Shopping mode
Shopping mode is when an AI platform answers a buying question with product cards, prices and shop links, in place of plain text.
Shopping mode is what an AI platform switches into when a question sounds like someone wants to buy. Instead of a written answer, or as well as one, it shows product cards: a row of products with pictures, prices and links to shops.
Knowing when it happens tells you which of your prompts are really about buying products, and which are about something else. On the prompts that trigger it, the question changes from "are we named?" to "is our product on the shelf, and is it first?"
What triggers it
The platform decides for itself, and it doesn't publish its rules. In practice, questions that name a product type, a budget or a use tend to bring it on:
- "Best espresso machine under £300"
- "Coffee grinder for a beginner"
- "Gift set for a tea lover"
Questions about how something works, or about a service, usually don't. "How do you descale an espresso machine?" gets a written answer.
It also varies from day to day. The same prompt can show products on Monday and plain text on Tuesday.
An example
Harrow & Pine tracks 30 prompts. Ten of them ask about tea gifts, and those regularly bring up product cards. The rest ask about brewing, health and tea types, and they almost never do. So Harrow & Pine reads its shopping numbers on the ten gift prompts, and its ordinary visibility on the rest.
Shopping mode in AnswerOrbit
We read shopping results from ChatGPT, the one platform we read them from. The Prompts tab in Shopping shows which of your prompts lead to shopping answers, by prompt or by topic. If a topic has prompts that don't ask about buying anything, you'll see a button to Add buying prompts. The Background searches tab shows the shopping searches ChatGPT ran before answering.