[HN Gopher] Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than we...
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Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
Author : speckx
Score : 391 points
Date : 2026-03-19 19:42 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (searchengineland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (searchengineland.com)
| kvisner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They have a solution and are trying to find a problem.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 $200/mo or more.
| lukan wrote:
| 20$ for a personal assistant is not much, but no, I surely
| don't trust those assistants to access my money.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I pay $200/mo for one assistant, from one company. The
| number of other companies that want the same kind of money
| for other assistants is increasing. I wish I could pay
| $200/mo and get all the companies.
| charcircuit wrote:
| That's why it would be important for the partners to support
| refunding.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| firefoxd wrote:
| 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?
| __alexs wrote:
| (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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-
| cha...
| bashkiddie wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| meroes wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| exegete wrote:
| The article says Walmart is not abandoning ChatGPT but is going
| to use their own app in Chat's ecosystem
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| 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.
| ares623 wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Users already use the internet to compare things. It makes no
| sense to bet on them not doing that.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Not so much and I'm certainly guilty of buying something
| from amazon because I'm already on amazon.com.
|
| I have my favorite set of retailers that I use for a fair
| number of my purchases, I'm sure a lot of people are like
| that.
| Elfener wrote:
| > 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).
| bko wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > impartial consistent system for shopping
|
| > for a lower price
|
| Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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_.
| danlitt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| But we know it and it's obvious.
| recursive wrote:
| Within a few years people will be accustomed to the idea
| of AI chatbots selling them stuff and it will be obvious
| then too. The first time paid placements appeared in a
| catalog, it was probably also not obvious then.
| bko wrote:
| 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?
| iso1631 wrote:
| more like 20 years. Basically when they introduced third
| party sellers.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| You can skip sponsored products
| __alexs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Maybe the best proxy metric is whether the customer
| returns the product. But the store will also be willing
| to eat more returns on a higher margin item if they make
| more profit at the end of the day.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| I don't think I agree. If I overpay by 10%, I'll never
| know it and probably wouldn't return it even if I did
| know--once the shrinkwrap is off, too late. If a superior
| product exists but I don't find it, by definition I
| wouldn't know and wouldn't return the thing I did buy.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Cynically, the customer might not know if they overpaid
| but the retailer doesn't care about that. Where "making
| the best choice" actually cashes out is the customer DAU
| dropping (rare) or product returns increasing.
| bko wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > (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 wrote:
| > 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).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _(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.
| busymom0 wrote:
| https://www.mcmaster.com/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's the one, thank you!
| jaapz wrote:
| Wow, that's amazing
| bandrami wrote:
| 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.
| froggit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| RockAuto also has what some might consider a "dated"
| interface, but honestly it's light years better than trying
| to use NAPA's or CarQuest's website or god forbid looking
| through dealership parts counter websites. I honestly wish
| regular retailers would have stuck more closely with what
| worked for more B2B focused ecommerce, i.e. I wish shopping
| Best Buy or Home Depot was more akin to McMaster, Fastenall
| or some of the nicer supply house web portals.
| maccard wrote:
| 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...
| skywhopper wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| > A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with
| this.
|
| Isn't there a Chinese messaging service (Weixin?) that has been
| very successful in getting people to buy stuff through it?
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Do you have any examples? Because from Amazon to Uber, they're
| not great from an end user perspective. It's not like people
| who like the website will stop using it because of chatgpt,
| this would be attracting people who complain about the
| website/app. People are always complaining about amazon for
| example, i don't like the experience but I haven't had all that
| much bad product experience from them, but people who keep
| saying they're getting bad products on Amazon can maybe use
| chatgpt, talk to it so it understands what they're looking for
| in natural language, in a way the search bar can't and keep
| their patronage.
|
| By the way, who names their AI "rufus" (amazon!)
| janalsncm wrote:
| I just had a horrible thought. Maybe online stores will just
| take away the ability for customers to see the full inventory
| and force you to go through the chatbot. This will allow them
| to fully control the shopping experience even more.
|
| If you want running shoes, you have to go through their
| chatbot.
|
| Amazon might already have the monopoly power to do this. They
| would just need to swap out the search bar for a chat box.
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| It's possible, but then wouldn't retailers who don't force
| their customers to crawl through an LLM maze eat their lunch?
| Natural economics at play would still happen I think
| janalsncm wrote:
| Maybe. In a world where people are already vendor locked to
| Prime or Walmart there's a nonzero switching cost. Amazon
| product search already has a ton of problems but they get
| away with it because of free 2 day shipping.
| hexasquid wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Next years headline will be
|
| > AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1%
| of traffic
| stavros wrote:
| Waymo cars cause 90% fewer accidents than human drivers:
|
| https://abit.ee/en/cars/waymo-robotaxi-autonomous-driving-
| sa...
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Yeah, but consumers can't buy Waymos. They can get
| dangerously unsafe Teslas and pretend it's the same tech.
| Lerc wrote:
| Is their issue that ChatGPT served their customers more than it
| served them?
| Vespasian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| In due time it will serve ChatGPT more than either
| casey2 wrote:
| Because most people can't read. Wait for agents generating
| personalized websites/self checkout apps.
| janalsncm wrote:
| This is from one of the links in the article
|
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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).
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| > perhaps they're just holding back
|
| Considering the money they need, they over promise and
| under deliver.
| latexr wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How would they mortally wound the software industry as of
| today?
|
| I find their software to be of subpar quality and
| resilience anyways.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Buying astral to get _uv_ is a wound but not a mortal
| once because it got forked this weekend.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Why would investors keep paying their OpenAI's engineers
| and power company, if they were on an obviously self-
| destructive trajectory?
| GolfPopper wrote:
| How is it "more profitable" to keep spending more than
| they make?
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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 a la Uber because they're
| interested in promoting a better future for humanity? I'm
| skeptical.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > 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.
| le-mark wrote:
| > 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| ForHackernews wrote:
| What you lose is control. Even in the case of an
| actually-intelligent agent, if you task a subordinate
| with producing a document for you, they are going to come
| up with something that is different from exactly what you
| had in mind. If they are really good, they might even
| surprise you and do a better job than than you'd have
| done yourself, but it still will be their vision, not
| yours.
|
| Your notion of a "mortal wound" to the software industry
| seems to assume that today's SaaS portals are the only
| form that industry can take. Great software _is_ "tool
| calls for agents". Those human agents who care about
| getting exactly the result they want will not be keen on
| giving up Photoshop for Photoshop-but-with-an-AI-in-
| front-of-it.
| layer8 wrote:
| > and it doesn't take "true AI" - the LLMs as we have
| today are enough already.
|
| I believe that relatively few people would agree with you
| on that point. LLMs aren't good enough (yet?), and very
| obviously so, IMO, to be autonomous problem solvers for
| the vast majority of problems being solved by software
| companies today.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They most certainly are not. With the current state of
| LLMs, anyone who puts them in charge of things is being a
| fool. They have zero intelligence, zero ability to cope
| with novel situations, and even for things in their
| training data they do worse than a typical skilled
| practitioner would. Right now they are usable only for
| something where you don't care about the quality of the
| result.
| janalsncm wrote:
| By this logic maybe AMD is holding back on making ROCm
| usable because it would crash chip margins and the global
| economy with it, so they let Nvidia have all the fun
| instead. It's selfless, really.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| > 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".
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Did they stop teaching "actions speak louder than words"
| in schools, or something?
| dylan604 wrote:
| "Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without
| wanting to put in the work for it."
|
| Pretty much the impetus behind a lot of theft. Sure,
| there's thieving because people can't afford food, but
| that's all theft. There's theft because they are addicts
| and don't want to sober up long enough to earn money, so
| they still things. There's others that can't afford
| something so rather than saving for it, they just take
| it.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| Is 'the work' not reflected in 'consequences' in terms of
| theft?
|
| I'm not sure how to convey this idea properly...Can't you
| view the repercussions of theft (Legal action, distrust,
| etc) as 'work' being put in? Sure, it's a different kind
| of work, but while I have a lack of motivation to want to
| work to buy a Lambo as I find them not worth the value, I
| also have a lack of motivation to steal a Lambo as I find
| it not worth the consequences.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I understand what you are saying but nonetheless struggle
| to view _the possibility_ of maybe getting caught and
| then maybe getting punished, as "work". It (the abstract
| concept of something possibly happening) fits into none
| of the definitions of "work" I have heard. Moreover, many
| crimes are committed without the perpetrator even
| _thinking_ of the consequences.
|
| Consider an alternative viewpoint: rather than contorting
| the definition of "work" in such a way and convincing
| everyone to accept the new definition, we might instead
| be content saying _" someone can want a thing, even very
| badly, without wanting to put in the work for it."_
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| Oh, I'm with you mate, I'm not trying to die on a hill
| over here re-defining 'work'. I was just looking from a
| more esoteric view, "Do you count the risk of
| consequences as potential effort" I think is at least
| more proper phrasing.
| DANmode wrote:
| "Effort" is a great wordchoice.
| dylan604 wrote:
| In normal society, people earn money within the legal
| confines of the society they are in. If you're a thief
| and trying to skirt that normal "earning of money", which
| is what normal people equate to "work", your work is
| scheming a plan to obtain the item without getting caught
| and possibly how to fence the item for money if you're
| not just using the item directly.
|
| Equating "work" as the repercussions is looking at things
| in strange way. That's just punishment for "working"
| outside of the legal confines of society.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Did they start teaching that all idioms are always true
| without nuance in schools, or something?
| danso wrote:
| > _Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without
| wanting to put in the work for it._
|
| Generally, such highly-motivated people end up being
| thieves and grifters
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| There's a difference between being interested in getting
| good at something and being good at something
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Exactly. Just because you're not good at something
| doesn't mean you don't want to be.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| wanting to be good at something is not exactly the same
| as being _interested_ in getting good at something, which
| carries the additional, nuanced, connotation of
| investment (or willingness to invest) towards this goal.
|
| e.g. many people want to live an active healthy
| lifestyle, but fewer are actually interested in doing so.
| infamous-oven wrote:
| 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.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Good luck with that at the shareholder meeting.
| MBCook wrote:
| And yet that's what all the AI boosters are claiming.
|
| What do you know. Reality does t match.
|
| I wonder if returns on ChatGPT purchased items are also
| higher.
| hadlock wrote:
| openai has.... I'm not sure but let's say 500m free
| users, and it's not unreasonable to assume they
| eventually hit 1b. That is a lot of advertising revenue,
| which is what powers companies like Google and even
| smaller companies with only 300m users like Twitter. If
| ecommerce isn't a major focus for OpenAI then their board
| members are asleep at the wheel.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Things that are not doing the thing.
| https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-
| the-...
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| > human time
|
| Maybe they just need to rewrite the prompt to say something
| like, "You want to get good at selling to humans. Money makes
| the world go around. It pays for the electricity you keep
| chugging. So quit being an effete twit and learn to sell.
| Would you like me to include a scene from David Mamet's
| 'Glengarry Glen Ross'?"
| rvz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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).
| antisthenes wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And quickly after that, we were meassuring traffic data with
| simple "how-many-requests-were-done" (including images) :-D
| TitaRusell wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| ChatGPT doesn't know what the best-converting dog food in
| Scranton, PA is. Amazon does.
|
| Anything that starts with chat history presumes the
| theoretical limit for ad effectiveness is higher than it is
| now, and chat is a better way of getting there than actual
| purchase history. I have a feeling it's not.
|
| Imagine a person who shops on Amazon for basically
| everything. So theoretically Amazon should know a ton about
| them, more than enough to put together a profile on that
| person.
|
| To say OpenAI could do a better job of selling products is
| to say they can do better than Amazon already does if you
| scroll through their personalized product recommendations.
| There is some better feed out there, or some better way of
| presenting the feed that Amazon hasn't thought of.
|
| I don't doubt it can be marginally better.
|
| I do doubt whether it can be double or triple digits better
| that can justify trillion dollar valuations. And I do doubt
| whether a model trained on Internet text rather than user
| interactions can do better.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| No... I'm not saying chatgpt will do better than amazon.
|
| >> passed in full to the e-commerce website that will use
| it to...
|
| I'm saying Amazon+chat data will do better than amazon.
|
| Thats the agentic shopping play.
|
| In the process note that the chat host also gets a lot of
| info over time.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Ok fair point, and the general principle of "more
| data=higher accuracy" probably applies.
|
| I think the issue is the tradeoff between accuracy and
| cost (on the seller's side). If you get more accurate and
| convert more but your costs go up too much, you actually
| lose money.
|
| Current systems are basically in a sweet spot of speed,
| cost, and accuracy.
|
| And I will go back to my previous point that I believe
| there is simply a limit to how much people will buy, and
| it might already be saturated. I could be wrong though.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| If I can tell ChatGPT to order me what I need to replace the
| bottom element on my water heater, and here's a picture of
| the ridiculously long model number, that saves me quite a bit
| of time.
|
| I used that as an example because I did that last week, apart
| from me just going to the store to get the links that it
| brought up.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Conversely, I did something similar, but I took a picture
| of the model number, copy/pasted the text from the image
| into a search engine, and that was that. Either way you're
| taking a picture and performing a manual step (query an
| LLM, query a search engine)
|
| I would never trust an LLM to accurately identify and
| purchase something for me based on a picture, a prompt, and
| a prayer.
| radus wrote:
| It's simple, just tell it not to hallucinate.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Of course anecdotal but 2 months ago I tried to do that for
| a missing bolt in a popular scooter (roughly 7 years old,
| bought 2nd hand so didn't know exact specs). I fed it
| various images that I took + internet images. It found a
| bunch of local shops but always found the wrong part (but
| very similar looking). I double-checked everything multiple
| times, via multiple contexts, even different pre-prompts
| from various sources, and asking plenty of questions. We
| chatted in thinking mode for what felt like ages, and
| according to paragraphs explaining why it HAD to be the
| right one, multiple times, with evidence that it sometimes
| gladly generated in image form (often completely garbage
| imagery e.g. with half-drawn bolts extruding from multiple
| surfaces). Eventually it found something very plausible
| which I ordered. It was the wrong part.
|
| I had to get someone on the phone to help me find and order
| the right part (which was on their website, for many years
| according to waybackmachien).
|
| I love LLMs but it's still totally hit/miss what you get.
| I'd rather not give it write-access to my bank account just
| yet.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| butlike wrote:
| 30 years ago is 1996. Amazon had been around for 2 years
| (they were incorporated in 1994).
| chasd00 wrote:
| > 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.
| jazzypants wrote:
| This is a very confusing comment to me. How were people
| buying books from Amazon in the 90s if it wasn't e-commerce?
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_e-commerce
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| 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
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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
|
| 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)
| kenjackson wrote:
| This is all valid (except probably the last sentence), but it
| also describes so many attempted changes right until they
| become darn near the default.
|
| This sounds like why I heard Redfin wouldn't work, or Netflix,
| or Amazon, or Uber, or PayPal, etc.... There are always these
| business complexities that make it seem like these spaces have
| too much friction, but if there's enough money - if it can be
| done then people will figure it out.
| wavemode wrote:
| tbh this sounds revisionist... I don't recall anyone saying
| that any of those services "wouldn't work". Uber I suppose is
| one where people thought they might run into regulatory
| problems, and with some of those companies people were
| concerned about profitability. But none those companies have
| I ever heard that the product itself was not going to work or
| be useful. (Nor, indeed, that the product was tested at large
| scale and performed 3x worse than the incumbent...)
| kenjackson wrote:
| Not revisionist at all.
|
| or Netflix, or Amazon, or Uber, or PayPal, etc... Netflix
| and Amazon both were competing against brick and morter
| that were everywhere. Blockbuster was in every town,
| usually in every major neighborhood. The thought was that
| on Friday night people wanted to get a movie they wanted,
| not just happen to have the movie that was shipped to them.
| And then with streaming it was "the content on Netflix is
| old and dated, who would want this?" They slowly ate from
| below. Blockbuster scrambled with their own mailed disc
| offering. And died before it even had a chance to confront
| streaming.
|
| Repeat this story with B&N where people said that you had
| to browse the books physically. You couldn't just blindly
| order online and wait two weeks to get the book (remember
| they got big before "2 Day Prime").
|
| With PayPal it was about "they don't understand banking or
| payment -- and it wants to be both?!".
|
| For this OpenAI experience, it doesn't sound great. I have
| accounts with these places I buy things from. I want to
| make sure I get my Prime shipping and digital discount via
| using the Amazon app. But if you could find a way to
| integrate my accounts all into ChatGPT things might be
| different. In the same way I used to never use Apple
| Wallet, but now it really is my go to place for everything
| I have a card for. I don't have to worry about having my
| grocery loyalty card or my football season tickets with me
| or my car insurance card. It's all in wallet. The Apple
| Wallet sucked until it was suddenly great.
| mosdl wrote:
| Sorry that is revisionist. The idea of getting a movie
| mailed or streamed always sounded better than shitty
| blockbuster with limited selection and late fees.
|
| The growth was fast for netflix/amazon/paypal/etc and
| people saw how it was an improvement from the get go.
| djeastm wrote:
| I seem to recall a lot more hype for these companies than
| people saying it won't work. You seem to be cherry
| picking from the naysayers of the time, but not the broad
| consensus.
| foobiekr wrote:
| A lot of the AI companies visibly suffer from the engineer's
| disease. It's kind of interesting to look at them through that
| lens, and of course, the claims they make about the future.
| acedTrex wrote:
| I think the most telling example of this is ilya himself
| being confused about why the "economic impact" of these ultra
| smart models is lagging where he thought it would be.
|
| All the silicon valley pie in the sky elites seemingly
| completely missed the innately HUMAN nature of our systems.
| The system was never predicated primarily on raw logic or
| intelligence. Its always been primarily about people.
| mooreds wrote:
| If you're interested in an economist's take on AI, I
| enjoyed this podcast:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-ai-gets-hired-
| ameri...
|
| It takes a long time for technology to diffuse through
| businesses. A long time.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh
| McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush:
| infrastructure and trust_
|
| Does anybody else just feel the aloof out of touchness just
| oozing from that sentence? " _Trust_ ", as if this is just any
| old metric they merely have to work to increase.
|
| This is what I want from a purchasing agent: I make a list of
| items that I repeatedly buy (mostly household supplies), and
| that I keep roughly updated with my inventory / need. The agent
| tracks prices and sales across all web stores, making
| appropriate purchase decisions based on which is the least
| expensive, combining shipping, taking advantage of sales to
| stock up, etc. For other one-time purchase items, I input what
| I am looking for and can create a persistent pan-site shopping
| cart that once again minimizes costs and shipping fees. Being
| very explicit here: the main goal of an " _agent_ " should be
| to represent and carry out _my own interests_.
|
| And these functionalities have been straightforwardly doable
| without "AI" for the past few decades, except for the _glaring_
| incentives against them! It is in every web store 's interest
| to _undermine_ customers ' ability to obtain semantic pricing,
| shop around, create a cart independent of their site, etc.
| These incentives are why when you visit any web store these
| days, the _very first_ thing they do is hassle you with
| CAPTCHAs (and the bad ones keep doing it throughout the
| session!) - they want to make sure you 're an actual
| computationally-unassisted human sitting there, wasting your
| personal time with their bloated pages that take tens of
| seconds to download and render, so that you don't spend that
| time being a more efficient market actor.
|
| Now, does "AI" have the capability to go against these trends
| and enable user-centric algorithmic shopping and purchasing?
| Perhaps, and I hope so! But it's certainly not going to be led
| by these popups on web stores nagging me if I want to chat
| instead of doing the thing I went there to do (which when you
| think about it, this is just the latest instance of these
| stores trying to make you waste your time on their site).
| Rather, it will come from completely third party services (or
| ideally software) setting out to act in customers' interests,
| and performing adversarial interoperability to achieve this!
| xnx wrote:
| > E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for
| the last 30 years
|
| Sort of, but there's a ton of middlemen between "resources in
| the ground" and "product in my hand". For example, how much
| utility is there in a "store" to thee consumer at this point?
| Let me buy from the manufacturer.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Manufacturers themselves generally don't want to sell
| directly to consumers: consumers are fickle and need support
| and have questions and sometimes want refunds or returns and
| if you sell directly to them, you need to have the staff and
| policies to deal with all of that. They're also located all
| over the world, and you might not want to deal with figuring
| out taxes and duties etc for shipping your product around and
| figuring out your warranty obligations everywhere you want to
| sell.
|
| Much easier if you can sell wholesale (sometimes via
| distributors) to a retailer or network of retailers, and the
| retailer is responsible for owning the customer relationship,
| dealing with their part of import/export, local regulations,
| etc. Retailers are businesses who will buy hundreds of your
| product at a time, can accept it as palletized freight, and
| pay you via bank EFTs instead of credit cards.
|
| There are notable exceptions to this model like Amazon's FBA
| system, but they're the outliers. I'm sure we can all point
| to inefficiencies in legacy product distribution networks but
| they solve some real problems.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Seems like a ripe opportunity for partnering with one of these
| companies that are already good at it?
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > OpenAI is new to it, and if I had to guess, not that
| interested in getting good at it.
|
| Maybe if they burn more tokens the answer will become clear
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| >I sort of trust them to make product recommendations
|
| Never, ever.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| 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."
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Since LLMs are trained on "random people online", why are
| they not of equal rank?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I see LLM as the average of multiple random people and
| traditional common sense from wikipedia and books.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| It's worth keeping in mind that some of those random
| people are trolls.
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Drifting off topic now, but Amazon could easily implement
| a few measures to really lock down reviews, but they
| purposely leave it gameable because it drives sales.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Even if they're (somehow) bias-free, you're still stuck with
| "the state of the internet circa 20XX" from the training
| data.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/merchants/
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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?"
| DANmode wrote:
| "You are an unfit mother."
|
| https://youtu.be/lajnHjRp9Z0
| qoez wrote:
| 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)
| brador wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| source?
| asimpletune wrote:
| 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.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| That is spot on.
|
| They forgot the first thing. Why would a customer use it and
| does it help them buy more stuff so I make more money?
|
| Just putting an AI in there for the heck of it is doomed to
| failure.
|
| I can think of a few different ways AI could be used inside a
| shopping app especially at the size of a company like
| walmart. Such as 'hey try our picknick planner?', 'need some
| sort of DIY project? Ask our bot for help'. Guide the user on
| what they need for a project and hey look here we have that
| stuff in stock at your local store today.
|
| The cart experience one of the last places I would put an AI.
| At that point the customer is 'done' and they want out.
| blitzar wrote:
| is 3x worse like a 300% decrease?
| phyzome wrote:
| Yeah, unclear what they mean. 1/3 the conversion rate, maybe?
| pluc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Zambyte wrote:
| Honesty implies intent. People can use LLMs to amplify
| dishonest messages (see: marketing), but I don't think it's
| reasonable to claim that LLMs are lying to describe when they
| produce incorrect information against the will of both the
| creator and operator.
| recursive wrote:
| I read it a different way. There's less upside to an LLM
| being "honest", since they're already making false
| statements regardless of intent. They're already non-
| trustworthy. So there's less to lose by being marketing
| channels.
| pluc wrote:
| We'll see once they pipe ads in there if they'll limit
| themselves to relevant ads or of they'll toss all pretense
| of caring out the window
| skywhopper wrote:
| 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.
| ZiiS wrote:
| 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???
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Yeah this article is very lacking in detail. If they A-B tested
| it though (which seems like an extremely basic thing to try
| before making a decision like this) I think that would satisfy
| your objection.
| bilekas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?"
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just because you're not the target audience doesn't mean
| there's not a real target audience.
|
| There a people today learning to use an LLM instead of an
| actual search engine. For these types of people whatever
| happens outside of the LLM app is invisible to them. The social
| media apps did similar where they started letting people
| purchase directly within the app. People started looking at
| these shops rather than doing searches for it elsewhere.
|
| Buying things on a social media app is crazy to me, but I don't
| use the social media apps. Buying things from an LLM app seems
| crazy to you, (because it's new and it's borked is fixable),
| but to people that first turn to their LLM app of choice that
| decision isn't so crazy.
| hattmall wrote:
| Social media apps generally opened up new markets though of
| their existing user bases as sellers. Perhaps chatgpt could
| know everything in your house, if you don't actually use it,
| and pair you with a neighbor that needs it!
| bilekas wrote:
| What a distopian hellscape you've painted into my brain. I
| work long and hard to not interact with my neighbors.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| that's sad.
|
| my neighbors are wonderful and i like chatting to them.
|
| are you the bad neighbor?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yes. Not interacting with neighbors is something that can
| happen naturally, but working hard to not is an entirely
| different thing.
|
| Knowing your neighbors is a good thing. Even if it's just
| a friendly hi. You don't have to hang out, but if there's
| ever something you need like "did I leave the sprinkler
| on" or "did I leave the stove on" or "borrow a cup of
| sugar", it helps being on speaking terms with a neighbor
| rather than your first interaction with them is because
| you need something.
|
| Caveat being that you live next door to Epstein or
| similar where not knowing them will be beneficial when
| the police come asking questions.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Just because you're not the target audience doesn't mean
| there's not a real target audience.
|
| Just because a target-audience has >0 members doesn't mean
| the target is plausible or good. :p
|
| ______________
|
| To transcribe an old Dilbert comic, which I think captures
| the sometimes, uh, _aspirational_ nature of "target
| audiences":
|
| 1. Dogbert, presenting a labeled circle: "Your target market
| is the high income group. They're the only ones who can
| afford your product."
|
| 2. Dogbert, adding circles to Venn-diagram: "More
| specifically, they must be rich, tasteless and easily amused.
| I've located a cluster of them for study."
|
| 3. Scene change to outdoor lawn, one suitably-dressed man
| confiding to another: "That dog's watching us golf again."
| sayYayToLife wrote:
| As bad as the idea of a solution looking for a problem, this is
| peak science. Copernicus who figured out that the Earth was not
| at the center of the solar system, he had a solution. The
| general word is called deduction.
|
| Personally I am an inductivist, I imagine you may be too.
|
| Think top down decisioning is deduction. Bottom up is
| induction.
|
| You might think induction is amazing but if you ask yourself
| "Are there any black swans?" and your answer is "No I've never
| seen any so there can't be any black swans." The issue is
| you've never actually seen every Swan and actually there are
| black swans in Australia.
|
| Point being, we don't know if this is a good thing until it's
| tested.
|
| This is an age-old problem.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where
| things could go wrong
|
| It sounds like you're excusing AI, what other systems is AI not
| suitable for?
| conductr wrote:
| When I read that sentence I thought of travel booking sites.
| The kind that are unavailable to help you when you arrive at
| a hotel that has no record of your reservation. The kind I
| avoid precisely because I've had enough problems like that
| where it's not worth saving 10% and I'd rather just book
| direct and avoid the headaches.
|
| When the hotel, airline, car rental, etc. can't even talk to
| me because of the channel I purchased from that's a problem.
| So I'd expect similar issues from buying through a AI
| interface. Walmart will say something about "we can't see
| your order details" when your delivery driver forgot the
| milk.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I'm not promoting "ChatGPT Checkout", however, just because
| something sucks now doesn't mean it will suck forever. I'm
| confident they'll iterate and improve. I say this because my
| 14-year-old niece's entire world seems to be ChatGPT; it's
| pretty much the only way she interacts with the internet. I
| don't think she's alone - all her young peers are like this,
| too. Retailers know this, so they've got no choice but to
| improve the experience of purchasing crap through an AI chat
| system.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I disagree, walmart's website isn't nice. a lot of commerce
| sites are cancer!
|
| if i can just ask chatgpt or gemini to shop I'd love that.
|
| Just navigating their sites for items is a pain, I can imagine
| an LLM being great at finding items, and facilitating the
| browsing experience. My only concern would be having to chat
| with it a lot, and any dark patterns coercing impulse
| purchases.
| 65 wrote:
| Clicking buttons is easier than writing a prompt.
| dkarl wrote:
| These interactions really don't get the testing they need.
|
| When they aren't designed, how do you know how to test?
|
| Over the weekend, I was directed to file a police report with a
| chatbot and could not complete it because it was asking for
| information that did not exist and did not apply to my case.
|
| (I'm sure somebody is going to say that this can be solved by
| having LLMs role play as victims and have an LLM observe and
| decide what's a failing test case and what isn't.)
| hownottowrite wrote:
| 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.
| martinald wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| hownottowrite wrote:
| 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.
| RA_Fisher wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| holografix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| so what, i want to build a little remote controlled plane
| that works
| WarmWash wrote:
| >...is to make people stop thinking for themselves and
| allowing a corporation to do it for them.
|
| Insert that "always has been" meme.
|
| Microsoft was brought to court in the 90's for shoehorning in
| Internet Explorer.
| nope1000 wrote:
| I would assume the average purchase in Walmart is significantly
| more low-tech than this though
| Vexs wrote:
| It's not even just that- with component selection you have a
| handful of datasheets that give you (ideally) fairly truthful
| information about the device. You can rather
| deterministically look at these and compare them.
|
| Regular consumer products? Good fucking luck. Anywhere an LLM
| pulls from is probably going to be mostly SEO'd listicles.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| 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.
| epsteingpt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
| sarbanharble wrote:
| 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.
| npilk wrote:
| 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?
| Kuyawa wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dessimus wrote:
| I highly doubt that a consumer would see any financial benefit
| from this. Sure different grocery stores use different products
| as loss leaders, but the trade off is time, so rather than the
| cost of having one person go to one store and by X number of
| items, we're sending either one person to three stores for ~X/3
| items, or three separate people to three stores. All of which
| will take more total time than 1 store, which puts more
| resource demand and will cost more to the consumer.
|
| Also, it would rather be in the faceless ai shop's interest to
| arbitrage orders, always show the "middle" price but use the
| cheapest one for orders.
| ta9000 wrote:
| I'm shocked, shocked that an SEO website would say ChatGPT bad.
| bgirard wrote:
| I think they're thinking about this wrong.
|
| I get all my groceries deliver to my doorstep via Walmart
| delivery pass. The thing I'm really missing is having AI curate
| meal planning to my family's preferences. I already feed ChatGPT
| my family' preferences (e.g. Kid A doesn't eat X Y Z and liked
| meal A B C, kid B likes ...) and ChatGPT is helping me build meal
| plans. With my preferences we can quickly nail down a meal plan
| for the week.
|
| The slowest part of my meal planning is going through Walmart's
| slow site where each page load is 2-3 seconds and it takes
| several page load per item. Once it can translate my meal plan
| into a grocery checkout from Walmart I'm all set.
| rawbot wrote:
| So we need a Walmart MCP then...
| justacatbot wrote:
| The catalog normalization problem is real and severely
| underestimated. I ran into this building on top of product data
| feeds -- even with a single retailer, inconsistency in titles,
| attributes, and categorization is staggering. LLMs are great at
| reasoning but they inherit all that messy upstream data, so
| agentic shopping will keep stumbling until the data layer gets
| cleaner.
| michaelksaleme wrote:
| This tracks with the broader AI productivity paradox data. BCG's
| March study found AI oversight causes 33% increased decision
| fatigue in workers -- but workers who used AI to reduce
| repetitive work reported lower burnout.
|
| The variable isn't whether AI is present. It's whether AI makes
| decisions well. A checkout flow where the AI makes worse purchase
| decisions than a static website is the consumer-facing version of
| the same problem enterprises face with AI agents: capability
| without governance = worse outcomes, not better.
| runako wrote:
| This partnership was doomed to fail.
|
| Walmart does not, over 10 years after they were released, even
| accept the contactless payment systems in common use. Instead,
| they push their in-house version in part so they can capture the
| relevant customer data.
|
| And we're meant to believe that Walmart planned to outsource the
| entire series of touchpoints represented by the discovery &
| checkout process? Yeah, okay.
|
| This was never going to be more than an experiment for Walmart.
| exabrial wrote:
| The first comment is probably spot on. I'll add one thing:
|
| Speed is your greatest feature. LLMs are slow. Loading 450mb of
| javascript to the client just to buy a bag of Doritos is slow.
|
| Server side rendering owns here.
| levmiseri wrote:
| This seems to be comparing apples to oranges. The intent of the
| users inside ChatGPT and on the website would be vastly
| different. Comparing them doesn't make much sense sans other
| variables (= better understanding the intent)
| oofbaroomf wrote:
| ChatGPT recommended me some good hard drives for price per TB,
| and one particularly cheap one had direct checkout with Walmart,
| so I tried it, because why not? It let me get all the way to the
| payment step before it told me it was out of stock. Walmart's
| website told me it was out of stock when I decided to click on
| the link. This is probably part of why it doesn't convert.
| jms703 wrote:
| This is my experience also, when trying chatgpt to purchase.
| alex43578 wrote:
| That's typical of my experience with all of these stock-
| aggregator sites. Either the best price is some dodgy or
| outright fake storefront, the item's OOS from the real vendor,
| or the price is out of date.
|
| Trying to buy things like GPUs or SSDs are a joke. I really
| wish even one vendor would just implement an actual waiting
| list, locked to an account with a verified address and purchase
| history. I'm fine to wait for my purchase, but having to race
| bots for a lottery ticket purchase is a pain.
| jborden13 wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity for a live inventory context layer
| before an LLM makes recommendations
| brookst wrote:
| Check out UCP
| kingjimmy wrote:
| do we need another protocol for this? seems like a stream
| data problem more than anything
| keeda wrote:
| On a related note, I think that's a good monetization vector
| for chatbots. Long back I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few USB
| hard drives with very specific requirements -- including a
| small size and weight ("can be duct-taped to a tablet form-
| factor device without being obtrusive and constantly falling
| off"), low cost, and speed fast enough to boot an OS from.
| After a pretty technical conversation, it came up with 3 very
| specific products, one which ended up being the start point of
| the one I actually purchased on Amazon.
|
| I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated
| links, that conversation could have been monetized in a
| mutually beneficial way.
|
| I keep thinking of that interaction whenever the discussion of
| ads on chatbots crops up. In an ideal world, model providers
| could better capture the value they provide. Unfortunately, I
| suspect such conversations are too rare, and often harder to
| monetize. (Like that time free tier ChatGPT helped me recover
| $500 in compensation for an airline delay. Great value for me,
| but no upside for OpenAI.)
|
| Unfortunately given the amounts and timelines of returns that
| investors expect from OpenAI, and their scale, and with ChatGPT
| constrained to its "Free Consumer-facing Internet App" form
| factor, they are doomed to have to trade in the reserve
| currency of the web: ads.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Gemini does this, it has Google Shopping links.
| otherme123 wrote:
| >I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated
| links, that conversation could have been monetized in a
| mutually beneficial way.
|
| I also ask LLMs for product recomendations. But the moment I
| suspect they are hidding the best items (not paying for the
| ad) to push the second best (not even talking about pushing
| shit as good products because they pay more) is the moment
| the LLM loses its value as recomender.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| How do you know what recommendations you can trust from the
| LLM output?
| qup wrote:
| You don't, but if they recommend second best options with
| any frequency, you'll find out eventually.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| You don't. Use various other LLMs to check each other's
| work.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| So the only way this can work fairly if Walmart, etc
| implements MCP/API?
| wat10000 wrote:
| The trouble is that monetization and usefulness tend to be in
| conflict. It starts out as, show affiliate links _if_ there
| are any. Then it turns into, prefer targets that we have
| affiliate agreements for. Then, don 't show products unless
| we have affiliate agreements. Then, prioritize ones that give
| us more money. And on and on.
|
| If they want to capture some of the value they provide, they
| should do it the standard fashion where they directly capture
| value from me by having me pay.
| dmorrison1 wrote:
| My AI agents recommended RAM, GPU, and CPU upgrades, but deemed
| the prices were still pre-their-existence, when I went to the
| links they sent they were often 2x more expensive.
| cat-turner wrote:
| Turns out real-time inventory access is not a trivial issue.
| tmaly wrote:
| I had the opposite, but it was for a SSD for a raspberry pi 5.
| I asked it to look online for good price. It found a place, and
| I ordered it. It was not a well known site like Walmart, but I
| got what I needed.
| dawnerd wrote:
| The fake product scammers are going to absolutely love people
| like you. Glad it worked out for you but that's putting a lot
| of blind trust in it.
| internetter wrote:
| We are talking about the instant checkout feature:
| https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/
|
| Assuming you visited this "not a well known site" directly,
| you did not use the "ChatGPT checkout" feature discussed in
| TFA
| mosaibah wrote:
| Checkout conversion is the wrong metric. Walmart's funnel has 20
| years of A/B tests behind every button placement, so of course a
| brand-new chat interface loses there. The interesting question is
| whether chat wins at discovery, not checkout
| Terr_ wrote:
| I fear "discovery" will end up being a corporate euphemism for
| "shilling", worse than any search-engine manipulation since it
| has the potential to be so much subtler, pervasive, and
| parasocial.
|
| The kind of microcosm parodied by _The Truman Show_ is becoming
| plausible, at least digitally.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| This is a great summary of the current AI era.
|
| Walmart's goal is to sell more things. Using AI did not help to
| achieve that goal. Is this a failure? No, we need to define a
| new metric based on what AI can do.
|
| Same thing with software.
|
| Are we shipping better software to happier customers? No?
| Better measure token usage, number of lines changed, and
| "developer velocity" instead.
| 6thbit wrote:
| Either wrong or insufficient metric.
|
| They could be converting on products the user didn't even begin
| with an intention to buy, which would be impossible to compare
| with their existing flows.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Personally, I cancelled my subscription the day that they
| announced there would be ads in ChatGPT. Not that I was surprised
| on that day.
|
| I find it kind of fascinating seeing people now debate the ins
| and outs of just exactly how useful the ads/affiliate schemes
| inside the chatbot are.
|
| Pretty much in the same way that I'm fascinated about people
| debating the quality of ads shown in their browser while I've
| been using ad blockers for forever now and cannot imagine seeing
| the web without them.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| enshitification at scale, propped up by noise/water-pollution
| datacenters the size of several football fields, but all we care
| about is the price of RAM. cheers!
| cat-turner wrote:
| They don't want complete shopping automation because if it really
| worked, people would buy LESS. Walmarts in person and online
| storefront is engineered to get people to buy things they didn't
| come in for. Upselling is programmed at every step.
| cat-turner wrote:
| A lot of people don't know this, but businesses pay (in terms
| of providing Walmart more inventory) for access to specific
| shelves. Their thinking that better positioning on the shelf
| leads to more sales. There are entire businesses built on
| optimizing endcaps.
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