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Holiday shopping season is upon us, and if you’re stressing about finding gifts for your loved ones, you aren’t alone. In a bid to address that feeling, and to bolster their platform’s standing as a true all-in-one personal assistant, OpenAI has announced new shopping features in ChatGPT.
In an official blog post, OpenAI introduced what it calls “shopping research,” which it describes as “a new experience in ChatGPT that does the research for you to help you find the right products.” In this experience, the company wrote, users will be able to find products by prompting ChatGPT with questions like “help me find a powerful new laptop suitable for gaming under $1000 with a screen that’s over 15 inches” or “I need a gift for my four year old niece who loves art.”
Once you’ve sent a shopping-related prompt to ChatGPT, or chosen shopping research as an option from ChatGPT’s dropdown menu, the platform should ask you some clarifying questions to get a better sense of the exact product you’re looking for. With this additional context, ChatGPT initiates a search across the internet to develop a comprehensive buyers guide. This search can take multiple minutes at a time.
This process is quite similar to deep research, a feature in which ChatGPT thinks hard about how to solve a problem, develops a plan, and then works for extended periods of time. Deep research is mostly used for information and data gathering, but the new shopping mode shows how such features can be pivoted in more commercial directions.
OpenAI says that shopping research utilizes a version of GPT-5 mini that has been customized specifically to excel at shopping tasks. “We trained it to read trusted sites, cite reliable sources, and synthesize information across many sources to produce high-quality product research,” the company wrote.
As ChatGPT searches on your behalf, it may ask additional questions. After I prompted the platform to help me find a toy for my nine-year-old nephew who loves construction, it asked me about my budget, what kinds of construction my nephew is into (trucks? architecture?) and the level of complexity that the toy should have. While searching, the platform asked me to preview a few of the products it had identified, and select a “more like this” option for the ones that most resemble my desired product.
Once ChatGPT was done searching, it delivered a report that reminded me of a New York Times Wirecutter article. Like Wirecutter, the report included an overall top pick (in this case a $50 magnetic tile building set), a scrollable comparison table of similar options, and short blurbs about other products with specific labels like “best mechanical STEM project under $50.”
Of course, AI models still get it wrong sometimes, and OpenAI is quick to caution that “shopping research might make mistakes about product details like price and availability, and we encourage you to visit the merchant site for the most accurate details.”
The company wrote that “hundreds of millions of people” already use ChatGPT to find new products, but the shopping research experience will provide a more dedicated framework when the platform is asked these kinds of questions. OpenAI also said that shopping research “performs especially well in detail-heavy categories like electronics, beauty, home and garden, kitchen and appliances, and sports and outdoor.”
In the future, OpenAI says users will be able to purchase products directly through ChatGPT. One company that’s already signed up for this “instant checkout” feature is Walmart, which in October announced a deal with OpenAI to allow users to shop the iconic retailer directly in ChatGPT. And Target just announced its own ChatGPT-specific app, which can be accessed on the platform by tagging @target in the prompt.
OpenAI says the shopping features are available for all ChatGPT users with an account, so free users can get in on the gift planning, too. If you’re an entrepreneur eager to get your products featured on ChatGPT, make sure that AI agents can access your website by following the company’s allowlisting guidelines.
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Ben Sherry
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