Perplexity Instant Buy Live Demo (ish)
I'm finally able to get the 'Instant Buy' capability to 'fire', but (spoiler alert) it doesn't go well 😢
A day after the Perplexity/PayPal announcement the functionality is starting to roll out and is verified on web for Max/Pro and free accounts (all have to be logged in).
Wayfair Enters the ‘Instant Buy’ Arena, First Merchant on both Google Buy for me and Perplexity Instant Buy
First, some breaking news, while the press release mentions the launch partners A+F, Ashley Furniture, Fabletics, NewEgg and Adorama, we’ve ALSO discovered that Wayfair is live on Perplexity Instant Buy. Here’s some tables.
This puts Wayfair as live on BOTH Google Gemini (verified) and Perplexity! But not ChatGPT yet? Who will be the first merchant to get the elusive Agentic Commerce hat trick? 🧢
Walk Through of Instant Buy
Here’s what the experience looks like:
You enter a prompt for a product such as “I’m looking for best selling items from abercrombie and fitch” and you get an answer that shows you 3 product cards, but if you click Shopping you get those same product cards PLUS many more. Notice these are all ‘Instant Buy’ enabled→
When you click on Instant Buy you are taken to this page that is a faux PDP. It also has access to the ‘Try on’ feature - which I demonstrate in the video. You can also go to the website to learn more.
When you click Instant Buy you are taken to a ‘Review & Pay’ confirmation screen:
If available, you will see all the variations in a picker UX like this→
In this example, there are two variants: color and size. Interestingly it is showing variants that are not in-stock down stream and tells you after you try and review and pay vs. at this stage. FYI, ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout/ACP automatically checks at this stage to improve the UX.
WOMP WOMP
Unfortunately, I’ve tried to purchase about 20 things and none of them are going through, I’ll keep working on this and post a follow-up with the post purchase experience.
ChatGPT Instant Checkout vs. Perplexity Instant Buy
I definitely like the ChatGPT Instant Checkout experience better at this early phase. The ChatGPT checkout is ‘smarter’ and anticipates the usual ux gotchas that Perplexity does not. Also, it’s 100% clear who the merchant is in the ChatGPT experience, where-as with Perplexity, I’m still not clear on if my credit card is going to show paypal/perplexity or Abercrombie + Fitch 🤔
Live Demo
This ~7min demo includes a full walk through of the experience minus the last step and with the Try on feature, enjoy!