ChatGPT is your personal shopper now

Lance Whitney / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET

The next time you go on a shopping spree online, you may want to enlist ChatGPT as your assistant. That is because the AI has been granted a new skill, namely one that can dig up the right products and let you buy the one you want.

Available to Plus, Pro, and Free users

Announced in an X post on Monday, this new shopping experience is an experiment from OpenAI designed to help people find, compare, and purchase products through its AI. The skill is now rolling out to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users, and will even be available for those without a ChatGPT account. With the rollout expected to finish in a few days, the AI will be able to show you better product results, product pricing and reviews, and direct links to buy.

Also: How to use ChatGPT: A beginner's guide to the most popular AI chatbot

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Any online retailer can appear in the results as long as they have not opted out of OpenAI's search crawler. The company promises that the results are selected independently and are not positioned as ads. This should mean that a variety of merchants will appear in the mix.

Also: I used ChatGPT to translate image text when Google's tool failed me - and things got weird

OpenAI is also exploring an easier way for retailers to submit their product feeds directly to ChatGPT. This would ensure that the results are more accurate and current than the ones picked up by the regular search crawler. Interested merchants can fill out a form at the product discovery page to be notified when submissions are open.

How it works

Now, how does this all work for the average consumer?

Let us say you need to buy a certain type of product, either for yourself or as a gift for someone else. Head to the ChatGPT page and sign in if you have an account. At the prompt, enter and submit a description of the type of product you want.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to recommend the best 14-inch Copilot+ PC laptops. In response, the AI displayed a variety of models that matched my request. A Highlights & Recommendations section listed several key features, such as best display, premium build, and long battery life, along with the top laptop in each category.

Also: 3 clever ChatGPT tricks that prove it's still the AI to beat

A carousel showed me photos, names, and basic information for each recommended PC. I could ask a question about a specific laptop. Selecting the name or photo of a computer then opened a sidebar with further details and links to reviews at different websites.

Here, I could also click a button to purchase the item from one or more retailers. Browsing through the various products, I found major retailers such as Best Buy, ASUS, Dell, Microsoft, and Walmart, but also smaller ones such as Swing Computers, TeciSoft, and FireOwls.

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This proved to be a good first attempt, but subsequent efforts were hit and miss, mainly because I did not always get the new shopping experience. Sometimes, ChatGPT simply listed a bunch of products as it normally would, with no links to investigate or purchase a specific item. Even rephrasing my request did not seem to make a difference.

I also could not find a way to control when the shopping experience appears. Sometimes, I may want to see the shopping and purchasing links; other times, I may simply need a regular list of products without links to buy them.

Stil an experiment

Inconsistencies might appear because the feature is still an experiment in the process of being rolled out. As such, it may have some initial kinks that need to be worked out. But as an experiment, it is certainly an interesting and potentially helpful way to save you time and effort when you are shopping online.

Also: 5 reasons I turn to ChatGPT every day - from faster research to replacing Siri

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