PayPal and Venmo put in-chat checkout in front of 170 million US users in November 2025, and they didn't do it with ChatGPT. They did it with Perplexity. That single deal tells you something most brands still haven't absorbed: Perplexity isn't a side character in AI shopping. It's running its own commerce stack, with its own merchant program, its own checkout flow and its own rules for who gets recommended.
If your AI-shopping playbook is just "submit a feed to ChatGPT and call it done," you're leaving a growing surface uncovered. Perplexity users skew toward research-heavy purchases, they trust the citations they see, and the platform is actively courting merchants with a pitch OpenAI can't currently match: zero transaction fees. Here's how the whole thing actually works, and what to do about it.
What Perplexity Shopping actually is
"Perplexity Shopping" isn't a single button. It's a set of features that Perplexity has shipped in stages since 2025, and they stack on top of each other:
- Shop like a Pro, Perplexity's shopping mode that returns three to five curated product cards for a query, each with an image, price, merchant name and a short attribute summary written by the model itself.
- Buy with Pro, the checkout layer. Once a shopper is on a Perplexity Pro plan ($20 a month or $200 a year, according to Perplexity's own pricing page), tapping a product card can complete the purchase inside the chat window using the payment card on file, with free shipping included.
- The Perplexity Merchant Program, a free program retailers apply to that gets their catalog into the shopping index and, if they qualify, into the Buy with Pro checkout flow.
- Comet, Perplexity's own browser, which layers an agentic shopping assistant on top of any site you visit, not just Perplexity.com.
Treat these as four separate things you can show up in, not one feature you either have or don't. A brand can be well cited in Shop like a Pro answers with zero involvement in the merchant program, and a merchant can be in the program without ever appearing in a specific user's query if the product data is thin.
How product cards get chosen
Unlike a traditional shopping engine that indexes a fixed catalog, Perplexity is answering a live question. When someone asks it to compare running shoes or find a mattress under $800, the model pulls from real-time web sources, whatever it can crawl or has ingested from merchant feeds, and synthesizes an answer with visible citations attached to each claim.
That has two consequences worth sitting with. First, the open web still matters here in a way it's already stopped mattering for some ChatGPT shopping queries. Reviews, comparison articles, spec sheets and forum threads all feed into what Perplexity says about a product, which means the same content strategy that gets you cited in a regular Perplexity answer (clear structure, specific numbers, one claim per sentence) carries over directly to shopping queries. Second, merchant feed data still gives you an edge on the mechanical stuff: exact pricing, real-time availability, and the actual "buy" action, none of which the model can reliably pull off a product page it's just crawling.
I think the practical read is that Perplexity rewards brands twice over: once for having a submitted, accurate product feed, and again for having genuinely useful third-party content about the product living on the open web. Miss either one and you're only getting half the visibility you could have.
Buy with Pro and the merchant program
The merchant program is where Perplexity is making its actual pitch to retailers, and the pitch is aggressive. Applying is free, there's no listing fee, and unlike the Agentic Commerce Protocol transaction structure that OpenAI built with Stripe for ChatGPT checkout, multiple industry reports describe Perplexity charging merchants nothing on completed sales. Treat that fee comparison as directionally accurate rather than a locked-in number since neither company publishes a public fee schedule, but the gap in cost model is real enough that it's shaping where merchants prioritize their integration work.
Early participating merchants include names like Abercrombie & Fitch, Ashley Furniture, Fabletics, Adorama and NewEgg, with Perplexity adding more retailers as the program scales. Once accepted, merchants get a few concrete things: their products can carry a "recommended product" callout, they can plug into the one-click Buy with Pro checkout, they get free API access to build their own Perplexity-powered search on their site, and they get a dashboard showing shopping and search trends for their own catalog.
The application itself runs through Perplexity's shopping help center and asks for the basics: business name, contact, website, product vertical and rough order volume. From there it's a manual review, and the product feed you submit needs to hold up. Practically, that means the same discipline as any shopping feed: a verified domain, a live and current product feed (Perplexity accepts the same Google Shopping product data spec most merchants already maintain for Google Merchant Center), and consistent identifiers like GTINs so the model can match your listing to the right query with confidence.
Comet: agentic shopping outside the chat window
Comet is Perplexity's own browser, and it puts a shopping assistant into every tab, not just perplexity.ai. Ask it to find a specific pair of boots under a price cap and it will search review sites, listicles and retailer pages, compare the options, and in some cases attempt to carry the purchase through to checkout on its own.
Worth being honest about where this stands today: independent testing has shown Comet handling research and comparison steps well, then hitting friction on the actual checkout page for sites it hasn't been trained against. That's a real limitation, and it's also exactly why a clean, standards-compliant checkout flow (clear form fields, no unusual CAPTCHA gates, a straightforward cart) matters more now, not less. An agent that can browse your site but can't finish a purchase on it is a lost sale you'll never see in your analytics as an abandoned cart, because it never showed up as a session in the first place.
How this compares to ChatGPT Shopping and Instant Checkout
Perplexity and OpenAI are building toward the same destination, chat-native purchasing, but the routes differ enough that a brand optimizing for one won't automatically show up well in the other. If you haven't already, it's worth reading how ChatGPT Shopping works and what ChatGPT Instant Checkout actually requires, since several of the mechanics (feed formats, the checkout protocol) are close enough to Perplexity's approach that the work overlaps.
| What matters | Perplexity Shopping | ChatGPT Shopping / Instant Checkout |
|---|---|---|
| Checkout fee to merchants | Reported as free, no published transaction fee | Runs through the Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe, which several merchants have described as carrying a transaction fee |
| Checkout requirement for shoppers | Requires a Perplexity Pro subscription ($20/month) | Available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Free users depending on the merchant |
| Primary ranking input | Real-time web synthesis plus merchant feed data, citations shown | Merchant feed completeness and freshness, plus fan-out queries against the open web |
| Agent-driven purchasing | Comet browser attempts autonomous checkout across any site | No general-purpose shopping browser; checkout is confined to Instant Checkout partners |
| Retail partnership depth | PayPal/Venmo, Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics, Adorama, NewEgg and more | Etsy, Shopify's merchant base, Walmart |
Neither platform has a monopoly on any one retailer. Some brands, particularly ones already on Shopify, will end up feeding both ecosystems from the same underlying product data. The bigger strategic question isn't which platform to pick, it's whether your feed and your on-site content are good enough to be legible to either one.
The practical checklist to get recommended
This is the part that actually moves the needle, and none of it requires waiting on a partnership announcement.
- Apply to the merchant program early. Even if Buy with Pro checkout isn't a priority yet, being an approved merchant gets your feed into Perplexity's index and unlocks the "recommended product" treatment on cards.
- Reuse your Google Shopping feed. Perplexity accepts the same product data spec most merchants already maintain for Google Merchant Center, submitted as CSV or XML. There's no separate format to build from scratch.
- Get GTINs and pricing exactly right. Perplexity is answering live questions with live prices. A stale price or a missing identifier is the fastest way to get skipped in favor of a competitor whose feed is clean.
- Keep publishing genuinely useful comparison content. Because Perplexity synthesizes answers from the open web with visible citations, the specs pages, buying guides and honest pros-and-cons content that already help you in regular Perplexity answers carry directly into shopping queries.
- Audit your checkout flow for agent-friendliness. If Comet or a future Perplexity agent can browse your product page but can't get through your cart, fix the friction: simplify form fields, avoid checkout gates that assume a human is clicking, and make sure your cart works without JavaScript quirks that trip up automated browsing.
- Track whether you're actually showing up. Don't guess. Run the queries your customers would actually type and see whether your products appear, and whether competitors are winning the slot instead. Tools built for this, including AI Peekaboo, turn that from occasional manual spot-checking into something you can monitor over time.
Common mistakes brands make with Perplexity Shopping
A few patterns keep showing up when brands try to bolt Perplexity onto an existing AI-shopping strategy without adjusting for how it actually works.
The first is submitting a feed and assuming the job is done. A merchant-program approval gets your catalog into the index, but Perplexity is still generating an answer in real time for every query. If your product pages, spec sheets and third-party reviews are thin or outdated, the model has less to synthesize from and will often lean on a competitor's page instead, even if your feed data is technically correct.
The second is ignoring price and availability accuracy because "it's just a feed sync." Because Perplexity shows live prices inside the answer and lets Pro subscribers check out immediately, a feed that's a day stale on price or stock creates a bad first purchase experience, and that shows up in the merchant dashboard as returns or cancellations, not just as a ranking problem.
The third is treating Comet as a future problem. Agentic browsing is already live, already shopping on real sites, and already hitting checkout friction that costs brands sales they'll never see logged as an abandoned cart. Testing your own checkout flow with an agent, not just with a human on a laptop, is a five-minute exercise that most ecommerce teams still haven't run.
FAQ: Perplexity Shopping for brands
Do I need to be in the merchant program to be recommended at all? No. Perplexity can and does cite products it finds through open-web content and general crawling, even without a submitted feed. The merchant program improves your odds and unlocks checkout, but it isn't the only door in.
Does my customer need Perplexity Pro to buy from me? To complete a purchase through Buy with Pro, yes, the shopper needs an active Perplexity Pro subscription. Free-tier users can still see and click through product cards to your site.
Is there a cost to join the merchant program? Based on Perplexity's own program description, no. There's no listing fee and no required ad spend to be considered.
Should I prioritize Perplexity over ChatGPT Shopping? Not either/or. Most merchants can reuse the same feed infrastructure for both. Prioritize whichever platform your actual customers are already using to research purchases, and track it rather than assume.
Where this is heading
Perplexity is moving fast on shopping specifically because it doesn't carry the search-ads business model that makes commerce a more complicated bet for Google, and it doesn't have OpenAI's existing enterprise relationships to lean on instead. Commerce is one of the clearest ways for Perplexity to make money, so expect the merchant program, the fee structure and Comet's checkout reliability to keep changing over the next few quarters.
If you want a clear read on whether your brand is actually showing up when people ask Perplexity, ChatGPT or Google's AI features what to buy, that's what AI Peekaboo is built to show you. Email us at filipe@aipeekaboo.com or book 30 minutes and we'll walk through your current visibility together.
