Perplexity Enters AI Shopping With a Free Agent and Zero Fees
Two months after ChatGPT launched instant checkout, a second AI shopping platform goes live. This one charges merchants nothing.
On September 29, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT with a 4% merchant fee (after a 30-day free trial) and Stripe handling payments.
Now Perplexity has launched its own AI shopping agent with over 5,000 merchants, PayPal handling payments, and zero transaction fees. No 4% cut. No platform tax.
Two months. Two AI shopping platforms. Two very different business models.
How Perplexity Shopping works
Users ask Perplexity for product recommendations in natural language. The AI searches across its merchant catalog, presents options with pricing and reviews, and lets users buy without leaving the conversation. PayPal handles payment processing and buyer protection.
The key differences from ChatGPT:
| ChatGPT | Perplexity | |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant fee | 4% per transaction | None |
| Payments | Stripe | PayPal, Venmo |
| Approach | Conversational checkout | Search-first, research-focused |
| Scale | Etsy live, 1M+ Shopify merchants coming | 5,000+ merchants |
| User cost | Free | Free |
Perplexity’s pitch to merchants is simple: your products get discovered, users buy through PayPal, and you pay nothing. The company declined to say how it plans to monetize the service.
The Perplexity Merchant Program
This is the part merchants should pay attention to.
Perplexity runs a Merchant Program that works like Google Merchant Center: businesses share their product catalog, and Perplexity uses it to deliver relevant results.
What you get by joining:
- Higher placement in product recommendations
- One-click checkout integration through “Buy with Pro”
- Free API access to build Perplexity-powered search on your own site
- A custom dashboard with search and shopping trend insights
What Perplexity needs from your product data:
- Schema.org markup (Product, Offer, Review, AggregateRating)
- GTINs (UPC/EAN) for product matching and deduplication
- Real-time price and stock through updated feeds
If you’re on Shopify, product information is automatically shared with Perplexity’s product cards. But joining the Merchant Program gives you visibility, analytics, and priority that passive integration doesn’t.
The program is free to join. It currently targets US merchants.
What this means for the merchant
Two months ago, AI shopping was one platform with one checkout flow. Now it’s two platforms with two different payment providers and two different fee structures.
This is happening fast. And the pattern is clear: every new AI shopping surface rewards the same thing. Structured, complete product data. The specifics:
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Join the Perplexity Merchant Program. It’s free, it takes less than five minutes, and it gets you analytics on how your products appear in AI search. If you’re on Shopify, your data is already flowing, but the program gives you priority placement.
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Check your Schema.org markup. Perplexity explicitly requires Product, Offer, Review, and AggregateRating schema. ChatGPT uses similar signals. If your product pages don’t have structured data, you’re invisible to both.
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Add GTINs to every product. Both Perplexity and ChatGPT use GTINs for product matching. Without them, your products are harder to identify, deduplicate, and surface.
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Keep your feeds real-time. Stale prices and out-of-stock items hurt you on every platform. If you’re on Shopify, make sure your product data is accurate and complete.
You can also check how your Shopify products appear to AI agents right now .
The real takeaway
The race just got its second entrant, and this one is free.
Update: More have since followed — Google and Microsoft both launched checkout protocols in January 2026.
The merchants who show up on all of them won’t be the ones picking the right platform. They’ll be the ones with complete, structured product data that any AI agent can read.
Update: For a full map of every AI shopping surface live today, see who else is building AI shopping.
Whether there are two AI shopping platforms or twenty, the merchant’s job is the same: be discoverable.
Sources
- Shop like a Pro | Perplexity
- Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol | OpenAI
- Perplexity AI Launches Free Shopping Agent to Challenge OpenAI | TechBuzz
- PayPal and Perplexity Launch Instant Buy Ahead of Black Friday | PayPal Newsroom
- Meet the Perplexity Merchant Program | WebFX
- How To Get Your Business in Perplexity’s Merchant Program | Website Builder Expert