Automatic, no-cost setup gives small businesses a place in AI shopping results, even as Filipino firms adopt AI far more slowly than they get online.
- Every HitPay Online Store in the Philippines are now set up to be found by AI shopping assistants, at no extra cost.
- HitPay’s focus today is discovery; completing a purchase inside an assistant is still emerging industry-wide.
HitPay, a payments platform serving small and medium-sized businesses across Southeast Asia, has announced that all HitPay Online Stores in the Philippines are now automatically discoverable through AI shopping assistants. This feature is enabled by default at no extra cost, requiring no additional setup, technical support, or developer involvement. It is available to all active HitPay online stores in the country, with merchants only paying the platform’s standard transaction fees.
For many small businesses in the Philippines, social media has long been the primary way to attract and engage customers. Today, Six in ten Filipinos rely on social platforms as their main source for researching brands, surpassing traditional search engines. While social media continues to play a vital role, AI-powered shopping assistants are emerging as a complementary channel for product discovery.
Shoppers are increasingly asking AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity what to buy rather than searching themselves. About 900 million people now use ChatGPT every week, and AI is already part of how this region shops. Data from Bain shows 39% of Asia-Pacific consumers say they already use AI when shopping online, and another 40% intend to.
McKinsey projects this AI-led commerce could account for US$3–5 trillion in retail spending worldwide by 2030. The businesses that appear in those answers are the ones an assistant can read, and for most small merchants, that has not been true until now.
In the Philippines, only about 14.9% of local firms use AI tools, even though 90% own computers and 81% have an internet connection. The appetite is clearly there: 77% of Filipino MSMEs say they want to adopt digital tools, while only 16% actually do. In a country where micro and small businesses make up majority of enterprises, that gap increasingly decides who gets found when a customer asks an assistant for a recommendation.
Every HitPay Online Store now carries a clear signboard AI assistants can read. Each store publishes a machine-readable version of its catalogue, product names, prices and stock levels, that refreshes through the day, so an assistant draws on current information rather than an outdated page. Each store also carries a signal that identifies it to AI shopping agents as open for business. Together, they give a small seller a genuine chance of surfacing when a shopper asks an assistant for a recommendation.
Completing a purchase inside an AI assistant is still settling as an industry standard, and several large platforms have scaled back in-app checkout while the underlying rails develop. HitPay’s current focus is discovery, making sure smaller sellers are visible at the point where shopping behaviour is changing, so they move ahead of broad adoption rather than chase it.
“Filipino entrepreneurs are among the most resourceful sellers anywhere. They have built real businesses on GCash, on QR, inside their phones, often without a website at all. What held them back from AI was never ambition, and it was never connectivity, it was the technical setup the tools quietly assume. We have removed that. As more customers ask an assistant what to buy, a small seller in Manila or Cebu should have the same chance of showing up as any large brand, from the moment they open. That is where commerce is heading, and we want Filipino merchants there first,” said Aditya Haripurkar, Co-Founder and CEO of HitPay.
This feature is integrated into HitPay Online Store, the company’s ecommerce website builder and online checkout solution. It enables merchants to accept payments through GCash, Maya, QR Ph, and over 50 other payment methods available across Southeast Asia.
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