The holiday shopping season always brings a wave of new tech, but this year’s innovations are squarely aimed at helping solo entrepreneurs and micro-businesses compete with global brands. Recent announcements from the second half of November 2025 show how artificial intelligence is reshaping e-commerce, advertising and even search. From one-click buying inside AI chat to fully orchestrated ad campaigns, these tools point to a future where small businesses can deliver world-class experiences without world-class budgets.
PayPal & Perplexity: Instant Buy Meets Answer Engines
On November 25, PayPal and answer-engine startup Perplexity launched Instant Buy, a feature that embeds checkout directly into Perplexity’s AI-powered search results. U.S. users can now research products and complete purchases in the same chat window, with PayPal handling identity verification, purchase protection and payment processing. Participating merchants sync their product catalogs with Perplexity via PayPal’s agentic commerce services; shoppers browsing items from brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and NewEgg can click “Buy now” and check out without visiting a separate website.
For small businesses, this integration offers a low-friction way to appear in AI-driven shopping journeys. PayPal’s Store Sync automatically uploads your inventory to Perplexity, while Agent Ready uses your existing PayPal configuration to accept payments. Merchants benefit from PayPal’s fraud detection and risk-management systems, which screen transactions and increase buyer confidence. Michelle Gill, PayPal’s General Manager of Small Business and Financial Services, describes the collaboration as the opening act of PayPal’s innovation for the agentic era—a signal that more AI-native commerce experiences are coming in 2026 and beyond.
ChatGPT Becomes a Personal Shopper
In the same week, OpenAI rolled out a shopping assistant inside ChatGPT. Powered by a specialised GPT-5 mini model, the assistant asks clarifying questions about what you’re looking for and then assembles a personalised shopping guide with side-by-side comparisons and deals. Instead of paging through search results, users describe what they need—such as “a compact espresso machine under $300”—and the assistant returns a shortlist with features, pricing and reviews.
The assistant is available to Free, Go, Plus and Pro plan users, making it accessible to solopreneurs experimenting with AI. While transactions are not yet supported, OpenAI plans to enable instant checkout through merchant partnerships, allowing purchases to be completed inside the chat, similar to Perplexity’s Instant Buy. For now, it acts as a research accelerator: you can refine filters, ask follow-up questions and request “lookalike” recommendations when an item is out of stock. If you sell products, this trend highlights the need for structured data, competitive pricing and strong reviews so your offers appear in AI-generated shopping guides.
Innovid Orchestrator: Autonomous Advertising for Lean Teams
Advertising technology company Innovid took a different approach with its November 11 launch of Innovid Orchestrator, a “superagent” that coordinates a suite of AI agents across the advertising lifecycle. The system connects your creative assets, media data and third-party models to generate, deliver, measure and optimise campaigns automatically. It includes four specialised agents—Create, Deliver, Measure and Optimize—that work together to produce tailored ads, traffic them to channels, analyse performance and reallocate budgets. The Orchestrator sits above your existing CRM and ad platforms, closing the loop between planning and performance.
For solopreneurs managing marketing alone, this could be a major unlock. You can launch a campaign by supplying brand guidelines or approved imagery, and the Create agent will generate multiple ad variants scored on predicted performance. Deliver agents handle trafficking and quality assurance, while Measure agents provide natural-language insights so you don’t have to decode complex dashboards. Optimisation runs continuously, shifting spend toward top-performing creatives. Because the platform supports bring-your-own agents (BYOA), you can plug in your own models or external analytics tools. Although Innovid Orchestrator targets larger advertisers, the company emphasises its goal of making sophisticated advertising accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Answer Engine Optimization: Becoming the Answer, Not Just a Result
The rise of AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews means traditional SEO is no longer enough. In Forbes, marketing expert Jason Hiser argues that businesses must focus on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)—structuring content so that AI assistants choose your brand when answering questions. SEO aims to rank on a page of results; AEO aims to become one of the few answers an assistant actually returns. That requires anticipating the questions customers ask and crafting clear, concise, authoritative responses.
Hiser recommends building a robust FAQ library and surrounding those questions with in-depth, high-quality content, supported by schema markup and conversational language. Encouraging reviews and participating in relevant communities also signal expertise and trustworthiness to AI algorithms. As more shoppers consult ChatGPT and similar tools before buying, being the answer—rather than simply an option—will become a major competitive advantage for small businesses.
Tools You Can Start Using Today
Sync Your Catalog with Perplexity
For product-based businesses, the easiest way to tap into AI-powered shopping is to register with PayPal’s agentic commerce services. With Store Sync, you upload your catalog once and make it discoverable to Perplexity users researching similar items. The Agent Ready feature ensures your existing PayPal configuration powers checkout. To get started, log into your PayPal Business account, open the agentic commerce section and follow the steps to connect to Perplexity. Once approved, your products can appear in answer-engine results, and PayPal will handle payment security and fraud screening.
Use ChatGPT’s Shopping Assistant for Research
Even if you don’t sell physical products, ChatGPT’s shopping assistant can help you understand competitor pricing, feature sets and customer expectations. Describe your niche products and review the recommendations it surfaces. Use the patterns you see—common features, pricing bands, value propositions—to refine your offers and adjust your messaging. As OpenAI moves toward direct checkout, early familiarity with the assistant will make it easier to integrate once merchant tools are made available.
Automate Campaigns with Innovid’s Trials
Although Innovid Orchestrator is enterprise-focused, the company often offers trial access and demos. Request a trial and test the Create and Measure agents on a small budget. Pay attention to how the system scores creative, structures reports and reallocates spend; even if you don’t adopt the platform, the insights can help you improve manually run campaigns.
Optimize Content for Answer Engines
Begin adapting your content for answer engines. List your most common customer questions and create pages or sections that address each one directly. Use short paragraphs, bullet points and plain language so models can parse your answers easily. Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on platforms that AI tools use as signals of trust. Where possible, implement schema markup (such as FAQPage) so crawlers recognise your structured answers. Over time, this will help your brand appear more often in AI-generated responses.
What This Means for Your Business
These announcements show that AI is no longer limited to back-office efficiency; it’s redefining how customers discover, evaluate and purchase products. Instant Buy turns an AI chat into a storefront, ChatGPT’s assistant suggests a future where many shopping journeys start with a conversation, and Innovid Orchestrator demonstrates how advertising can become largely self-managing. At the same time, AEO underscores that content needs to be written for answers, not just rankings.
For solopreneurs, the message is encouraging: a large marketing team isn’t mandatory, but a proactive approach to AI is. Visibility in AI-driven shopping experiences, clean data feeding answer engines and a basic understanding of agentic tools will matter more and more. Each development reduces friction—shorter paths to purchase, fewer manual campaign tweaks—while demanding new skills in writing for conversational interfaces and maintaining accurate, structured information.
Action Steps for December
- This week: Explore PayPal’s agentic commerce dashboard and begin syncing your catalog with Perplexity. Even a small product line can benefit from early visibility in answer-engine commerce.
- Next week: Test ChatGPT’s shopping assistant by asking it to recommend products in your niche. Analyse the recommendations and create or update content that answers the same underlying questions.
- Within two weeks: Request a demo of Innovid Orchestrator or a similar advertising automation platform. Apply at least one insight from the trial to your existing campaigns, even if you don’t adopt the tool long term.
- By month-end: Run an AEO audit of your key pages. Rewrite priority content in a question-and-answer format, add FAQ schema where appropriate and request fresh reviews from happy customers.
Embrace the Agentic Future
The pace of AI innovation can feel dizzying, but the upside is clear: less friction for your customers, smarter marketing decisions for you and new routes to audiences that didn’t exist a year ago. As Instant Buy, chat-based shopping and autonomous advertising move from pilot to mainstream, solopreneurs who act now will be better positioned than those who wait. The agentic era of commerce has arrived—make sure your business is part of it.
