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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.

Sounds like an opportunity for a live inventory context layer before an LLM makes recommendations

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 Either the best price is some dodgy or outright fake storefront, the item's OOS from the real vendor, or the price is out of date.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.

This is my experience also, when trying chatgpt to purchase.

> 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.

Seems like a ripe opportunity for partnering with one of these companies that are already good at it?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

> 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!

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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)

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.

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?"

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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!)

> 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?

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.

The article says Walmart is not abandoning ChatGPT but is going to use their own app in Chat’s ecosystem

> (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.

> (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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

I would assume the average purchase in Walmart is significantly more low-tech than this though

In due time it will serve ChatGPT more than either

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.

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.

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.

I fear "discovery" will end up being a corporate euphemism for "shilling", worse than any search-engine manipulation since it'll be so much subtler.

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.

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.

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.

So we need a Walmart MCP then...

Next years headline will be

> AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1% of traffic

> 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.

>I sort of trust them to make product recommendations

Never, ever.

They have a solution and are trying to find a problem.

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

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).

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.

Yeah, unclear what they mean. 1/3 the conversion rate, maybe?

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?"

source?

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