PayPal and Perplexity are launched Instant Buy ahead of Black Friday, letting U.S. shoppers move from AI‑driven product research to checkout inside Perplexity in just a few clicks. The integration makes merchants that use PayPal discoverable directly within Perplexity’s shopping experience, so customers can browse live catalogs and pay through PayPal without leaving the answer engine.
Turning Perplexity into a shoppable AI interface
Instant Buy extends Perplexity’s shopping feature from pure discovery into a full transaction flow. After using Perplexity to compare products and narrow down options, shoppers can complete purchases within the same chat using their existing PayPal identity, PayPal Purchase Protection, and familiar checkout steps.
The rollout connects Perplexity users to brands that already rely on PayPal for payments, including retail names such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Ashley, Fabletics, Adorama, Newegg and others. Instead of clicking out to multiple sites, customers can move from answer to order inside one experience, with PayPal handling payment processing and risk.
A strategic alliance for agentic commerce
The Instant Buy launch puts into practice the strategic alliance the two companies announced earlier in 2025, which named PayPal as the commerce layer for Perplexity’s next wave of AI‑enhanced retail. Perplexity focuses on agentic discovery—using AI to understand intent, refine choices and build shopping guides—while PayPal provides the infrastructure that turns those decisions into completed transactions.
By embedding PayPal’s commerce services into Perplexity, the shopping experience effectively becomes a distributed storefront. Perplexity surfaces products based on a shopper’s needs and constraints, while PayPal routes funds and protections as if the purchase were made directly on a merchant’s own site.
Holiday promo: 50% back up to $50 for first timers
To support the launch and capture peak seasonal traffic, PayPal is offering a limited‑time incentive for eligible U.S. shoppers who try Instant Buy. From 9 a.m. ET on November 21, 2025 until 11:59 p.m. ET on December 31, 2025, customers who complete their first Perplexity Instant Buy purchase using PayPal will receive 50% back, up to $50, subject to the full terms and exclusions in the promotion details.
The offer is designed as a low‑risk way for shoppers to test AI‑driven checkout while tackling Black Friday, holiday and year‑end purchases. For both companies, it is a chance to prove that collapsing discovery and payment into one flow can feel faster and more convenient than traditional e‑commerce journeys.
How PayPal powers agentic commerce for merchants
On the merchant side, PayPal positions itself as the “commerce engine” behind Perplexity’s enhanced shopping feature. Its agentic commerce services include store synchronization—making a merchant’s product catalog discoverable within Perplexity—and agent readiness, which ensures those products can be purchased using the merchant’s existing PayPal configuration.
The value proposition to retailers centers on three points: simple integration into the agentic ecosystem, increased sales conversion by reaching shoppers at the moment of highest intent, and enhanced payment security through PayPal’s fraud detection and risk management systems. Importantly, merchants remain the merchant of record and receive funds directly from PayPal, giving them full visibility into customers, returns and post‑purchase relationships.
Keeping merchants at the center of AI shopping
By using PayPal as the payment layer, Perplexity’s Instant Buy is designed to enhance, rather than replace, retailer relationships. While the discovery phase happens inside the AI answer engine, the underlying transaction still runs through the merchant’s PayPal rails, preserving control over order data, customer service and loyalty programs.
This structure aims to reassure brands that participating in AI‑driven shopping does not mean giving up ownership of the customer. Instead, Perplexity brings highly motivated shoppers into the funnel, and PayPal ensures those orders are processed with the same protections merchants expect across other channels.
What it means for the future of AI shopping
For Perplexity, Instant Buy closes the loop from “what should I buy?” to “I’ve bought it” in a single conversation, showcasing how agentic AI can handle both research and action. For PayPal, the partnership is an early example of how its payments and risk capabilities can sit behind new AI interfaces, from answer engines to future agentic services.
