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.
Photo: Courtesy of OpenAI
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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