Mercari Adds ChatGPT-Powered Shopping Assistant to Marketplace Platform

Mercari has added a ChatGPT-powered shopping assistant to its marketplace platform for secondhand items.

With the new Merchat AI, which is now available in beta across the United States, customers can engage in real-time conversations with the shopping assistant and receive product recommendations based on their chat prompts, Mercari said in a Tuesday (April 18) press release.

“Merchat AI marks an exciting turning point in the evolution of secondhand shopping,” Mercari U.S. CEO John Lagerling said in the release. “With this technology, we’re leveraging the transformative power of artificial intelligence to make it easier for Americans to shop and explore Mercari’s extensive marketplace.”

As PYMNTS reported March 15, ChatGPT’s intuitive, chat-based interface allows users to interact with the ever-growing language model its creator, OpenAI, is building and push the boundaries of the dataset it is being trained on.

General Motors Vice President Scott Miller said March 10, “ChatGPT is going to be in everything.”

With the new Merchat AI, customers can log in to the site, engage the shopping assistant in natural conversation, answer questions about their needs and then receive a series of recommendations, according to the press release.

For example, customers might ask the shopping assistant to suggest a Mother’s Day gift, find an item that’s part of a new trend, find a specific item, suggest attire for a particular occasion, or discover home décor items that reflect a particular style, the release said.

“We anticipate that generative AI will also unlock more opportunities to iterate on our customer experience, along with additional ways to make the resale experience even more appealing to buyers and sellers,” Lagerling said in the release.

Several other retail applications of generative AI technology have been announced in recent weeks.

For example, Klarna is working with OpenAI to use ChatGPT as a personal shopping assistant that will enable users to ask the platform for shopping advice and receive product recommendations along with links to shop for those products.

Showing another use case for the technology, Expedia is using ChatGPT to power an in-app travel planning experience in which the generative AI tool will provide recommendations on places to go, where to stay, how to get around and what to see and do.

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