PayPal’s Honey to Integrate ChatGPT and Other AIs for Shopping

PayPal has added AI-powered pricing, offers, and shopping recommendations to its Honey browser plugin.

The payments giant PayPal revealed on Tuesday that it is incorporating new features into its PayPal Honey browser plugin, after its partnership with Google on agentic commerce this last month, September. Users who are researching products they wish to buy will be able to access Honey’s product recommendations, price, and promotions through the AI chatbot features.

PayPal Honey’s plugin will show links to the products the AI chatbot suggests, along with real-time pricing, merchant options, and offers, when users ask their favourite AI chatbot a question about shopping, according to PayPal. The technology can also detect instances in which the AI’s own suggestions might have overlooked significant retailers and present the customer with those other choices.

During shopping discussions, the new and updated feature uses chatbot integration to provide links, current prices, merchants, and promotions.

With the addition of PayPal notes and customised offers, the features are intended to improve merchant sales and assist customers in better comparing prices.

PayPal told a news organisation that while the agentic shopping integrations are intended to be AI neutral, they would first integrate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with further integrations to come.

PayPal stated that if large merchants are not included in chatbot suggestions, Honey can also add them.

The new features, according to the company, are a part of its larger rollout of agentic commerce initiatives, which also include the Google partnership, an agentic commerce offering, a remote MCP server, Agent Toolkit, and other, smaller deals, such as getting free access to its new Comet browser and a year of Perplexity’s premium service.

With intentions to spread to additional chatbots, the upgrade is initially accessible on OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Naturally, when AI companies expand into product suggestion and direct user-to-merchant connections, they will compete with Honey and similar products. Just yesterday, for example, OpenAI revealed plans to compete with Google and Amazon using its own agentic purchasing system, which includes a feature called “Instant Checkout.”

Even while OpenAI’s technology only supports Etsy at first, with plans to include Shopify merchants “soon,” it serves as a preview of what the AI era will bring. Users may begin their purchasing investigation in an AI chatbot rather than just surfing the web, where Honey previously had traction, which calls for new solutions like this. This is in contrast to users searching Amazon or the internet for products and recommendations.

The unveiling of the AI features comes after Honey received a lot of negative publicity. By claiming credit for purchases that creators had pushed, the firm was accused by a YouTuber of stealing money from influencers. There have even been some lawsuits related to the revelation.

The move comes as Honey is recovering from lawsuits and bad press, and as PayPal confronts competition from AI shopping after its relationship with Google.