ChatGPT Shopping Research: Revolution or Just Better Search? | Fast Five Shorts

ChatGPT has introduced shopping research.

According to a ChatGPT blog post, the new experience does the research for you to help find the right products.

Instead of sifting through dozens of sites, you can just describe what you're looking for.

For example, you can say find the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment or something like I need a gift for my 4 year old niece who loves art.

And shopping research builds a thoughtful guide to help you decide.

Sounds just like it was written by the company that did it.

And how bullish are you on doing your shopping research via ChatG?

I'm, I'm incredibly bullish.

I don't know that I would say specifically Chat GPT.

I think I would look more to Gemini, you know, the, the war between those twos.

San Sam Altman or introduced his code Red yesterday because he's really wanting the team to get focused on less cash burn and staying competitive against Google.

I, I think that this is giving us an opportunity to shop for things in ways that we wouldn't have before.

So are we using this for.

Yes, you're going to use it for the big purchases.

But I also think that as more consumers care about the types of ingredients in their products, they care about where these products are sourced from and again, number one, they care about price and availability.

I, we've never had this, this visibility before in a platform.

So I do think we could start to see people say like I'm looking for a better for you snack for my kids and these are the options.

What are those things?

What are the ingredients?

List this out on a table for me because I think people are going to start using this tool as a way to even shop for things like essentials for groceries, for personal items.

So I do think that what ChatGPT has done here, what Gemini did with their latest, their third 3.0 release, I do think that this is going to provide greater value to how people are starting to shop for things, how they're doing price comparisons and how they get the exact product that they want because it's so simple and easy.

But I know I'm very bullish on it.

Where do you come down on this, Chris?

Are you, are you positive towards this?

I know you, you've been in the past, you've been pushing towards more on the retailer's website.

So how do you, how do you land on this?

Yeah, I mean overall I think it makes, it's a smart move by ChatGPT.

100%.

I think that makes sense.

But, but again, I'm slowing My role on the importance of it overall.

Because to me, like I'm wondering, the big question I have is how many product searches are actually as research intensive as you're describing.

I don't think it's that many.

Otherwise Amazon wouldn't have the hold on first product searches that it has.

And in fact, to prove this point, I queried Claude competitor LLM platform on the number of searches that are actually transactional.

And you know what the answer is?

And the number of searches that are actually actually transactional is 70%.

Only 30% on what site?

On 30% across the industry.

Across the industry.

30% are research based.

So that tells me that, you know, how many people are really going to be doing this exhaustive research that, you know, we all glom on to like, I mean I can even remember, I think we even had this conversation like when, when Walmart debuted their, their, their, their Sparky engine and they were like, you seem like I'm playing the super bowl party.

It's like, yeah, okay fine, you can use that use case, but how many use cases are there really?

Like that.

And so that's the question I have.

So net net again, I'd be slowing down, slowing down if I'm an organization deciding where I'm placing my bets, being very thoughtful about which Pandora's boxes I want to be opening based on all these announcements that are coming out of ChatGPT and Google and everyone else.

Fair.

Yeah, I just, I think it's, I think it's being used for.

I would, I know that's the cloud representation I would be again following.

I still think we're on the precipice of this.

I think we need to follow like we need to gather more data before we can make any kind of true assessment as to how much people are going to be searching.

I think it's still in its infancy.

It's only been around for, you know, two years really where it's reached mass adoption or three years.

Sorry.

And I think we still have a lot more to come here.

I still think that it's something that retailers need to be investing heavily in both on their site and off.

You know, I think there's no harm in getting your products more prepared, building content that will help your products show up easier and number one, making sure that you have price transparency because that is going to be so, so important.

And that's where I think we start coming into searches for the things, the kinds of things that you're talking about, Chris, that weren't happening before but might happen as budgets get tightened up.