use the same criteria. Perplexity’s shopping feature is available now on desktop and the web for US users. Perplexity stated that the iOS and Android versions of the shopping experience in the US will arrive in the coming weeks.
