PayPal’s Honey to integrate with ChatGPT and other AIs for shopping assistance (techcrunch.com)

PayPal announced that its Honey browser extension will surface product recommendations, real-time pricing, merchant options and deals inside AI chatbots when users ask shopping questions. The AI-agnostic integration (initially supporting OpenAI’s ChatGPT) will display links to items the chatbot recommends, fill in omitted major retailers, and add personalized offers to help consumers compare prices and merchants more quickly. PayPal says the feature is intended to both improve shopper decision-making and drive merchant sales through targeted promotions. Technically, the move is part of PayPal’s broader “agentic commerce” push—alongside a Google partnership, a remote MCP server, an Agent Toolkit, and deals with Perplexity and its Comet browser—aiming to embed commerce into conversational agents rather than traditional web pages. The shift matters because AI platforms (e.g., OpenAI’s Instant Checkout initiative) are themselves becoming shopping intermediaries, creating direct competition for affiliate-based tools like Honey. That raises product and trust implications: merchants can gain more direct, AI-driven distribution, but Honey faces reputational and legal headwinds after accusations it misattributed influencer-driven sales. The rollout signals a larger trend toward chat-first shopping, which will hinge on accurate real-time pricing, transparent attribution, and interoperable agent integrations.