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Customers Are Starting to Use ChatGPT to Shop

Published Thursday Jun 15, 2023

Author Rebecca Deczynski, INC.

Customers Are Starting to Use ChatGPT to Shop

Over the past few months, Matt Bahr, founder and CEO of the New York City-based post-purchase survey company Fairing, noticed an emerging trend. When asked how they first heard about a product or brand, customers increasingly gave a new answer: ChatGPT.

While those responses weren't exceptional in number, there were enough to pique Bahr's interest. In his experience, the early adopters harbinger many more to come. "In the first month that we saw 'TikTok' listed as a response, there were about 50 mentions, and now there are hundreds of thousands," he says.

So far, customers are finding products through ChatGPT by searching relatively open-ended queries, Bahr says. One response to a post-purchase survey for a jewelry brand said that the shopper had prompted ChatGPT to recommend a gift for their wife. 

That may unlock a slew of new opportunities for retail brands to capture new customers. But they'll have to commit to playing the long game: Currently, ChatGPT is trained with data that cuts off at September 2021, so any products released after that date or website updates made since then won't have an impact on what a person asks the large language model today. In ChatGPT Plus, the platform's paid model, users can turn on up-to-date web browsing, although some websites have blocked the platform.

The general expectation, however, is that ChatGPT and other generative A.I. models will eventually be able to crawl the internet in real time--so it may be wise to act sooner rather than later. Brands can optimize their product listings and marketing efforts to get ahead of the curve, says William Underwood, CEO and co-founder of Optiversal, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based content and merchandising solutions provider that works for large retail partners such as Petco and Best Buy.
 
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