Perplexity Takes Lead in AI Shopping

If AI chat is the future of shopping, Perplexity just took the lead. And because it already integrates with Amazon, it has an infinite supply of products. It is also better than Amazon’s own Rufus AI assistant.

On Monday, the AI-powered search engine Perplexity introduced a shopping feature for its paid users in the U.S., combining catalogs of large retailers like Amazon and Best Buy and platforms like Shopify with a one-click checkout. It allows users to ask questions like “Find the best running shoes for a sub-3-hour marathon,” get an answer based on various sources and a list of products with Buy with Pro buttons that enable purchases with billing details saved in the Perplexity account. If Buy with Pro isn’t available, the platform redirects users to the retailer’s website to checkout or offers Shopify’s Shop Pay.

Mike Mallazzo wrote, “If you search Sephora or Amazon for Meghan Markle’s favorite lipstick, you get a hodgepodge of seemingly random results. Yet, over the past 5+ years, every major women’s and lifestyle magazine has published the correct answer: Charlotte Tilbury Matte Revolution in Very Victoria.” The only place today that can answer that and allow to buy is Perplexity.

It is similar to Amazon’s Rufus assistant but subjectively provides better answers and has checkout buttons in the results. It is also not limited to products on Amazon. However, crucially, having products and integration with Amazon — likely a result of Jeff Bezos’s investment in Perplexity’s Series B round — solves the marketplace supply challenge all other AI assistants except Perplexity and Rufus will struggle to solve.

Is also similar to Google’s shopping AI experiments. Perplexity’s shopping feature is essentially a mix of Google Shopping (an index of all shopping websites), Buy on Google (a checkout option for Google Shopping, which the company killed in 2023), and AI. Google has rolled out numerous shopping AI features this year but is missing the checkout feature like the killed Buy on Google or Perplexity’s Buy with Pro.

Shopify’s Shop app has Shop AI, a take on the same problem. Introduced over a year ago, it helps find products sold on Shopify-hosted websites. However, it lacks the context of reviews and the wider web, so its results are often barely passable.

Amazon has thousands of options for running shoes; the promise of AI shopping is the best five pairs based on trends, personalization, and intelligence. The promise is tainted by hallucinations today, but it is leading somewhere.

Of course, in the future, AI shopping might still be just as rare as “Hey Alexa, buy me running shoes.” Voice shopping, virtual reality, social commerce, and live video shopping are in the online shopping graveyard as ideas that never matched their promise in the West (some are massive in other parts of the world). They all exist in some form — TikTok Shop, for example, is leading the social commerce revival that Facebook and Instagram failed to deliver — but pale in comparison to the search-bar shopping volume that dominates e-commerce.

AI’s Choice, the new Buy Box, is the transformational change. The post-SEO world of e-commerce, which hides the complexity of thousands of options and beautifully designed product landing pages, is different. Searching for “running shoes” versus asking “Find the best running shoes for a sub-3-hour marathon” is that difference.