Breaking: Perplexity and PayPal Announce 'Instant Buy' Coming Next Week PLUS 2 Demos: Google Buy for Me and Amazon Rufus' new 'Compare' Feature
The News is coming fast and furious as everyone in Agentic Commerce makes their last minute preparations for Holiday 2025 kick-off.
RIP đȘŠ Perplexity âBuy with Proâ; Long Live âInstant Buyâ
About a year ago Perplexity came out with âBuy with Proâ - the first shot fired in the Agentic Commerce Wars that are now in full swing. Here we are a year later and Perplexity in partnership with PayPal has announced (cnbc and zdnet are good reads), a complete re-imagining of their Agentic Commerce offering that is now called Instant Buy:
While we knew that Perplexity and PayPal were doing âsomethingâ - we didnât know what it would look like and, most importantly, when. Late yesterday, we learned about Instant Buy when PayPal CEO Alex Chriss posted this on X tagging Perplexityâs CEO Aravind Srinivasâ
In the ZDNet article they have some more details on the User eXpereince, that should sound somewhat familiar: (because itâs closer to the ChatGPT Instant Checkout experience now)
Instead of the âsometime product cardsâ, always âshopping tab from the âBuy with Proâ eraâŠ
Instant Buy is going to have a product card carousel style implementation as shown in the 5-sequence screen shots from the article below:
Here the user is searching for some furniture, they see a Product Card carousel (screenshot 2) and then they can Instant Buy (screenshot 3).
Perplexity: Industry Scuttlebutt
Weâre all wondering how this is going to work on the back-end. Is PayPal going to route it through some proprietary protocol? Will it ride on ACP rails, or will it be on AP2 or ? Who will host the checkout, how clear will it be who the merchant is? Once we see it live in the wild and can poke around at it, weâll know, until then weâre all speculating.
Perplexity: Change of Merchant-of-Record Philosophy
In the OG âBuy with Proâ, Perplexity was the âmiddle manâ and therefore the Merchant-of-record. In this implementation the PayPal merchant is the merchant of record which, again, is more in-line with the new high-water mark that Instant Checkout/ACP has set for the Agentic Commerce industry.
Perplexity Instant Buy: Next Steps
Weâll be watching closely and, as youâve come to expect, will alert you when this goes live and share a demo and thoughts on the experience when we see it. Stay tuned!
Speaking of Live Demos, hereâs two short ones for youâŠ
Live Demo 1: Google âBuy for Meâ Live demo!
I frustratingly havenât been able to replicate a Google âBuy for Meâ in the wildâŠuntil now! But, itâs very much earl experience/beta as you will seeâŠ
Live Demo 2: Rufus New Compare Feature Live Demo (<7mins)
Amazon recently released a cool AI feature âHelp me Decideâ, but it was a PITA to get it to start up. I liked it so much but had to constantly try to invoke it by âshopping like I was lostâ - weird, right? (the Help me decide feature was shown in this Retailgentic post).
Today, I noticed on my iOS Amazon app Amazon has now added the feature basically to any SERP that lets you throw up to 5 products into a little rufus sandbox and chat about them and compare them. Itâs SUPER helpful and powerful. This is BY FAR the best use case Iâve experienced in Rufus so far. Bravo đ to the team that built this.
This 6min demo walks through the feature in a live use case.