AI Chatbot Glossary
What Is AI Shopping Agent?
An AI shopping agent is an AI system that shops on behalf of a person: it searches products across stores, compares options, tracks prices, and in some cases completes the purchase, acting from the buyer's side rather than the seller's.
Definition
A shopping agent works from the buyer's intent ("find me a waterproof jacket under $150 in a medium") and does the legwork: querying product catalogs or feeds, reading reviews and specifications, filtering by constraints, and presenting a shortlist. The most advanced versions can hold a cart across several merchants and check out with a stored payment method. Buyer-side agents live inside consumer products such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode; they reach a store through public product data, structured feeds, and platform integrations, not through the store's own chat widget.
Why AI Shopping Agent Matters for AI Chatbots
For an online store, buyer-side agents are a new channel: if your products are not machine-readable, an agent cannot recommend them. The practical response is clean product data (structured feeds, schema markup, accurate stock and pricing) so agents can find and quote you correctly. Chatonbo sits on the other side of the counter. It is a seller-side assistant on your own site that knows your catalog, policies, and order data; it complements buyer-side agents rather than replacing them.
See it in practice:
See the seller-side assistantRelated Terms
AI Shopping Assistant
An AI shopping assistant is a chat-based helper embedded in an online store that guides shoppers to the right product, answers questions about sizing, shipping, and returns, tracks orders, and can add items to the cart, all inside one conversation.
ChatGPT Shopping
ChatGPT shopping is the set of features in OpenAI's ChatGPT that show product results with images, prices, and reviews in answer to shopping questions and, for participating merchants, let the user buy without leaving the chat.
Product Feed for AI
A product feed for AI is a structured, machine-readable export of a store's catalog (titles, descriptions, prices, variants, availability, images, URLs) prepared so that AI assistants and shopping agents can find, understand, and recommend the products accurately.
Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce is online shopping where an AI agent takes actions on the shopper's behalf - looking up order status, applying discounts, confirming stock, and building checkout links - instead of only answering questions.