How to make ChatGPT your personal elf and save money this Holiday Season
Even Santa needs a little help sometimes!
With the holiday shopping season seemingly stretching longer and becoming more stressful every year, we reached out to recent cover star Jordan Goure, the serial Windsor-Essex entrepreneur and co-founder of the dynamic hiring platform Picsume, to find out what the smart kids are doing to get life under control. According to Goure, this season’s savviest shoppers will be leaving much of the legwork to AI-powered chat apps. (ChatGPT is the best known, but alternatives like Gemini, Claude or Perplexity should be similarly up to the task.)
At his day job, Goure gives his AI tools structure and purpose using master prompts: detailed sets of instructions that provide meaningful context, “role-playing” information, and specific guidelines to essentially train AI-powered agents to behave as you would—in a fraction of the time.
As he explains, with just a few simple steps, you can use AI to organize, compare, and simplify your Christmas shopping, the same way tech industry titans streamline complex projects every day.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Open your preferred AI chat app on your phone or computer.
2. Tell it where you shop and lay down some ground rules.
Start your message with the basics: your favourite stores, your location, and any stipulations (e.g., your budget, a preference for pickup over delivery, “no third-party sellers,” etc.). For example:
I’m in Windsor, ON. Compare items across Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. Prefer fastest delivery and lowest total price. Avoid sketchy third-party listings.
3. Type out Goure’s “smart prompt.”
You are a smart holiday shopping assistant. I will paste wish lists from multiple stores.
Goals:
- Aggregate all items, detect duplicates/similar models, and show the best store for each item (price + delivery speed + availability + return policy).
- Present a comparison table with columns: Product • Category • Amazon Price • Best Buy Price • Walmart Price • Other Store(s) • Best Deal (store + reason) • Notes (e.g., bundle, warranty, ratings).
- Highlight:
- The cheapest overall checkout path (fewest stores if possible).
- Any time-sensitive deals or coupon codes you find in the data I provide.
- If an item isn’t available, suggest closest alternatives (same brand or equivalent spec + similar price)
- End with a short summary: total cost by store/mix, fastest delivery option, and recommended split (who to buy what from).
Context: Country/region = Windsor-Essex, Canada, currency = CAD, tax estimate = 13%.
Now I’ll paste links or lists. Wait until I say “GO” before analyzing.
4. Add your existing wish lists via direct links or text entry.
Major retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and Costco allow users to create personal “wish lists” and share them with friends and family using a public link. If you’ve created a couple, paste them into the chatbot, one per line, under descriptive headers (e.g., “Amazon List,” “Best Buy List”).
If an online store won’t spit out a workable link, simply copy the items and paste them directly into the chatbot. Use a new paragraph for each retailer. For example:
Best Buy:
– Apple AirPods Pro (2nd gen) – $229
– Nintendo Switch OLED – $449.99
Tip: Use exact model names (e.g., “Model A2968” or “2024 edition”) to help weed out duplicates.
6.Say “GO”!
Once everything is in place, enter “GO.” The AI will produce a neatly ordered table plus a short summary of the best buying plan.
7. Use common sense to check the results for 30 seconds. (Goure calls this “sense-checking.”)
Click a couple product links to confirm the chatbot’s output matches what you really want. Goure recommends glancing at shipping dates and return windows and trying to weed out marketplace sellers, which can be slower or less scrupulous than major retailers.
If something looks off, finetune the results with a command like, Re-match AirPods by model A2968 only or Prefer pickup within 25 km.
8.Lock your plan
Ask the AI to finalize a single-cart plan (to shop at the fewest number of stores) or a fastest-arrival plan (to split orders across multiple retailers).
So, what’s step 9? Kick back and pour another glass of eggnog? Fiddle with the centrepieces for the hundredth time? That’s entirely up to you; your holiday season is yours again.
Sounds pretty masterful to us.
