Shopping Comes to Perplexity AI: What “Shopping That Puts You First” Really Means
On November 25, 2025, Perplexity AI announced a new conversational shopping experience that turns its assistant into something closer to a personal shopper than a traditional search bar. The feature, described in their post “Shopping That Puts You First”, is rolling out for free to Perplexity users in the US, starting on web and desktop apps, with iOS and Android “in the coming weeks”.
If ChatGPT’s shopping tools brought AI into product discovery, Perplexity’s move is the next step: shopping fully embedded inside an AI search workflow, from “what should I buy?” to “I’ve checked out, what else do I need?”
In this article, I’ll break down:
What Perplexity’s new shopping experience actually does
Why their PayPal partnership matters for merchants
How this could change e-commerce, SEO, and the way we build online stores
From search results to a shopping conversation
Perplexity’s starting point is a simple observation: online shopping is great at transactions but bad at discovery. You can find a specific product, but not necessarily the right product for your context, your lifestyle, or your taste.
Most innovation in e-commerce has focused on:
Faster checkout flows
Better recommendation carousels
More aggressive retargeting
But the fun part of shopping — discovering something that feels like it was chosen for you — has mostly been left to affiliate blogs and “top 10” listicles, often optimized more for commissions than user fit.
Perplexity’s shopping pitch is:
Let the AI shop with you, not instead of you.
It doesn’t try to replace the shopper. Instead, it:
Understands your intent
Learns your preferences over time
Keeps context across follow-up questions
Then helps you move from consideration to checkout in a single flow
How Perplexity’s shopping experience works
1. Conversational discovery (that actually remembers context)
Instead of typing “winter jacket men” and scrolling through infinite grids, you can ask more natural questions like:
“What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take a ferry to work?”
Perplexity uses that full context — climate, commute, style, constraints — to return curated options. If you follow up with “What about boots?” it keeps the same context instead of resetting the search.
This is search as an ongoing conversation, not a series of disconnected queries.
2. A shopping assistant that learns your taste
Perplexity also remembers your past searches and patterns:
If you’ve been browsing mid-century modern home decor, it can bias future suggestions towards that aesthetic.
If you’ve been researching minimalist running shoes and later ask for a gym bag, it can prioritize minimalist, performance-oriented brands and styles.
That’s a very different model from “customers who bought X also bought Y”, and closer to a unified taste graph built around one person.
3. No more digging through endless product grids
Perplexity explicitly criticizes the classic “endless scroll” product grid. Instead, it shows focused product cards with:
The key attributes relevant to your specific query
Specs and details you actually need to decide
Reviews and supporting info directly inline with the conversation
It’s essentially building a decision interface around your query, instead of throwing you onto a generic category page.
4. Integrated checkout with PayPal — without hijacking the merchant
This is where things get really interesting for e-commerce and web dev.
Perplexity has partnered with PayPal so shoppers can complete checkout without leaving the Perplexity experience. You can:
Discover products through the conversation
Add items to cart
Check out directly within Perplexity using merchants that already rely on PayPal
All in one interface, without hopping between tabs.
Crucially, in this flow:
The merchant remains the merchant of record
The retailer still knows who the customer is
They can process returns, manage support, and build loyalty programs as usual (Perplexity AI)
So Perplexity is not trying to become a marketplace that “owns” the customer. It’s more like:
An intelligent front-end for discovery and decision, plugged into existing merchant infrastructure.
Better for shoppers and better for merchants?
Perplexity’s thesis is that everyone wins:
For shoppers
Less time wasted on bad “best-of” lists
Products matched to actual context and taste
Seamless jump from “idea” to “ordered”
No need to juggle multiple tabs, blogs, and cart pages
For merchants
They still control the customer relationship
They get more qualified intent – users entering checkout after a guided, personalized journey
Lower cart abandonment because decision and checkout happen in one flow
If this works as promised, merchants could see higher conversion from smaller but better-qualified traffic coming in through AI assistants like Perplexity.
How this changes the game for e-commerce & SEO
From a web-development and strategy perspective (and this is where abZ Global lives), Perplexity’s launch is another signal of a big shift:
The “search → blog → affiliate link → product page” funnel is slowly being replaced by “AI → conversation → curated product card → checkout.”
Some implications:
Traditional SEO isn’t enough
Ranking top 3 for “best X for Y” still matters, but AI assistants might summarize or partially replace these pages. Your brand needs to be present in AI training data, product feeds, and structured information.Affiliate-style content might lose power
When an AI assistant is giving unbiased, context-aware recommendations, the value of low-effort affiliate listicles drops. Brands that rely heavily on this channel might feel pressure.AIO (AI Optimization) becomes real
It’s no longer just “optimize for Google.”
Now you need to think: How will my products and brand be represented inside AI shopping flows like Perplexity, ChatGPT, etc.?Checkout becomes modular
Perplexity + PayPal is a good example of how checkout can be embedded anywhere. Your store might need to prioritize robust payment infrastructure and APIs over custom checkout UIs.
What this means if you run a Shopify, Squarespace, or custom store
If you’re a merchant, marketer, or dev building online stores, here’s how to think about this:
1. Make your product data “AI friendly”
Clean, rich product descriptions
Clear specs and attributes
Structured data / schema markup
Honest, detailed imagery and reviews
The better your data, the easier it is for AI assistants to accurately describe and recommend your products.
2. Invest in strong foundations, not hacks
Perplexity is not scraping your hero banner; it’s using:
Product feeds
APIs
Structured information
Third-party data sources
If your store is built on Shopify, Squarespace, Webflow, or a custom stack, make sure:
Your product catalog is consistent and well-organized
Your integrations with payment providers like PayPal are solid
You’re not relying on fragile hacks or UI-only content that AI can’t “read” properly
3. Think beyond “traffic”
In an AI-shopping world, raw traffic might matter less than:
Being selected as a recommendation
Converting once a user arrives
Building loyalty after the first purchase
That means you’ll want:
Great post-purchase experiences
Easy returns and support
Strong email flows and retention strategies
…because once Perplexity sends someone your way, you want to keep them.
Perplexity vs the rest of the AI shopping landscape
Perplexity’s approach to shopping sits at an interesting intersection:
Not an all-in-one marketplace (like Amazon)
Not just affiliate recommendations (like content-driven commerce)
Not just a search engine with product links
Instead, it’s leaning fully into:
Conversation as the primary UI
Personalization via memory and context
Checkout embedded directly in the assistant
Other players (OpenAI, Google, etc.) are building their own versions of AI shopping flows, but Perplexity is clearly positioning itself as a lightweight, research-first assistant that can now also close the loop with purchases.
Final thoughts: the assistant is becoming the store
The launch of Perplexity’s shopping experience is another strong sign that:
The AI assistant is becoming the new “homepage” of the internet.
Instead of:
Google → blog → comparison → store → checkout
We’re drifting toward:
Assistant → conversation → curated suggestions → checkout → follow-up conversation
For users, this can mean less friction and better matches.
For merchants, it means fewer but more valuable touchpoints.
For developers and agencies like abZ Global, it means helping clients:
Build solid, API-ready stores
Structure their data for AI assistants
Design experiences that still feel on-brand when discovery and checkout may start elsewhere
Perplexity’s “Shopping That Puts You First” is only available in the US at launch, but the direction is clear: AI-native shopping experiences are no longer a demo — they’re shipping, today. (Perplexity AI)
If you’d like, next step I can:
Craft a short meta description + SEO title for this post
Or design a thumbnail concept (landscape, blog-ready) that visually shows “AI assistant + shopping + PayPal/merchant connection”.