You are looking for a television set and have certain specs in mind, besides a budget. Trying to help the shopping process is OpenAI’s new tool. Called “shopping research”, it will take ChatGPT very little time to generate answers. It also means users who are looking for simple answers, like a price check, can rely on a regular ChatGPT response.

After submitting prompts to the chatbot, for example “find a gift for my seven-year-old nephew who loves music”, the shopping research tool will pop up automatically; it can also be accessed from the menu. OpenAI says the chatbot “asks smart clarifying questions, researches deeply across the Internet, reviews quality sources, and builds on ChatGPT’s understanding of you from past conversations and your ChatGPT memory to deliver a personalised buyer’s guide in minutes”.

The tool, coming just in time before the holiday season begins in the West, is rolling out on mobile and Web for logged-in ChatGPT users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. OpenAI said it is making “nearly unlimited usage available to all plans through the holidays”.

Like Google, OpenAI’s interest in e-commerce is not something we didn’t see coming. The company introduced a feature called Instant Checkout in September that allows users to make purchases directly from eligible merchants through ChatGPT.

The new tool could be useful as hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT to find, understand, and compare products: “Shopping research is built for that deeper kind of decision-making. It turns product discovery into a conversation: asking smart questions to understand what you care about, pulling accurate, up-to-date details from high-quality sources, and bringing options back to you to refine the results,” said the company in a statement.

The chatbot is expected to do well in detail-heavy categories like electronics, beauty, home and garden, kitchen and appliances, and sports and outdoor.

The results are organic and based on publicly available retail websites; it means companies don’t have to advertise to get highlighted. Also, OpenAI said it will not share users’ chats with retailers.

Shopping research is powered by a version of GPT‑5 mini trained with reinforcement learning specifically for shopping tasks. Picture: OpenAI

How to use it

Ask a shopping question and ChatGPT will suggest shopping research automatically. Tap it to begin, or you can also select ‘shopping research’ from the (+) menu.

Once you begin, ChatGPT opens a visual interface where you can chat and share feedback on product options to guide the research. Here, you can explain what you’re looking for, and answer clarifying questions about things like your budget, who the item is for, or which features you care about.

In the background, ChatGPT looks across the Internet for the latest information, like price, availability, reviews, specs, and images, and brings options back to you as it goes. You can mark items as “Not interested” or “More like this.” This allows the research to adapt based on your real-time feedback.

After a few minutes, users receive a “personalised buyer’s guide with the top products, key differences, trade-offs, and up-to-date information from reliable retailers”.

If you would like to purchase an item, click through to the retailer’s site. In the future, you’ll be able to purchase directly through ChatGPT for merchants who are part of Instant Checkout⁠ where available.

Shopping research is powered by a version of GPT-5 mini trained with reinforcement learning specifically for shopping tasks. “We trained it to read trusted sites, cite reliable sources, and synthesise information across many sources to produce high-quality product research,” said the company.

There are limitations: the model powering shopping research might make mistakes about product details like price and availability.

Highlights

Shopping research in ChatGPT is rolling out on mobile and Web.

It’s available for all logged-in users.

The feature is powered by GPT-5 mini.

The model powering shopping research might make mistakes.