> Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.
It turns out when you step outside of “hard tech” problems like building GPT6 there are all of these details others have solved already. E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
OpenAI is new to it, and if I had to guess, not that interested in getting good at it.
petcat 5 hours ago [-]
> not that interested in getting good at it
I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so. They expect their many failures and short-comings to be shored up by continuous model training.
But that, of course, means that in the meantime it will suck and nobody will use it.
darthoctopus 3 hours ago [-]
> don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so
In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".
infamous-oven 4 minutes ago [-]
It's really hard to be a generalist and better than all the specialists at everything. OpenAI wants to focus on the G in AGI, and optimizing for ecommerce is just not that interesting to them, so of course it can't compete with Walmart.
monegator 3 hours ago [-]
b-b-b--but muh AGI? just two more weeks of training, please
no_shadowban_2 2 hours ago [-]
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ImPostingOnHN 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe in yours?
Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without wanting to put in the work for it.
Conversely, someone can work very hard for something they do not want.
The linkage between wanting a thing and wanting to do the work to get it is not absolute, or necessary there at all.
s3r3nity 35 minutes ago [-]
Did they stop teaching "actions speak louder than words" in schools, or something?
I think they're operating beyond their current (human) capacity, trying to test out too many things at a time.
But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it.
(This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. Not to software or computing, just to all the software vendors, whose job is to slice off pieces of computational universe, put them in boxes to prevent interoperability, and give each a name so it's a "product" that can be sold or rented).
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
> But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it.
Sam Altman doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and has time and again shown he has no restraint for trampling over others to further his own goals. Why would e-commerce be where he draws the line?
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think there is any line drawn here. I think if they executed well (and by they I mean any one of the three SOTA LLM vendors), they could already mortally wound the entire software industry today.
Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious:
1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status quo and milking it indefinitely (i.e. while the models aren't yet good enough to reliably single-shot complex software products from half-baked prompts, because once they get there, disruption will happen organically)
2) trying to compete with ~every other software product today is not likely to succeed in the end; a serious attempt would still burn down the software industry, but the major players don't have the capacity to handle it all at once, and doing it gradually will give enough time for regulatory agencies to try and stop it; either way, no one wins
mrbungie 4 hours ago [-]
How would they mortally wound the software industry as of today?
I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.
TeMPOraL 3 hours ago [-]
By embracing adversarial interoperability - instead of chasing hundreds of integration deals across industries that put LLMs in products, they focused fully on integrating product access into chat, by combination of business deals, apps/MCPs, and engineer/designer support for users, all directed towards the goal of having the LLM become the "superapp" where work is done, gradually replacing product classes in order of how easy it is.
There's lots of easy but drudge work to enable this that needs to be done at the fringes. For example, LLMs today could easily replace most people's smartphone homescreen experience, or travel/commute experience, as the data is there and LLMs have the capability, even prices are acceptable - what's missing is explicit first-party support to wire it up, keep it wired up.
One step up, what's missing is accepting this explicitly as a goal: to replace software, to make existing products (whether whole or in pieces) the tools AI uses to do work for you. All the vendors seem to carefully walk around the idea, but avoid engaging with it directly, because once they do, they'll be competing with everyone instead of milking them.
rune-dev 2 hours ago [-]
They can’t even deliver their own flagship products without bugs, and terrible UX. So I’m doubtful of their abilities.
These are also the same companies allowing their AI to make decisions in war, have no qualms about the mental issues they’re causing in people, and have abused workers in 3rd world countries for years.
But you think they’re holding out on “destroying the software industry” out of the goodness of their hearts? Come on
fc417fc802 1 hours ago [-]
I think his reasoning was pretty clearly presented as not the goodness of their heart but rather the medium to long term predicted outcome on their bottom line. Ultimately failing or getting tangled up with regulators any more than necessary is to be avoided. If you move too early and it chases people away from your platform which undermines your ability to keep innovating then a competitor who held back will ultimately eat your lunch.
mrbungie 1 hours ago [-]
But then there is no safe way for them to "mortally wound" the software industry. The full argument is moot.
I would add there are more reasons why this wouldn't work: costs due to OOM more usage, adoption/AI backlash, adversarial environment, players with big head starts (Google).
fc417fc802 34 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I believe the original commenter made that exact point.
You don't need to personally win in order to mortally wound someone. It can be informative to speculate about whether or not something is possible regardless of it being strategically advisable in the current context.
PaulHoule 1 hours ago [-]
Buying astral to get uv is a wound but not a mortal once because it got forked this weekend.
bee_rider 55 minutes ago [-]
Why would investors keep paying their OpenAI’s engineers and power company, if they were on an obviously self-destructive trajectory?
Hendrikto 3 hours ago [-]
> they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce
They definitely would if they could. They desperately need money. They already told the whole world they want to replace them, they just can’t.
_heimdall 2 hours ago [-]
> This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products
That seems reasonable, its just yet to be seen if LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word.
They're impressive ML for sure, but that is in fact different from AI despite how companies building them have tried to merge the terms together.
TeMPOraL 2 hours ago [-]
What I'm saying is not (directly) related to whether or not LLMs are "true AI" or not. It's sufficient that they are fully general problem solvers.
A software product (whether bought or rented as a service) is defined by its boundaries - there's a narrow set of specific problems, and specific ways it can be used to solve those problems, and beyond those, it's not capable (or not allowed) to be used for anything else. The specific choices of what, how, and on what terms, are what companies stick a name to to create a "software product", and those same choices also determine how (and how much) money it will make for them.
Those boundaries are what LLMs, as general-purpose problem solvers, break naturally, and trying to force-fit them within those limits means removing most of the value they offer.
Consider a word processor (like MS Word). It's solving the problem of creating richly-formatted, nice-looking documents. By default it's not going to pick the formatting for you, nor is it going to write your text for you. Now, consider two scenarios of adding LLMs to it:
- On the inside: the LLM will be able to write you a poem or rewrite a piece of document. It could be made to also edit formatting, chat with you about the contents, etc.
- From the outside: all the above, but also the LLM will be able to write you an itinerary based on information collected from maps/planning tool, airline site, hotel site, a list of personal preferences of your partner, etc. It will be able to edit formatting to match your website and presentation made in the competitor's office tools and projected weather for tomorrow.
Most importantly, it will be able to do both of those automatically, just because you set up a recurring daily task of "hey, look at my next week's worth of calendar events and figure out which ones you can do some useful pre-work for me, and then do that".
That's the distinction I'm talking about, that's the threat to software industry, and it doesn't take "true AI" - the LLMs as we have today are enough already. It's about generality that allows them to erase the boundaries that define what products are - which (this is the "mortal wound to software industry" part) devalues software products themselves, reducing them to mere tool calls for "software agents", and destroying all the main ways software companies make money today - i.e. setting up and exploiting tactics like captive audience, taking data hostage, bundled offers, UI as the best marketing/upsale platform, etc.
(To be clear - personally, I'm in favor of this happening, though I worry about consequences of it happening all at once.)
DrewADesign 4 hours ago [-]
Why do you foresee OpenAI’s involvement in the software business mitigating the resistance to interoperability and companies making money through productization? If they were actually interested in solving those problems instead of trying to secure themselves the biggest slice of economic pie, wouldn’t they have been happy about Chinese companies distilling their models? Are they engagement-juicing inn their heavily subsidized service à la Uber because they’re interested in promoting a better future for humanity? I’m skeptical.
le-mark 3 hours ago [-]
> but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry.
The US stock market has priced this in already. Many software only companies are perceived to be under threat by ai. It represents a wonderful arbitrage opportunity for ai skeptics in fact.
NicoJuicy 4 hours ago [-]
> perhaps they're just holding back
Considering the money they need, they over promise and under deliver.
PaulHoule 1 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting question.
I am behind schedule on developing a "summer phase" [1] for my foxographer costume and was chatting with Gemini about a crash priority "spring phase" [2] and asked it for suggestions and it gave me a 10-pack of results that had one good thing in it at rank #8, a similar query run against a normal search engine actually got something better at #1. Now sure I am talking w/ Gemini with big words like "supergraphic" whereas a normal search would be heavy on 3-letter and 5-letter words used in the product descriptions.
It makes think though of expert system based product configurators back in the 1980s
thing is that kind of product configurator is based on an ontology, constraints and rules as opposed to embeddings which might capture the "feel" of things like clothing.
[1] Busytown meets Arknights
[2] supergraphic shirt + camera gets resonance with my promotional system and people keep approaching me (e.g. laugh but every KPI in the system has an extra zero on the left)
45 minutes ago [-]
boringg 1 hours ago [-]
30 years? E-commerce hasn't been around that long - try 5 years of optimization MAX.
FWIW OpenAI is desperately trying to monetize and they think e-commerce is a "simple" problem to solve. I mean they do need to convert their funnel without alienating their users. I assume they are going to have some big payouts for agentic purchases gone awry or leave merchants on the hook.
AStrangeMorrow 16 minutes ago [-]
I remember having to describe a standard model to predict online shopping behaviors for my ML class exam in university. That was close to 10 years ago now.
Also remember a teacher telling us about that story of a company finding a woman was pregnant from her shopping behavior and pushing relevant recommendation. Prompting people around her like her dad or something to find out she was pregnant
butlike 1 hours ago [-]
30 years ago is 1996. Amazon had been around for 2 years (they were incorporated in 1994).
chasd00 43 minutes ago [-]
> 30 years ago is 1996.
as an aside, fall of '96 is when i started college. There was an elementary school on my drive to class where I would routinely get caught in drop-off traffic. All those kids i remember crossing the street are at least in their mid 30s now. ...I think i need to lay down and it's not even 9AM my local time.
bigfishrunning 1 hours ago [-]
So, you're proposing we've been optimizing E-Commerce since...2021? Amazon was founded in 1994. It was not the first site selling things online (but it's the most recognizable one). E-Commerce has been getting attention for a *very* long time [0]
This is a very confusing comment to me. How were people buying books from Amazon in the 90s if it wasn't e-commerce?
rvz 4 hours ago [-]
Also having to wait for ChatGPT for a "thinking" response to search for information that is slower than a Google search loses them lots of money.
I believe that it can still work and I won't claim about being unsurprised about this failure. But this is a great opportunity to execute this problem really well if OpenAI and others are not interested in getting good at this.
Perplexity also attempted this, got sued by Amazon and it appears semi-abandoned.
The only problem is that it must be quicker or just as quick as a Google search, and also compatible with the existing checkout flows.
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
> Perplexity also attempted this, got sued by Amazon and it appears semi-abandoned.
Any details on that? I feel the answer is more likely there than in "friction".
Hardly any purchase of consequence is so sensitive to friction that the difference between Google Search and an LLM response matters (especially that in reality, we're talking 20+ manual searches per one LLM response). I.e. I'm not going to use LLMs advise on some random 0-100$ purchase anyway, and losing #$ on a ##$ purchase due to suboptimal choice is not that big of a deal - but I absolutely am going to consult it (and have it compile tables and verify sources) on a $500+ purchase and for those I can afford spending few more minutes on research (or rather few hours less, compared of doing it the usual way).
TitaRusell 3 hours ago [-]
What the hell would AI even bring to the table here?
Already your favourite e commerce site has all your data. You can switch on the "buy this automatically" feature.
2 hours ago [-]
porridgeraisin 12 minutes ago [-]
More targeted ads.
Today, ads are based on user information you can reasonably collect from the users historical actions on your website, and then whatever search term they enter.
But soon, ads can be based on your current chat context + (derived interests of yours from your entire chat history across all chats. Shhhh.) passed in full to the e-commerce website that will use it to choose ads, generates creatives on the fly, all that crap, hyper-specific to you.
I'm so excited. Aren't you?
Now, as a side effect, searching through these can become better experience wise as well. They can use all that context and genuinely surface fewer, better results. But that's not the motivation of the e-commerce player anyways. If the ads work they'll be happy.
user3939382 2 hours ago [-]
Ssshhh there’s an “VP of AI Transformation” getting paid $600,000 to do this plus the budget. They need their “AI transformation journey” to show to the board.
moffkalast 3 hours ago [-]
Shopping research has been pretty funny to me at least, a straightforward way for them to do product placement that people actually want, but implement it so poorly that half of the links it returns are broken.
antisthenes 3 hours ago [-]
> E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
It certainly hasn't been optimized to anything in 1996. In 1996 it was people clumsily scanning print catalogs, spending 5 hours to upload 10 images on dialup and making a simple HTML page (no DB or any kind of backend) and putting their landline phone on it with a message to "call to checkout"
I know you were exaggerating for effect, but E-commerce and catalog normalization are definitely not "solved" everywhere.
McMaster Carr is a good example of a company that has 90%+ of their stuff ironed out, but most websites and especially small ecommerce isn't like that.
ralferoo 3 hours ago [-]
I think you're misinterpreting what his comment meant. I read it as meaning that e-commerce has been optimised repeatedly over the 30 years, from a basic start (which as you pointed out was haphazard) to the point where it is now optimised to extract every possible cent from the user, whether by encouraging them to buy with one click (the Amazon one-click patent must be around 20 years old now), time-limited promo spot pricing, sending you e-mails about what you had in the basket if you don't complete a sale, etc...
Right now, by comparison, it sounds like AI based shopping is still in the very early stages. Maybe further along than the early e-commerce, but still with a long way to go in its evolution. That'll probably happen quicker than with e-commerce, because a lot of the knowledge about what does or doesn't work has already been learned, but it sounds like it's still a long way behind. Caveat - I've never used it myself, so I don't know how far it is along that path, I'm just basing that from the article.
KellyCriterion 1 hours ago [-]
And quickly after that, we were meassuring traffic data with simple "how-many-requests-were-done" (including images) :-D
Kuyawa 34 minutes ago [-]
Where everybody sees failure I see a trillion dollar business, a faceless ai shop that merges all shops around your location.
"I need mayo, ketchup, mustard and ground beef"
"Here is a list of products with prices ... proceed to pay $25 (yes/no)" Yes
"Your card has been charged. Delivery will knock on your door in 7 minutes"
I'll code that app in one month, what's there to lose?
porridgeraisin 10 minutes ago [-]
This exists in india already
The food delivery apps (zomato, Swiggy) support "agentic shopping" through an MCP server.
You can reserve a small amount of money in UPI apps that doesn't need any approval to be debited (only by a specific merchant).
Razorpay which is a payment gateway has an MCP server
So you can add razorpay in your app, and claude can pay.
Claude can access the Swiggy MCP server and search using natural language there.
The incentive for the food delivery app to participate in this is better targeted ads.
bilekas 2 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT Checkout, a solution looking for a problem.
Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong, where handing over payment details in another chain.
Just let me buy my stuff in peace. Shopping is not the 'killer app' for GenAI.
baggachipz 2 hours ago [-]
When you're a solution in search of a problem, you'll try to shoehorn your "solution" into everything.
"This isn't what I wanted to buy, I said my feet are a size 10 and these aren't even shoes!"
"You're absolutely right! Shoes go on feet, and each of your 10 feet could wear shoes. Would you like me to research shoes and purchase them for you?"
no_shadowban_2 2 hours ago [-]
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__alexs 6 hours ago [-]
(Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying.
A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
itopaloglu83 5 hours ago [-]
They practically want to funnel users like cattle and not let them think about it or compare things.
It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money.
Elfener 4 hours ago [-]
> It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money.
This is why I think the "you're the product" saying is wrong. You're just some annoyance to managers (whether they're trying to use you just for user numbers and ad views or they're trying to get your money), whose product is the company (shares or just outright selling the company).
amelius 4 hours ago [-]
Users already use the internet to compare things. It makes no sense to bet on them not doing that.
ares623 4 hours ago [-]
You can sit on your couch all day for 30 days and corporations will still be able to take your money. The marvels of frictionless payments.
maccard 3 hours ago [-]
What’s your example for this? Because my experience in e comm is that targeted advertising is awful (I bought a lawnmower last week, Amazon knows I bought it. I am now getting ads for lawnmowers, suggested products for lawn mowers, rather than lawn care, gardening tools, or anything to do with the lawnmower I’ve already bought), sites are absolutely overrun with ads and suggested placements for the product they want to sell me rather than the one I’ve searched for, and that everyone except Amazon interrupts the checkout flow with multiple up-sells, verifications, 2FA prompts, 3d Secure validations…
bko 5 hours ago [-]
Why is this good? I want an impartial consistent system for shopping. If I can find it at a different site for a lower price, I should be able to do so. I should also be able to have it give me non-bot reviews and ask relevant questions about the product.
The same way I think shopping at Amazon is better than a place like Nike due to objectivity and comparison, I think a chat interface has the potential to take this to another level since places like Amazon have degraded considerably in terms of things like fake third party products and fake reviews.
__alexs 4 hours ago [-]
The buyer of this technology is not shoppers, it's retailers. The measurement of quality is "does it make us more money?" not "does it help me make better buying choices."
Retailers do not want you to make better choices. They want you to buy the widget.
A lot of evidence suggests that also shoppers aren't that interested in making the best choice either. They want to make a tolerable choice with as little effort as possible. There is no basically no consumer market for "power shopping" outside of weird niches like pcpartpicker.com etc.
StilesCrisis 3 hours ago [-]
Is there a way to measure users "making the best choice?" You could measure the amount of time spent comparison-shopping, but most people are terrible at that anyway; it's an acquired skill for sure. Besides a willingness to spend time, it seems like an impossible-to-quantify metric even in the abstract.
bko 3 hours ago [-]
That's a cynical way to look at it. Most likely the LLM will take a cut of sales and they'd be more or less indifferent who cuts the check. There's a market for this sort of thing. People will go to the best LLM for shopping. If the LLM is a shitty product, people will switch. LLMs are increasingly commoditized.
All you say is true for an aggregator like Amazon. But Amazon is better than Nike.com because as an aggregator they go from 1 to many retailers. LLMs will go from 1 aggregator (Amazon) to many so it will be better. And they don't have to invest a lot in UI/UX as chat is the interface.
__alexs 1 hours ago [-]
It's not cynical it is materialism.
Shoppers do not want to pay to shop. Retailers pay thousands to encourage you to shop with them. They are the economic buyers of this feature.
throwaway290 4 hours ago [-]
> impartial consistent system for shopping
> for a lower price
Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
danlitt 4 hours ago [-]
I do agree with your conclusion, but the catalog in most online shops is certainly not impartial. Amazon sells the entire first page of search placement, for example.
throwaway290 2 hours ago [-]
But we know it and it's obvious.
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
Catalog is an ad, the SKU database behind the catalog is impartial (at least as much as it gets), but no one is giving you access to that.
bko 3 hours ago [-]
Catalog is impartial? Then why are ~40% of every search I do on Amazon a sponsored product? There is no pure "catalog" especially with cheap crap coming out every day from no-name Chinese labels.
Am I the only one that think Amazon has gotten pretty awful in the last 5 years?
throwaway290 2 hours ago [-]
You can skip sponsored products
iso1631 2 hours ago [-]
more like 20 years. Basically when they introduced third party sellers.
skywhopper 1 hours ago [-]
Where are these sites? Everywhere I shop online is full of distractions and attempts to funnel me away from what I wanted and confuse me along the way.
Not that a chat interface would be an improvement.
exegete 5 hours ago [-]
The article says Walmart is not abandoning ChatGPT but is going to use their own app in Chat’s ecosystem
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying.
The only e-commerce site that fits this standard is that old one for buying (IIRC) nuts and bolts or such, that pops up on HN every other year, and whose name sadly escapes me now. Everyone else is ruthlessly optimizing their experience to fuck shoppers over and get them to products the vendor wants them to buy, not the products the shoppers actually want (or need).
> A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
That is precisely the point.
Chats may suck as an interface, but majority of the value and promise of end-user automation (and more than half the point of the term "User Agent" (as in, e.g., a web browser)) is in enabling comparison shopping in spite of the merchants, and more generally, helping people reduce information asymmetry that's intertwined with wealth and power asymmetry.
But it's not something you can generally sell to the vendors, who benefit from that asymmetry relative to their clients (in fact, I was dumbfounded to see so much interest on the sales/vendor side for such ideas, but I blame it on general AI hype).
Adversarial interoperability is the name of the game.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
You were thinking of McMaster-Carr, but Digikey is also that good for electronics parametric shopping.
Sadly Sigma-Aldrich, the hyphenated retailer for chemistry, appears to have been covered in javascript sludge.
Just made an order from them. It's weirdly comforting to know there's a company that knows I need clevis bolts and is willing to sell them to me for a transparent price.
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
It's the one, thank you!
jaapz 4 hours ago [-]
Wow, that's amazing
froggit 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure you're aware but you initially sound like you disagree with the post you replied to, only to follow up by enthusiastically reiterating that author's words as if in agreement.
You realize what shoppers and vendors each consider to be "good" e-commerce sites are fundamentally opposed concepts?
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe? I'm not sure which way the OP is arguing, in particular because of that "(Good)". So perhaps I misread the comment as arguing the opposite of what it is.
locknitpicker 5 hours ago [-]
> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying.
I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
froggit 3 hours ago [-]
> I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
You think a crude, unoptimised "minefield" is the route that leads to something as delicate as a "fragile equilibrium?" I don't see something as carefully balanced as your unstable equilibrium even being something that could exist without the processes involved having been refined down to a science. The only real alternative that meets your narrative would be that this is an industry that runs entirely on hope and luck (and enough human sacrifices to keep ample supplies of both on hand).
TZubiri 5 hours ago [-]
It depends on the product, if we are talking commodities or mass produced products like groceries, sure.
If we are talking custom products or complex appliances that need a lot of guidance, then maybe chat interface is appropriate.
bashkiddie 5 hours ago [-]
When I shop for special hardware (e.g. bicycle shift gear) it is usually underspecified.
If the information does not exist in the text block, a chat bot is of no use.
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
Chat bots don't belong to an e-commerce site; chat bots belong on the outside, specifically to comparison-shop and pull in some external information to de-bullshitify offers, correct "mistakes" and "accidental omissions" in the listings, resolve the borderline-fraudlent crap companies play these days with store-specific and season/promotion-specific SKUs with different parameters all resolving to same model/make name (think Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that are not actually deals, just inferior hardware with dedicated SKU).
goostavos 1 hours ago [-]
Agree. AI is (currently) fantastic at "de-bullshitifying" the internet. "Give me a table that compares Products A & B by z, y, and z." Companies have gone out of their way to make comparison shopping near impossible. Specs are hidden, if they're shown at all. Just figuring out if a certain TV had an ARC-HDMI out required downloading the manual.
I dread the day when ads inevitably make their way into the main AI models. One of the things its currently good at will be destroyed.
TZubiri 4 hours ago [-]
The use case for chat interfaces would be as follows:
Grandma wants to buy a good bike, but doesn't know about types of wheels or how many gears they need, or what type of frame is appropriate for their body type.
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
Reliable information on this does not exist on vendor sites, though. It exists on Reddit and in books and in med/physio papers and bunch of other places a SOTA model has read in training or can (for now) access via web search.
LLMs are already very good for shopping, but only as long as they sit on the outside.
meroes 60 minutes ago [-]
Idk I earnestly tried using LLMs to find me the smallest by volume regular ATX PC case 3 months ago and it was a nightmare. That info is out there, but it could not avoid mentioning ITX, mini atx (sometimes because Reddit posters messed up) and just missed a bunch of cases. And letting in any mistakes meant I had to double check every volume calculation it did.
I found the Jonsbo D41 without the help of LLM despite trying. (There might be a few smaller but they are 3x the price)
LLMs don’t weigh and surveil the options well. They find some texts like from Reddit in this case that mention a bunch subset of cases and that text will heavily shape the answer. Which is not what you want a commerce agent to do, you don’t want text prediction. I doubt that gives the obscure but optimal option in most cases.
TZubiri 3 hours ago [-]
We are talking about a hypothetical sales chatbot which would be built alongside the business, so they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.
TeMPOraL 2 hours ago [-]
> they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.
That doesn't follow. In fact, having this capacity and information creates a moral dilemma, as giving customers objectively correct advice is, especially in highly competitive markets, bad for business. Ignorance is bliss for businesses, because this lets them bullshit people through marketing with less guilt, and if there's one thing any business knows, is that marketing has better ROI than product/service quality anyway.
pjc50 5 hours ago [-]
The problem is that the chat transcript is legally binding. If the chatbot makes incorrect statements which the customer relies on for their complex purchase, then you're going to have to refund them.
You can either have AI be honest or AI become a marketing tool. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.
sumeno 2 hours ago [-]
Considering you can't have chat bots be honest even if you don't make them marketing tools I suspect I know which way companies are going to go
skywhopper 1 hours ago [-]
LLMs do not have a concept of “honesty”. Nothing they say is honest or dishonest. Anyway, “What’s the best XYZ?” is not a question that has a definitive answer for most XYZs.
cmiles8 4 hours ago [-]
The idea that AI will suddenly solve e-commerce demonstrates a lack of understanding on everything that has happened in this space over the last 25 years.
There’s a lot of this going on in AI at the moment. New folks come in thinking they have a magic solution and then produce a total train wreck as it turns out domain expertise is still a thing.
RugnirViking 3 hours ago [-]
What would it even mean for an ai to solve e-commerce? Is that a claim made here? Is e-commerce a problem to be solved? It seems like e-commerce does just fine, if plagued by poor quality product, fake reviews, and relentless borderline fraudulent marketing.
Was anyone suggesting AI would help with it? It seems from the article that Walmart (presumably experts in e-commerce) themselves willingly collaborated with open ai. Especially at Walmart's level, what even was the theory?
In any case. It seems that despite this poor result, Walmart decided to essentially go ahead anyway and partner with open ai to put their "own chatbot" inside the open ai app?
cmiles8 3 hours ago [-]
Well everyone is desperate to show that they’ve built and deployed some AI thing. Few have done so and demonstrated meaningful value that justifies all the expense of doing it.
Lerc 6 hours ago [-]
Is their issue that ChatGPT served their customers more than it served them?
nicbou 2 hours ago [-]
In due time it will serve ChatGPT more than either
Vespasian 5 hours ago [-]
To early to say that but it's certainly a part of the equation all vendors are currently looking at.
And given the past few decades there is no reason to not try to do that.
d--b 5 hours ago [-]
That's definitely it.
This probably means that OpenAI et al are fine-tuning salesman-like LLMs to "fix" that problem.
Can't wait for the future.
holografix 2 hours ago [-]
Wow the sceptics really came out in force for this one.
I’m currently using Gemini to research components for a remote controlled plane. I have the frame of the plane and now need to buy correctly specced servo motors, an engine, battery, etc etc. It has saved me so much time and educated me tremendously on how the different components interact and the options available.
If I could just press “buy” from within Gemini and pay via Google Pay (or better still, Apple Pay) I’d do it in a heartbeat.
If ChatGPT can do this today, I need to try it.
y-curious 1 hours ago [-]
The entire point of shoehorning AI into everything is to make people stop thinking for themselves and allowing a corporation to do it for them.
“””If I could just press “buy” from within Gemini and pay via Google Pay (or better still, Apple Pay) I’d do it in a heartbeat”””
Yeah, until that becomes enshittified and you don’t notice because you no longer do research on components.
cdelsolar 27 minutes ago [-]
so what, i want to build a little remote controlled plane that works
nope1000 1 hours ago [-]
I would assume the average purchase in Walmart is significantly more low-tech than this though
npilk 53 minutes ago [-]
So they are comparing to the conversion rate of people who click on a link in the chat and go to Walmart's website to view the product? Wouldn't that be a really strong intent-to-buy signal?
The better comparison might be conversion rate for those who searched on Walmart.com vs those who searched within ChatGPT. Or maybe that is what they're comparing and I misunderstood?
ZiiS 2 hours ago [-]
How many people tried for the novalty with no intention of purchasing? It being a thousand times worse conversion wouldn't matter if they are additional sales???
sarbanharble 1 hours ago [-]
The shift to AI is currently a boon to consumer. Penny’s has obviously done this, as they have had a $119 Man U jersey ring up at $19 for a week now, with many of my mates having bought one. It’s unbelievable that anyone thinks gutting human oversight builds a better company.
epsteingpt 1 hours ago [-]
Stores converted better than eCommerce for a long time and adoption was slow.
The next generation will shop in a different way, if it's better, and the change will be gradual as well.
Adoption takes time.
bigfishrunning 51 minutes ago [-]
That was only true because the internet wasn't completely saturated -- many people didn't get online until the late 2000s [0]. This was a major barrier to entry keeping brick-and-mortar stores ahead.
The only thing holding back "Agentic Purchasing" is convenience. It's much easier to do a conventional search and click "Buy" then it is to have a conversation with some chatbot. If I walk into a store, most of the time I don't want to talk to a salesperson, I just want to grab the thing I came for and leave; this is also true for online shopping. The chatbot is another barrier to the purchase.
Last year they couldn't draw fingers on hands properly, this year they can't convert at checkouts, I wonder what they'll be failing to do a year from now.
bashkiddie 5 hours ago [-]
Next years headline will be
> AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1% of traffic
stavros 4 hours ago [-]
Waymo cars cause 90% fewer accidents than human drivers:
Yeah, but consumers can't buy Waymos. They can get dangerously unsafe Teslas and pretend it's the same tech.
qoez 4 hours ago [-]
It's probably stuff like this along with investor pressure that will make AI companies slowly make their AIs more profit maximizing (and the long term reason ilya etc was so against even going down that path)
keiferski 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t trust AI bots to access my wallet. Not sure I ever will.
I sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
falcor84 4 hours ago [-]
> my wallet
Does it actually need direct access to your wallet? I haven't tried it yet, but assumed it would work with a separate wallet, fed through by top-ups.
keiferski 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like they are an intermediary between the user and the business. So it’s not a top-up thing. That would be needlessly complex from ChatGPT’s end, too.
>I sort of trust them to make product recommendations
Never, ever.
raincole 4 hours ago [-]
Your argument is "they're designed to influence us" right?
Amazon reviews are paid influence. Reddit posts are paid influence. Everything everywhere you read online is paid influence. I'd rank LLMs between "people I personally trust" and "random people online."
everdrive 1 hours ago [-]
In fairness to your point, I also find that Amazon reviews can no longer be trusted, and I really try to buy as little as possible from Amazon. Due to this, and other reasons, I find it quite difficult to have a good sense for whether I've bought something high quality, or if it'll be a piece of trash.
vulcan01 4 hours ago [-]
Since LLMs are trained on "random people online", why are they not of equal rank?
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
For me, for now, they are. And being "many random people" and not "random person", they average out into something much more trustworthy than even recommendations from most individuals I know personally.
Operative word is "for now" - LLMs caught entrepreneurs unprepared, but they'll catch up and poison this too, same thing that happened with search giving rise to SEO.
raincole 1 hours ago [-]
I see LLM as the average of multiple random people and traditional common sense from wikipedia and books.
hrimfaxi 1 hours ago [-]
It's worth keeping in mind that some of those random people are trolls.
keiferski 5 hours ago [-]
I trust them as much as any other online source, which is to say, sort of, but only as a starting point for research.
Do you have a better alternative?
everdrive 1 hours ago [-]
It depends. For home improvement projects, you can see what tools people are using. If a home repair channel is trustworthy, that may be a good start. General market research can help as well. For instance, post-China-buyout Craftsman should be avoided. For nearly anything else, it really depends. Name-brand electronics are usually safe unless they're small items (eg, power adapters, USB cords. Batteries are nearly impossible to purchase online without getting ripped off.) For clothing, I would just generally recommend only buying from thrift stores. For a lot of physical items (eg: door knobs, fuel hoses, etc.) it is actually quite difficult to purchase online. In person, we can tell a lot about quality just by touching the object with your hands. (eg: a flimsy shelf is not self-evident online, but is obvious in the hardware store.)
I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying that nearly every category of item requires its own strategy. For a brief period consumers were winning the information war and you could just go to Amazon, read the reviews, and get a superior product for cheap. We're now in a modern-but-old-fashioned situation. It's quite difficult to know if you're going to get ripped off, and you're forced to rely on more blunt heuristics. (eg: trust specific brands, buy things in person, etc.) None of these are perfect, but they are quickly becoming the best of some bad options.
crooked-v 4 hours ago [-]
Even if they're (somehow) bias-free, you're still stuck with "the state of the internet circa 20XX" from the training data.
5 hours ago [-]
asimpletune 4 hours ago [-]
Isn’t there already a much older rule that predicts this?
Your product has to be a 10x improvement over the incumbent to be competitive.
In AI speak it would be the “extra-bitter” lesson I guess?
You need to add 10x resources to beat a product that’s already solved with mature tech.
kvisner 4 days ago [-]
That doesn't seem terribly surprising, a human can quickly look through a grid of shirts to find one they like. ChatGPT would be guessing what they might want and the human would probably get a bad experience there with some regularity.
dude250711 2 hours ago [-]
They have a solution and are trying to find a problem.
blitzar 3 hours ago [-]
is 3x worse like a 300% decrease?
phyzome 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, unclear what they mean. 1/3 the conversion rate, maybe?
firefoxd 6 hours ago [-]
The experience is a lot like when you are talking with a friend, then they decide to ask siri or google a question using voice. The result is always imprecise. Meaning they either have to repeat their query, or end up typing it anyway.
If you want to buy a Walmart product, the easiest way is to go to Walmart. Why add an imprecise middle man in between?
hownottowrite 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve been running e-commerce systems for 30 years (tech, marketing, etc). This was going to fail from the start for one reason: intent.
Most people using AI chat are exploring ideas and solutions. They’re doodling, not shopping. Or in old timey parlance, they’re looky-loos or tire kickers at best.
Anyone who’s had to justify ad spend in e-commerce can tell you that some sources produce huge traffic with absolutely terrible conversion. Reddit and Pinterest pretty much blow for this reason, with limited exceptions. It’s also why TikTok and other influencer platforms really work.
Conversion requires a mental shift from discovery to demand.
Also, really hate summaries like this without the actual source so here are the main points from the actual source (WIRED https://archive.is/7DuEV):
1. Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT performed poorly, with conversion about one-third of Walmart’s normal site.
2. The experience failed largely because it forced single-item purchases instead of letting users build a cart.
3. Walmart is shifting to embedding its own assistant, Sparky, inside ChatGPT and keeping checkout on its own system.
4. ChatGPT is still valuable because it’s driving significantly more new customer traffic than search.
5. Purchases that did work were mostly practical, problem-solving items like supplements and tools.
6. Fully automated “agentic shopping” is still unlikely in the near term because people want control over purchases.
7. OpenAI is moving away from in-chat checkout and focusing on helping users research while merchants handle transactions.
In short, AI is useful for discovery, but traditional e-commerce flows still outperform it at closing sales.
RA_Fisher 2 hours ago [-]
I use AI to shop and it seems easy for an AI to understand when that’s the case (they can do statistics and physics after all).
hownottowrite 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, I use it for that too. But we’re also talking about most people. Your average Walmart customer is not going to be your average HN reader.
martinald 2 hours ago [-]
Would be interesting to know for other retailers though and how much of this is down to what Walmart sells?
I'm confused by the comment that it failed because it forced single item purchases. Most of my "ecommerce" use is researching and buying one item at a time.
hownottowrite 2 hours ago [-]
I think in large part the average Walmart consumer does not shop like the average Amazon consumer. They load up a big cart over time rather than pull the trigger on lots of smaller, convenience-driven purchases. So Walmart is going to view a smaller cart size as a potential failure primarily because their operations are not optimized the same way that Amazon is.
TeMPOraL 2 hours ago [-]
It's a failure for e-commerce vendors because it's a spectacular success for shoppers, and the relationship between sellers and buyers is almost always adversarial.
brador 4 hours ago [-]
Original AI was sourced from university level text books, stack, wiki. Average iq around 140.
The latest AI is trained on the average citizens social media output. Iq 90.
That’s why AI seemed smart. The bar will not be raised again. We’re cooked.
_1 2 hours ago [-]
source?
casey2 6 hours ago [-]
Because most people can't read. Wait for agents generating personalized websites/self checkout apps.
charcircuit 6 hours ago [-]
What if they made instant checkout actually instant? You ask ChatGPT to setup a website and it instantly purchases web hosting and sets up the website there. You can't beat a 100% conversion rate by actually checking out instantly. If you didn't like that host you can ask it to find it alternative and ChatGPT would automatically attempt a refund and then purchase from someone else.
LoganDark 6 hours ago [-]
I'd become afraid to ask that bot anything, not knowing what it would automatically try to purchase for me. Paying for the bot itself is already a lot: $20/mo to $200/mo or more.
lukan 4 hours ago [-]
20$ for a personal assistant is not much, but no, I surely don't trust those assistants to access my money.
TZubiri 5 hours ago [-]
What are we talking about here? ChatGPT as an interface to buy groceries? Or ChatGPT as an interface to build a website. I fail to see how these would be related other than using a specific technology
wrqvrwvq 4 hours ago [-]
> Because most people can't read. Wait for agents generating personalized websites/self checkout apps.
> You ask ChatGPT to setup a website and it instantly purchases web hosting and sets up the website
Multiple comments deflecting from the original shopping conversion failure to recommend ... building a whole new website (with hosting for some reason?). W/o bothering to look through commenter history, one has to assume there are a lot of chatbots on this site or else the people using this stuff have been lobotomized.
I'm sure it'll start happening too, and when that fails, the bots will, i don't know, invent a new macarena. We are definitely headed for an irredeemably stupid future.
fennecfoxy 5 hours ago [-]
Not really many details...
Perhaps clickthrough is worse because there are fewer dark patterns involved and people are mostly just browsing and occasionally buying only what they need.
They didn't really seem to specify the "why" of it with any research. And weird that OAI wasn't supporting them to see wha the issue was.
zmmmmm 5 hours ago [-]
> Walmart will embed its own chatbot, Sparky, inside ChatGPT. Users will log into Walmart, sync carts across platforms, and complete purchases within Walmart’s system.
The enshittification is upon us.
netsharc 4 hours ago [-]
Hah, Clippy's cousin Sparky: every once in a while after ChatGPT answers a question it'll say "Looks like you still have stuff in your WalMart cart. Would you like me to complete that checkout for you? Also, WalMart-brand diapers is on offer this week, shall I add that to your cart?"
josefritzishere 1 hours ago [-]
Look, another thing AI is empirically bad at. Can we dispense with cramming AI into every product and service and just use it where it's useful? It's very wasteful and an utterly obnoxious experience for users.
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> Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.
It turns out when you step outside of “hard tech” problems like building GPT6 there are all of these details others have solved already. E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
OpenAI is new to it, and if I had to guess, not that interested in getting good at it.
I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so. They expect their many failures and short-comings to be shored up by continuous model training.
But that, of course, means that in the meantime it will suck and nobody will use it.
In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".
Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without wanting to put in the work for it.
Conversely, someone can work very hard for something they do not want.
The linkage between wanting a thing and wanting to do the work to get it is not absolute, or necessary there at all.
But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it.
(This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. Not to software or computing, just to all the software vendors, whose job is to slice off pieces of computational universe, put them in boxes to prevent interoperability, and give each a name so it's a "product" that can be sold or rented).
Sam Altman doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and has time and again shown he has no restraint for trampling over others to further his own goals. Why would e-commerce be where he draws the line?
Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious:
1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status quo and milking it indefinitely (i.e. while the models aren't yet good enough to reliably single-shot complex software products from half-baked prompts, because once they get there, disruption will happen organically)
2) trying to compete with ~every other software product today is not likely to succeed in the end; a serious attempt would still burn down the software industry, but the major players don't have the capacity to handle it all at once, and doing it gradually will give enough time for regulatory agencies to try and stop it; either way, no one wins
I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.
There's lots of easy but drudge work to enable this that needs to be done at the fringes. For example, LLMs today could easily replace most people's smartphone homescreen experience, or travel/commute experience, as the data is there and LLMs have the capability, even prices are acceptable - what's missing is explicit first-party support to wire it up, keep it wired up.
One step up, what's missing is accepting this explicitly as a goal: to replace software, to make existing products (whether whole or in pieces) the tools AI uses to do work for you. All the vendors seem to carefully walk around the idea, but avoid engaging with it directly, because once they do, they'll be competing with everyone instead of milking them.
These are also the same companies allowing their AI to make decisions in war, have no qualms about the mental issues they’re causing in people, and have abused workers in 3rd world countries for years.
But you think they’re holding out on “destroying the software industry” out of the goodness of their hearts? Come on
I would add there are more reasons why this wouldn't work: costs due to OOM more usage, adoption/AI backlash, adversarial environment, players with big head starts (Google).
You don't need to personally win in order to mortally wound someone. It can be informative to speculate about whether or not something is possible regardless of it being strategically advisable in the current context.
They definitely would if they could. They desperately need money. They already told the whole world they want to replace them, they just can’t.
That seems reasonable, its just yet to be seen if LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word.
They're impressive ML for sure, but that is in fact different from AI despite how companies building them have tried to merge the terms together.
A software product (whether bought or rented as a service) is defined by its boundaries - there's a narrow set of specific problems, and specific ways it can be used to solve those problems, and beyond those, it's not capable (or not allowed) to be used for anything else. The specific choices of what, how, and on what terms, are what companies stick a name to to create a "software product", and those same choices also determine how (and how much) money it will make for them.
Those boundaries are what LLMs, as general-purpose problem solvers, break naturally, and trying to force-fit them within those limits means removing most of the value they offer.
Consider a word processor (like MS Word). It's solving the problem of creating richly-formatted, nice-looking documents. By default it's not going to pick the formatting for you, nor is it going to write your text for you. Now, consider two scenarios of adding LLMs to it:
- On the inside: the LLM will be able to write you a poem or rewrite a piece of document. It could be made to also edit formatting, chat with you about the contents, etc.
- From the outside: all the above, but also the LLM will be able to write you an itinerary based on information collected from maps/planning tool, airline site, hotel site, a list of personal preferences of your partner, etc. It will be able to edit formatting to match your website and presentation made in the competitor's office tools and projected weather for tomorrow.
Most importantly, it will be able to do both of those automatically, just because you set up a recurring daily task of "hey, look at my next week's worth of calendar events and figure out which ones you can do some useful pre-work for me, and then do that".
That's the distinction I'm talking about, that's the threat to software industry, and it doesn't take "true AI" - the LLMs as we have today are enough already. It's about generality that allows them to erase the boundaries that define what products are - which (this is the "mortal wound to software industry" part) devalues software products themselves, reducing them to mere tool calls for "software agents", and destroying all the main ways software companies make money today - i.e. setting up and exploiting tactics like captive audience, taking data hostage, bundled offers, UI as the best marketing/upsale platform, etc.
(To be clear - personally, I'm in favor of this happening, though I worry about consequences of it happening all at once.)
The US stock market has priced this in already. Many software only companies are perceived to be under threat by ai. It represents a wonderful arbitrage opportunity for ai skeptics in fact.
Considering the money they need, they over promise and under deliver.
I am behind schedule on developing a "summer phase" [1] for my foxographer costume and was chatting with Gemini about a crash priority "spring phase" [2] and asked it for suggestions and it gave me a 10-pack of results that had one good thing in it at rank #8, a similar query run against a normal search engine actually got something better at #1. Now sure I am talking w/ Gemini with big words like "supergraphic" whereas a normal search would be heavy on 3-letter and 5-letter words used in the product descriptions.
It makes think though of expert system based product configurators back in the 1980s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon
thing is that kind of product configurator is based on an ontology, constraints and rules as opposed to embeddings which might capture the "feel" of things like clothing.
[1] Busytown meets Arknights
[2] supergraphic shirt + camera gets resonance with my promotional system and people keep approaching me (e.g. laugh but every KPI in the system has an extra zero on the left)
FWIW OpenAI is desperately trying to monetize and they think e-commerce is a "simple" problem to solve. I mean they do need to convert their funnel without alienating their users. I assume they are going to have some big payouts for agentic purchases gone awry or leave merchants on the hook.
Also remember a teacher telling us about that story of a company finding a woman was pregnant from her shopping behavior and pushing relevant recommendation. Prompting people around her like her dad or something to find out she was pregnant
as an aside, fall of '96 is when i started college. There was an elementary school on my drive to class where I would routinely get caught in drop-off traffic. All those kids i remember crossing the street are at least in their mid 30s now. ...I think i need to lay down and it's not even 9AM my local time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_e-commerce
I believe that it can still work and I won't claim about being unsurprised about this failure. But this is a great opportunity to execute this problem really well if OpenAI and others are not interested in getting good at this.
Perplexity also attempted this, got sued by Amazon and it appears semi-abandoned.
The only problem is that it must be quicker or just as quick as a Google search, and also compatible with the existing checkout flows.
Any details on that? I feel the answer is more likely there than in "friction".
Hardly any purchase of consequence is so sensitive to friction that the difference between Google Search and an LLM response matters (especially that in reality, we're talking 20+ manual searches per one LLM response). I.e. I'm not going to use LLMs advise on some random 0-100$ purchase anyway, and losing #$ on a ##$ purchase due to suboptimal choice is not that big of a deal - but I absolutely am going to consult it (and have it compile tables and verify sources) on a $500+ purchase and for those I can afford spending few more minutes on research (or rather few hours less, compared of doing it the usual way).
Already your favourite e commerce site has all your data. You can switch on the "buy this automatically" feature.
Today, ads are based on user information you can reasonably collect from the users historical actions on your website, and then whatever search term they enter.
But soon, ads can be based on your current chat context + (derived interests of yours from your entire chat history across all chats. Shhhh.) passed in full to the e-commerce website that will use it to choose ads, generates creatives on the fly, all that crap, hyper-specific to you.
I'm so excited. Aren't you?
Now, as a side effect, searching through these can become better experience wise as well. They can use all that context and genuinely surface fewer, better results. But that's not the motivation of the e-commerce player anyways. If the ads work they'll be happy.
It certainly hasn't been optimized to anything in 1996. In 1996 it was people clumsily scanning print catalogs, spending 5 hours to upload 10 images on dialup and making a simple HTML page (no DB or any kind of backend) and putting their landline phone on it with a message to "call to checkout"
I know you were exaggerating for effect, but E-commerce and catalog normalization are definitely not "solved" everywhere.
McMaster Carr is a good example of a company that has 90%+ of their stuff ironed out, but most websites and especially small ecommerce isn't like that.
Right now, by comparison, it sounds like AI based shopping is still in the very early stages. Maybe further along than the early e-commerce, but still with a long way to go in its evolution. That'll probably happen quicker than with e-commerce, because a lot of the knowledge about what does or doesn't work has already been learned, but it sounds like it's still a long way behind. Caveat - I've never used it myself, so I don't know how far it is along that path, I'm just basing that from the article.
"I need mayo, ketchup, mustard and ground beef"
"Here is a list of products with prices ... proceed to pay $25 (yes/no)" Yes
"Your card has been charged. Delivery will knock on your door in 7 minutes"
I'll code that app in one month, what's there to lose?
The food delivery apps (zomato, Swiggy) support "agentic shopping" through an MCP server.
You can reserve a small amount of money in UPI apps that doesn't need any approval to be debited (only by a specific merchant).
Razorpay which is a payment gateway has an MCP server
So you can add razorpay in your app, and claude can pay.
Claude can access the Swiggy MCP server and search using natural language there.
The incentive for the food delivery app to participate in this is better targeted ads.
Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong, where handing over payment details in another chain.
Just let me buy my stuff in peace. Shopping is not the 'killer app' for GenAI.
"This isn't what I wanted to buy, I said my feet are a size 10 and these aren't even shoes!"
"You're absolutely right! Shoes go on feet, and each of your 10 feet could wear shoes. Would you like me to research shoes and purchase them for you?"
A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money.
This is why I think the "you're the product" saying is wrong. You're just some annoyance to managers (whether they're trying to use you just for user numbers and ad views or they're trying to get your money), whose product is the company (shares or just outright selling the company).
The same way I think shopping at Amazon is better than a place like Nike due to objectivity and comparison, I think a chat interface has the potential to take this to another level since places like Amazon have degraded considerably in terms of things like fake third party products and fake reviews.
Retailers do not want you to make better choices. They want you to buy the widget.
A lot of evidence suggests that also shoppers aren't that interested in making the best choice either. They want to make a tolerable choice with as little effort as possible. There is no basically no consumer market for "power shopping" outside of weird niches like pcpartpicker.com etc.
All you say is true for an aggregator like Amazon. But Amazon is better than Nike.com because as an aggregator they go from 1 to many retailers. LLMs will go from 1 aggregator (Amazon) to many so it will be better. And they don't have to invest a lot in UI/UX as chat is the interface.
Shoppers do not want to pay to shop. Retailers pay thousands to encourage you to shop with them. They are the economic buyers of this feature.
> for a lower price
Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
Am I the only one that think Amazon has gotten pretty awful in the last 5 years?
Not that a chat interface would be an improvement.
The only e-commerce site that fits this standard is that old one for buying (IIRC) nuts and bolts or such, that pops up on HN every other year, and whose name sadly escapes me now. Everyone else is ruthlessly optimizing their experience to fuck shoppers over and get them to products the vendor wants them to buy, not the products the shoppers actually want (or need).
> A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
That is precisely the point.
Chats may suck as an interface, but majority of the value and promise of end-user automation (and more than half the point of the term "User Agent" (as in, e.g., a web browser)) is in enabling comparison shopping in spite of the merchants, and more generally, helping people reduce information asymmetry that's intertwined with wealth and power asymmetry.
But it's not something you can generally sell to the vendors, who benefit from that asymmetry relative to their clients (in fact, I was dumbfounded to see so much interest on the sales/vendor side for such ideas, but I blame it on general AI hype).
Adversarial interoperability is the name of the game.
Sadly Sigma-Aldrich, the hyphenated retailer for chemistry, appears to have been covered in javascript sludge.
You realize what shoppers and vendors each consider to be "good" e-commerce sites are fundamentally opposed concepts?
I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
You think a crude, unoptimised "minefield" is the route that leads to something as delicate as a "fragile equilibrium?" I don't see something as carefully balanced as your unstable equilibrium even being something that could exist without the processes involved having been refined down to a science. The only real alternative that meets your narrative would be that this is an industry that runs entirely on hope and luck (and enough human sacrifices to keep ample supplies of both on hand).
If we are talking custom products or complex appliances that need a lot of guidance, then maybe chat interface is appropriate.
I dread the day when ads inevitably make their way into the main AI models. One of the things its currently good at will be destroyed.
Grandma wants to buy a good bike, but doesn't know about types of wheels or how many gears they need, or what type of frame is appropriate for their body type.
LLMs are already very good for shopping, but only as long as they sit on the outside.
I found the Jonsbo D41 without the help of LLM despite trying. (There might be a few smaller but they are 3x the price)
LLMs don’t weigh and surveil the options well. They find some texts like from Reddit in this case that mention a bunch subset of cases and that text will heavily shape the answer. Which is not what you want a commerce agent to do, you don’t want text prediction. I doubt that gives the obscure but optimal option in most cases.
That doesn't follow. In fact, having this capacity and information creates a moral dilemma, as giving customers objectively correct advice is, especially in highly competitive markets, bad for business. Ignorance is bliss for businesses, because this lets them bullshit people through marketing with less guilt, and if there's one thing any business knows, is that marketing has better ROI than product/service quality anyway.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-cha...
You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.
There’s a lot of this going on in AI at the moment. New folks come in thinking they have a magic solution and then produce a total train wreck as it turns out domain expertise is still a thing.
Was anyone suggesting AI would help with it? It seems from the article that Walmart (presumably experts in e-commerce) themselves willingly collaborated with open ai. Especially at Walmart's level, what even was the theory?
In any case. It seems that despite this poor result, Walmart decided to essentially go ahead anyway and partner with open ai to put their "own chatbot" inside the open ai app?
And given the past few decades there is no reason to not try to do that.
This probably means that OpenAI et al are fine-tuning salesman-like LLMs to "fix" that problem.
Can't wait for the future.
I’m currently using Gemini to research components for a remote controlled plane. I have the frame of the plane and now need to buy correctly specced servo motors, an engine, battery, etc etc. It has saved me so much time and educated me tremendously on how the different components interact and the options available.
If I could just press “buy” from within Gemini and pay via Google Pay (or better still, Apple Pay) I’d do it in a heartbeat.
If ChatGPT can do this today, I need to try it.
“””If I could just press “buy” from within Gemini and pay via Google Pay (or better still, Apple Pay) I’d do it in a heartbeat”””
Yeah, until that becomes enshittified and you don’t notice because you no longer do research on components.
The better comparison might be conversion rate for those who searched on Walmart.com vs those who searched within ChatGPT. Or maybe that is what they're comparing and I misunderstood?
The next generation will shop in a different way, if it's better, and the change will be gradual as well.
Adoption takes time.
The only thing holding back "Agentic Purchasing" is convenience. It's much easier to do a conventional search and click "Buy" then it is to have a conversation with some chatbot. If I walk into a store, most of the time I don't want to talk to a salesperson, I just want to grab the thing I came for and leave; this is also true for online shopping. The chatbot is another barrier to the purchase.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
> AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1% of traffic
https://abit.ee/en/cars/waymo-robotaxi-autonomous-driving-sa...
I sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
Does it actually need direct access to your wallet? I haven't tried it yet, but assumed it would work with a separate wallet, fed through by top-ups.
https://chatgpt.com/merchants/
Never, ever.
Amazon reviews are paid influence. Reddit posts are paid influence. Everything everywhere you read online is paid influence. I'd rank LLMs between "people I personally trust" and "random people online."
Operative word is "for now" - LLMs caught entrepreneurs unprepared, but they'll catch up and poison this too, same thing that happened with search giving rise to SEO.
Do you have a better alternative?
I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying that nearly every category of item requires its own strategy. For a brief period consumers were winning the information war and you could just go to Amazon, read the reviews, and get a superior product for cheap. We're now in a modern-but-old-fashioned situation. It's quite difficult to know if you're going to get ripped off, and you're forced to rely on more blunt heuristics. (eg: trust specific brands, buy things in person, etc.) None of these are perfect, but they are quickly becoming the best of some bad options.
Your product has to be a 10x improvement over the incumbent to be competitive.
In AI speak it would be the “extra-bitter” lesson I guess?
You need to add 10x resources to beat a product that’s already solved with mature tech.
If you want to buy a Walmart product, the easiest way is to go to Walmart. Why add an imprecise middle man in between?
Most people using AI chat are exploring ideas and solutions. They’re doodling, not shopping. Or in old timey parlance, they’re looky-loos or tire kickers at best.
Anyone who’s had to justify ad spend in e-commerce can tell you that some sources produce huge traffic with absolutely terrible conversion. Reddit and Pinterest pretty much blow for this reason, with limited exceptions. It’s also why TikTok and other influencer platforms really work.
Conversion requires a mental shift from discovery to demand.
Also, really hate summaries like this without the actual source so here are the main points from the actual source (WIRED https://archive.is/7DuEV):
1. Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT performed poorly, with conversion about one-third of Walmart’s normal site.
2. The experience failed largely because it forced single-item purchases instead of letting users build a cart.
3. Walmart is shifting to embedding its own assistant, Sparky, inside ChatGPT and keeping checkout on its own system.
4. ChatGPT is still valuable because it’s driving significantly more new customer traffic than search.
5. Purchases that did work were mostly practical, problem-solving items like supplements and tools.
6. Fully automated “agentic shopping” is still unlikely in the near term because people want control over purchases.
7. OpenAI is moving away from in-chat checkout and focusing on helping users research while merchants handle transactions.
In short, AI is useful for discovery, but traditional e-commerce flows still outperform it at closing sales.
I'm confused by the comment that it failed because it forced single item purchases. Most of my "ecommerce" use is researching and buying one item at a time.
The latest AI is trained on the average citizens social media output. Iq 90.
That’s why AI seemed smart. The bar will not be raised again. We’re cooked.
> You ask ChatGPT to setup a website and it instantly purchases web hosting and sets up the website
Multiple comments deflecting from the original shopping conversion failure to recommend ... building a whole new website (with hosting for some reason?). W/o bothering to look through commenter history, one has to assume there are a lot of chatbots on this site or else the people using this stuff have been lobotomized.
I'm sure it'll start happening too, and when that fails, the bots will, i don't know, invent a new macarena. We are definitely headed for an irredeemably stupid future.
Perhaps clickthrough is worse because there are fewer dark patterns involved and people are mostly just browsing and occasionally buying only what they need.
They didn't really seem to specify the "why" of it with any research. And weird that OAI wasn't supporting them to see wha the issue was.
The enshittification is upon us.