There were one billion searches on ChatGPT last week. And now, the platform is launching updates to its shopping experience, to create “conversational shopping”, parent company OpenAI announced today. These shopping improvements are rolling out on 28 April to Plus, Pro, Free and logged-out users in every market where ChatGPT is available.
From now on, when ChatGPT users search for fashion, beauty, home goods or electronics, the platform will provide personalised recommendations, visual product details, pricing comparisons across retailers, and reviews, with direct links to buy from within the ChatGPT interface from merchant websites that stock the item. Unlike traditional search engines and social media, product results will be chosen by the artificial intelligence and are not ads, which could be a compelling selling point for users who are increasingly sceptical about online recommendations.
“We’re looking to bring a new kind of conversational shopping experience into ChatGPT,” says Matt Weaver, head of solutions engineering for the EMEA region at OpenAI. “For the last six months, search has been one of the most popular features on [the platform]. Shopping online can involve many open tabs and a long research journey, and we’re looking to simplify that by bringing it to one place.”
There are plans to expand the features to other categories once OpenAI has taken learnings from the initial launch.
Despite concerns over AI’s energy usage, adoption of ChatGPT’s search function has spiked over the last six months. However, until now, it has not been focused on shopping. The Information reported last week that senior Google executive Sissie Hsiao said ChatGPT had drawn away some search queries, but primarily “homework and math”, which aren’t crucial to ad revenue. According to the same report, Hsiao also said “so far [Google] has not seen cannibalisation of commercial queries or [queries with] commercial intent” from ChatGPT.
While ChatGPT’s new shopping features aren’t reinventing the wheel, they do condense the various stages of the typical online purchase journey into one, which could lure shoppers away from traditional search engines. As demonstrated to Vogue Business in a briefing, if you ask ChatGPT to recommend a red T-shirt for under £30 to go with your new red sneakers, for example, it will suggest options via image tiles, as well as various retailers to buy the item from on a side bar. From there, you can ask all manner of research questions in the same window, like what are the returns policies of the various stockists, say, or how it fits, based on reviews.
Increasingly, the “research phase” of the purchase journey is a crucial step for consumers, according to a study Vogue Business and youth culture agency Archrival conducted last year. It found that 70 per cent of Gen Zs and 69 per cent of millennials only trust a brand after carrying out their own research, rather than buying impulsively. Where previously perhaps they’d consult search engines or social media to see product reviews, OpenAI is seeking to streamline the process.
The platform will also memorise preferences based on past conversations, to personalise the shopping experience further in future. (Users can update or erase this data in settings, the platform adds.) This feature will not initially be available in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein, where privacy laws are stricter.
“To find the retailers and products to suggest, ChatGPT pulls the information from third-party providers and publicly available information,” Weaver says. But it is looking to link directly with merchants in future. “We’re exploring an easy way for retailers to provide their product feeds directly to ChatGPT helping ensure accurate, up-to-date listings. We’re launching an interest form on our website, and we’ll notify merchants when submissions open.”
It’s still early days for ChatGPT commerce, the company says, “and we’ll continue to bring merchants along our journey as we quickly learn and iterate”.
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