> Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.
It turns out when you step outside of “hard tech” problems like building GPT6 there are all of these details others have solved already. E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
OpenAI is new to it, and if I had to guess, not that interested in getting good at it.
I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so. They expect their many failures and short-comings to be shored up by continuous model training.
But that, of course, means that in the meantime it will suck and nobody will use it.
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).
Why do you foresee OpenAI’s involvement in the software business mitigating the resistance to interoperability and companies making money through productization? If they were actually interested in solving those problems instead of trying to secure themselves the biggest slice of economic pie, wouldn’t they have been happy about Chinese companies distilling their models? Are they engagement-juicing inn their heavily subsidized service à la Uber because they’re interested in promoting a better future for humanity? I’m skeptical.
> 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?
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
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> (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.
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.
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?
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.
> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying.
I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
When I shop for special hardware (e.g. bicycle shift gear) it is usually underspecified.
If the information does not exist in the text block, a chat bot is of no use.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?"
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.
What if they made instant checkout actually instant? You ask ChatGPT to setup a website and it instantly purchases web hosting and sets up the website there. You can't beat a 100% conversion rate by actually checking out instantly. If you didn't like that host you can ask it to find it alternative and ChatGPT would automatically attempt a refund and then purchase from someone else.
I'd become afraid to ask that bot anything, not knowing what it would automatically try to purchase for me. Paying for the bot itself is already a lot: $20/mo to $200/mo or more.
What are we talking about here? ChatGPT as an interface to buy groceries? Or ChatGPT as an interface to build a website. I fail to see how these would be related other than using a specific technology
> 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.
> Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Amazon one-click.
It turns out when you step outside of “hard tech” problems like building GPT6 there are all of these details others have solved already. E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
OpenAI is new to it, and if I had to guess, not that interested in getting good at it.
I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so. They expect their many failures and short-comings to be shored up by continuous model training.
But that, of course, means that in the meantime it will suck and nobody will use it.
But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it.
(This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. Not to software or computing, just to all the software vendors, whose job is to slice off pieces of computational universe, put them in boxes to prevent interoperability, and give each a name so it's a "product" that can be sold or rented).
Sam Altman doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and has time and again shown he has no restraint for trampling over others to further his own goals. Why would e-commerce be where he draws the line?
Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious:
1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status quo and milking it indefinitely (i.e. while the models aren't yet good enough to reliably single-shot complex software products from half-baked prompts, because once they get there, disruption will happen organically)
2) trying to compete with ~every other software product today is not likely to succeed in the end; a serious attempt would still burn down the software industry, but the major players don't have the capacity to handle it all at once, and doing it gradually will give enough time for regulatory agencies to try and stop it; either way, no one wins
I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.
Considering the money they need, they over promise and under deliver.
I believe that it can still work and I won't claim about being unsurprised about this failure. But this is a great opportunity to execute this problem really well if OpenAI and others are not interested in getting good at this.
Perplexity also attempted this, got sued by Amazon and it appears semi-abandoned.
The only problem is that it must be quicker or just as quick as a Google search, and also compatible with the existing checkout flows.
Any details on that? I feel the answer is more likely there than in "friction".
Hardly any purchase of consequence is so sensitive to friction that the difference between Google Search and an LLM response matters (especially that in reality, we're talking 20+ manual searches per one LLM response). I.e. I'm not going to use LLMs advise on some random 0-100$ purchase anyway, and losing #$ on a ##$ purchase due to suboptimal choice is not that big of a deal - but I absolutely am going to consult it (and have it compile tables and verify sources) on a $500+ purchase and for those I can afford spending few more minutes on research (or rather few hours less, compared of doing it the usual way).
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.
A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money.
This is why I think the "you're the product" saying is wrong. You're just some annoyance to managers (whether they're trying to use you just for user numbers and ad views or they're trying to get your money), whose product is the company (shares or just outright selling the company).
The same way I think shopping at Amazon is better than a place like Nike due to objectivity and comparison, I think a chat interface has the potential to take this to another level since places like Amazon have degraded considerably in terms of things like fake third party products and fake reviews.
Retailers do not want you to make better choices. They want you to buy the widget.
A lot of evidence suggests that also shoppers aren't that interested in making the best choice either. They want to make a tolerable choice with as little effort as possible. There is no basically no consumer market for "power shopping" outside of weird niches like pcpartpicker.com etc.
> for a lower price
Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
The only e-commerce site that fits this standard is that old one for buying (IIRC) nuts and bolts or such, that pops up on HN every other year, and whose name sadly escapes me now. Everyone else is ruthlessly optimizing their experience to fuck shoppers over and get them to products the vendor wants them to buy, not the products the shoppers actually want (or need).
> A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
That is precisely the point.
Chats may suck as an interface, but majority of the value and promise of end-user automation (and more than half the point of the term "User Agent" (as in, e.g., a web browser)) is in enabling comparison shopping in spite of the merchants, and more generally, helping people reduce information asymmetry 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.
You realize what shoppers and vendors each consider to be "good" e-commerce sites are fundamentally opposed concepts?
I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
If we are talking custom products or complex appliances that need a lot of guidance, then maybe chat interface is appropriate.
Grandma wants to buy a good bike, but doesn't know about types of wheels or how many gears they need, or what type of frame is appropriate for their body type.
LLMs are already very good for shopping, but only as long as they sit on the outside.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-cha...
And given the past few decades there is no reason to not try to do that.
This probably means that OpenAI et al are fine-tuning salesman-like LLMs to "fix" that problem.
Can't wait for the future.
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.
> AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1% of traffic
https://abit.ee/en/cars/waymo-robotaxi-autonomous-driving-sa...
I sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
Does it actually need direct access to your wallet? I haven't tried it yet, but assumed it would work with a separate wallet, fed through by top-ups.
https://chatgpt.com/merchants/
Never, ever.
Amazon reviews are paid influence. Reddit posts are paid influence. Everything everywhere you read online is paid influence. I'd rank LLMs between "people I personally trust" and "random people online."
Operative word is "for now" - LLMs caught entrepreneurs unprepared, but they'll catch up and poison this too, same thing that happened with search giving rise to SEO.
Do you have a better alternative?
If you want to buy a Walmart product, the easiest way is to go to Walmart. Why add an imprecise middle man in between?
The enshittification is upon us.
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.
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.
> 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.