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Two days ago, we covered OpenAI's Shopping Research and called it "a feature to watch, not a fire to fight." It's a research tool—a better way to think about buying, but not a place to actually buy.
Perplexity evidently decided that thinking is overrated. Their new shopping experience, launching free to US users, is aggressively transaction-focused.
While OpenAI generates thoughtful buyer's guides, Perplexity surfaces product cards and then lets you complete the purchase right there via PayPal. No tab-switching, no cart abandonment, no friction between "I want this" and "I bought this."
Through a direct Shopify integration, millions of US merchants are already discoverable whether they opted in or not. Larger retailers can join the free Merchant Program to feed richer product data and get better placement, but the key move here isn't the product catalog—it's what happens at checkout.
This is the "anti-Amazon" strategy, and retailers will love it.
In Perplexity's model, the retailer remains the "Merchant of Record." This sounds like boring legal jargon, but it's actually the whole ballgame.
When someone buys your product through Perplexity, you still get the customer data, you handle fulfillment, and you own the post-purchase relationship—loyalty programs, returns, email marketing, all of it. You aren't just a supplier to a platform. You're the seller. Perplexity is just the interface.
Compare that to OpenAI, which treats retailers mainly as data sources and keeps your ChatGPT conversation history private from merchants. Or Amazon and Google, which hold customer relationships hostage. Perplexity is betting that if they treat merchants as partners—offering free API access, structured data ingestion, and full transaction visibility—brands will happily feed them what they need to build a shopping engine that rivals the giants.
However, some of the trade-offs are still there.
If Perplexity (and eventually OpenAI) succeeds, your beautiful e-commerce site becomes backend infrastructure. Users don't see your landing page, your carefully crafted "About Us" story, or your expertly curated cross-sells. They see a standardized product card generated by an LLM. You get higher conversion rates via one-click checkout in exchange for a completely diluted brand experience.
So which future wins?
OpenAI is betting people want a trusted advisor for complex decisions. Perplexity is betting they want a vending machine that knows their size and style preferences. One built a consultant. The other built a clerk.
Neither has cracked this yet. Perplexity's instant buy only works where PayPal works. OpenAI's accuracy still sits at 64%, and Amazon blocks them entirely. But as things stand today, AI shopping won't be one thing; instead, it will be layered. Research tools for considered purchases, transaction engines for impulse decisions, and eventually autonomous agents that just handle it while you're asleep.
The advice remains the same: make sure your product data is semantically rich and structured for conversational discovery. Whether the winning model is ChatGPT's buyer's guides or Perplexity's much more merchant-friendly model, both need to understand what your product does and solves, not just what it's called and what are its physical properties.
And if you're on Shopify, you might want to check your analytics. You might already be selling on Perplexity—you just don't know it yet.
— Torsten & Peter
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