Grocery shopping is one of those things that never seems to go away. Week after week it eats up a chunk of our time. Usually the process looks the same: take the list we’ve been adding to all week, go into Amazon, search for each item one by one, drop them into the cart, and then finally check out for pickup or delivery.
Over the summer I even tried building my own agentic grocery shopping assistant called Groshobot. If you are curious, you can watch the video here:
When Perplexity released Comet, their agentic browser, I wanted to see how much of our grocery shopping process it could actually handle for me. The idea was pretty simple: if it could take care of the repetitive parts, I’d save a lot of time.
We usually order through Whole Foods on Amazon, so I first tried it with a straightforward prompt:
“Please shop on amazon whole foods for me for these things and add them to my whole foods cart
Raspberries - organic
Blackberries - organic
Blueberries - organic
Green seedless grapes
Mandarin oranges
Apple sauce pouches
Bread - daves killer bread or sourdough is fine
Chomp sticks - original turkey sticks please. they are yellow.
The Good Crisp Company chips - my son likes red, blue cans. its very similar to pringles
Popcorn - already popped in the bag. okay to be a 365 brand and ideally not with coconut oil
Almond milk - 365 brand is fine
My wife and I watched as it worked through our list, paid attention to the notes we gave it, and made decisions on things like brand and price. It was efficient and definitely saved time, but it wasn’t perfect. After a few weeks of using an agentic browser for grocery shopping, here’s what I’ve learned:
1. It Gets You About 85% of the Way
Comet does most of the leg work really well. It filled my cart with most of what I asked for in seconds, which easily saves me 20 minutes of clicking through Amazon. However, it doesn’t always nail the details. Sometimes it grabs the wrong brand or a slightly different product than what I wanted. That last 15 percent is where I still have to step in and make adjustments.
2. Specificity Makes All the Difference
As you would expect, I learned quickly that vague requests end up with unexpected results. If I requested “popcorn in a bag”, we would be at the mercy of whatever the agent decided was the best option based on its reasoning. However, when I was explicit, such as “365 brand, already popped in the bag, not made with coconut oil,” it found one that was much more suited to what I was looking for. The more specific you are, the better the results. Think of it like giving directions to someone who is very literal.
3. Pagination Trips It Up
Comet tends to stop at the first page of results, which can be a problem in a shopping experience. For example, when I searched for Good Crisp Company chips, it only showed me options from the first page, even though there were 7 other pages available of options to choose from. Unless I explicitly told it to go deeper, it missed some options that we might have considered adding to our cart. Being specific about the type you want usually helps narrow it down, but if you want full coverage, you have to ask.
4. Cart Math Isn’t Perfect
This one made me laugh. I had one can of Creepy Crisps in my cart already and told Comet to “add two more.” Instead of giving me three total, it just added one more to my existing cart, making it go from one to two. From its perspective, that was logical. From mine, not so much. The lesson is that you sometimes need to phrase things in a very clear way, like “increase quantity by two,” to avoid mix-ups, especially when there are usually multiple ways to add items to cart in a commerce experience.
5. Best Used as a Helper, Not a Replacement
At the end of the day, Comet is great at handling the repetitive part of shopping, but it’s not something I can fully hand off to yet. I think of it more like a junior assistant. It gets me 85 percent there, then I come in and finish the job. That still saves a ton of time, and it makes the whole experience less of a chore.
Check out the full video above to see what the experience is like! Please share other agentic browser use cases that you have been playing with. Writing this post reminds me, I need Comet to add a few more things to our cart!
