> 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.
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.
> (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 they operate in every day when dealing with organizatoins.
> (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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
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.
> for a lower price
Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
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 they operate in every day when dealing with organizatoins.
It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money.
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.
If we are talking custom products or complex appliances that need a lot of guidance, then maybe chat interface is appropriate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-cha...
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 sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
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."
Do you have a better alternative?
> AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1% of traffic
The enshittification is upon us.
If you want to buy a Walmart product, the easiest way is to go to Walmart. Why add an imprecise middle man in between?
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.