AI service Perplexity was this week updated with a new personalized shopping experience that's designed to help users rediscover the joy of shopping.
Perplexity offers conversational search that incorporates the user's history and wants when looking for item suggestions. The Perplexity team suggests that the AI is able to understand each shopper's unique needs better than a search algorithm that's optimized for advertiser dollars.
The search engine is able to remember past searches, learning each user's design preferences. Results are displayed in product cards rather than scrollable grids, with the cards featuring spec lists and reviews. Perplexity supports checking out with PayPal directly from the Perplexity interface, though this is currently limited to supported merchants like Fabletics, Adorama, and NewEgg.
OpenAI this week added an AI shopping research feature to ChatGPT, so both ChatGPT and Perplexity now offer similar functionality.
Perplexity's new shopping experience is available for free to all U.S. Perplexity users on the desktop and web, and it will be expanding to iOS in the coming weeks.
PayPal is currently offering a cash back reward. Customers who complete their first purchase using PayPal within Perplexity can receive 50 percent back, up to $50.
