Image Credits:PayPal\/Honey <\/p>\n
After teaming up\u00a0with Google on agentic commerce<\/a>\u00a0last month, payments giant PayPal announced Tuesday it\u2019s adding new features to its\u00a0PayPal Honey<\/a>\u00a0browser extension. The features will provide AI chatbot users, who are researching items they want to purchase, Honey\u2019s product recommendations, pricing, and access to deals.<\/p>\n When users ask their preferred AI chatbot a shopping-related question, PayPal Honey\u2019s extension will display links to the products the AI chatbot recommends, along with real-time pricing, merchant options, and offers, PayPal says. The system can also identify when the AI\u2019s own recommendations may have left out major retailers and surface those additional options to the consumer.<\/p>\n The features are designed to help consumers better compare pricing and boost merchant sales through the addition of personalized offers, PayPal notes.<\/p>\n The agentic shopping integrations are designed to be AI agnostic, PayPal told TechCrunch, but will initially work with OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT with more to follow.<\/p>\n The company says the new features are part of its broader rollout of agentic commerce initiatives, which include the Google partnership, an agentic commerce offering<\/a>, a remote\u00a0MCP server<\/a>,\u00a0Agent Toolkit<\/a>, as well as other, smaller deals \u2014 like an offer to use Perplexity\u2019s premium service for a year for free<\/a>, and free access to its new Comet browser.<\/p>\n Of course, the AI providers themselves will be a competitor for products like Honey, as they move into making product recommendations and connecting users with merchants directly. For instance, just yesterday OpenAI announced a plan to take on Amazon and Google with its own agentic shopping system,<\/a> which includes an \u201cInstant Checkout\u201d feature.<\/p>\n While OpenAI\u2019s system initially only supports Etsy with plans for Shopify merchants \u201csoon,\u201d it\u2019s a signal of what\u2019s to come in the AI era. Instead of browsing the web or Amazon when looking for products and recommendations, users may start their shopping research in an AI chatbot, instead of just browsing the web, where Honey previously had traction, necessitating new products like this.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n