In a significant move poised to reshape the digital marketplace, OpenAI has launched ‘Shopping Research,’ a new feature within ChatGPT designed to transform the AI chatbot into a sophisticated personal product advisor. The tool, which began rolling out globally to all logged-in users on both free and paid plans, aims to simplify the often-fragmented online shopping process by turning product discovery into a natural, interactive conversation. Timed just ahead of the peak holiday shopping season, OpenAI is encouraging widespread adoption by offering "nearly unlimited usage" across all plans for a limited period.[1][2][3][4][5] This initiative marks OpenAI’s most direct challenge yet to the dominance of e-commerce giants like Amazon and search-led shopping platforms like Google Shopping, signaling a strategic ambition to build a comprehensive commerce ecosystem within its conversational AI interface.[6][7][8]

The core of the new feature is its departure from traditional keyword-based searching. Instead of users sifting through countless tabs and sponsored posts, they can now describe their needs in natural language, such as asking for "a quiet cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment" or "a gift for a four-year-old niece who loves art."[3][4] ChatGPT’s Shopping Research tool then initiates a dialogue, asking clarifying questions about budget, desired features, and personal preferences to narrow the search.[9][10][11][12] Within minutes, it conducts in-depth research across the internet, analyzing product pages, specifications, and trusted reviews from high-quality sources to generate a personalized buyer's guide.[1][10][13] This guide presents top recommendations, compares their key differences, and outlines potential trade-offs, effectively acting as an expert personal shopper.[1][13][12] The process is interactive, allowing users to provide real-time feedback by marking suggestions as "Not interested" or requesting "More like this" to dynamically refine the results.[1][14]

Powering this advanced capability is a specialized version of GPT-5 mini, a model reinforced specifically for shopping-related tasks.[15][9][16][11] OpenAI states this variant was trained to read high-quality sites, cite sources, and synthesize product information with greater accuracy.[15][16][13] Internal evaluations demonstrate a significant performance leap; the shopping model achieved between 52% and 64% product accuracy on queries with multiple constraints, compared to just 37% for the standard ChatGPT Search.[1][2][17] The system is designed to perform particularly well in detail-heavy categories such as electronics, beauty, home and garden, and appliances.[14][18][19] Despite these improvements, OpenAI maintains transparency about the tool's limitations, acknowledging that it might still make occasional mistakes regarding price and availability and encouraging users to verify final details on merchant websites.[13][4][19]

This launch is a critical component of OpenAI's broader, long-term strategy to embed commerce directly into its AI platform. The Shopping Research tool builds upon the company’s previously launched "Instant Checkout" feature, which allows users to purchase products from participating merchants like those on Shopify and Etsy without leaving the ChatGPT interface.[6][3][7][8] Together, these features create a complete pipeline—from discovery and research to comparison and final purchase—all within a single conversation.[6][7] While the company currently states that product recommendations are organic, not sponsored, and that user chats are not shared with retailers, industry analysts anticipate a future monetization model based on commissions or transaction fees.[15][20][19] This positions ChatGPT not just as a tool for information retrieval, but as a powerful aggregator of consumer spending and a direct competitor for a slice of the multi-billion dollar e-commerce market.[21][8] The move reflects a growing trend in consumer behavior, with recent studies showing over 60% of consumers have already used conversational AI to help them shop online and that search habits are becoming increasingly conversational.[16]

The implications for the wider tech and retail industries are profound. For Google and Amazon, which have long controlled the top and bottom of the online shopping funnel respectively, ChatGPT's integrated approach presents a significant threat by capturing user intent at the earliest stage of discovery.[22] The conversational model bypasses traditional search engine results pages and product listings, offering a curated experience that could fundamentally alter digital marketing strategies.[3][8] Retailers face a new landscape where being visible to AI crawlers and having well-structured, detailed product information is paramount. OpenAI has noted that the tool respects website rules, meaning retail giants like Amazon, which have blocked OpenAI's web crawlers, may not be prominently featured in the results.[23] Conversely, merchants on partner platforms like Shopify may gain a distinct advantage.[6][23] As AI-driven "agentic commerce" becomes more sophisticated, the battle will be for which platform becomes the primary interface through which consumers discover, research, and ultimately purchase goods and services online.[21][8]

In conclusion, the launch of Shopping Research is more than just a new feature for ChatGPT; it is a deliberate and strategic entry into the heart of e-commerce. By leveraging a specialized AI model to offer a genuinely conversational and personalized shopping experience, OpenAI is betting that consumers want intelligence and curation over endless scrolling. The initial offering, free of charge and widely available, is designed to hook users and gather valuable data on shopping behavior. While challenges around accuracy and monetization remain, this move firmly establishes OpenAI as a formidable new player in the digital marketplace, one that could disrupt the established order and redefine the relationship between consumers, retailers, and the AI assistants that guide their purchasing decisions.