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Comment by liamconnell | Hacker News Reader

Yes that's what I meant. But Amazon will fight for its life to stop this. So OpenAI will have to go to other retailers, which don't have the same product catalogue size as Amazon. Best case scenario: Target or Walmart. But there is a reason that OpenAI announced deals with Etsy and Shopify rather than those.

And OpenAI doesn't have as much product insight as the retailers so they have to rely on the retailer to choose which is the "best" mechanical keyboard for this person. And at that point, pretty much all of the shopping value is being provided by the retailer rather than ChatGPT, so why would they get much money?

There's a market for this but its not going to be trivial for OpenAI to win it. And it probably wont be a cashflow monster like AdWords or Amazon.

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> Amazon will fight for its life to stop this.

Why? Amazon advertises heavily on Google search, why wouldn't they do the same with OAI?

Good point!

On the other hand, Historically Amazon didnt compete with Google (until GCP). They do compete with Microsoft, which is pretty closely aligned with OAI. They also have large investments in Anthropic.

Even if OpenAI did win here, would it be a profit monster like Google Adwords? Adwords had the auction model which meant that certain categories were hugely lucrative for Google. Can a chatbot do the same? If I know that the product I buy is simply auctioned off to the highest bidder, what's the point of using an agent to help me shop? There has to be a pretext of the agent actually looking out for my best interest, otherwise I would just use search. Nobody expects adwords to look out for their best interest. They are always free to skip the ads section if they choose.

It will be hard for ChatGPT to implement an auction model since it will be different for each product category. Hiring a lawyer will probably have a different interaction from buying groceries. On Google+AdWords, its all just search results and ads.

If there is no auction, then all of this is WAY less profitable than the Google model. So once again - not going to save OAI from negative margins.

> Can a chatbot do the same?

I really don't see why not. If anything, there's even more user interactions with a chatbot which means more opportunities and more context for placing targeted ads.

And why wouldn't they do an auction? There's nothing stopping them. In fact, again, it's even easier because users are not conditioned to near instantaneous results from a chatbot like they are from an internet search. Internet search also has different categories, I'm not seeing why it's a particularly different or more challenging problem re: hiring a lawyer vs searching for groceries.

Because they make a shitload of money by arranging Amazon search results in a certain way, selling favorable placement on those results, and inserting upsells ("Try Amazon Prime!") into the checkout process, all of which are at risk if Chat-GPT becomes a frontend to buying on Amazon. (Note that they are already vigorously going after Perplexity for trying to be an Amazon frontend)

In general, Big Tech will never allow itself to be just the backend to a service where another company controls the frontend and the relationship to the customer. That's how you get commoditized and ultimately replaced.

Examples: you cannot get a streaming box with universal search ("which streaming service has show X? Just hit play and go"): the streaming services staunchly refuse to provide the APIs to do so. Nor is there interoperability across messaging apps to let users supply their own frontend clients. AI and MCP will go much the same way, it will be locked down as soon as it presents a business model threat.

Agree on your overall point, minor note that Apple TV does decent at being a streaming box with universal search. The benefit of buying into a walled garden is that sometimes platform owner and user interests align.

It's not just Apple. Every major platform has universal search now.

> all of which are at risk if Chat-GPT becomes a frontend to buying on Amazon.

Can you explain to me how this is different than the literal world we are currently in, where Google and web search serves as a frontend to buying $billions of products on Amazon already?

> you cannot get a streaming box with universal search ("which streaming service has show X? Just hit play and go")

You've clearly not used a Roku TV, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire Stick lately :). Universal search with "click and play" and deep links into individual streaming services is table stakes for streaming TV now. Your statement here could not be more wrong, honestly.

Because amazon doesn't have a web search service but they do have a product recommendation service? Even if they do pay OpenAI they would certainly be competing with their own service and keeping prices down via that. OpenAI needs Amazon (or some other fulfillment company) to deliver products. Amazon does not need OpenAI - they can build their own recommendation engine or work with another.

> Because amazon doesn't have a web search service but they do have a product recommendation service?

That's the whole point here. People use web search as a product recommendation service, even though Amazon has one natively. What makes you think people won't (and they already are, in massive numbers) use chatbots for product recommendations and web search?

But OpenAI has the attention. It's where people ask for product recommendations, and it has context about the user. Surely Amazon doesn't need OpenAI, but OpenAI will be another valuable distribution channel for them - unless some other LLM takes the crown.

> Best case scenario: Target or Walmart. But there is a reason that OpenAI announced deals with Etsy and Shopify rather than those.

I'm confused at that statement. Walmart and Target are exactly who OpenAI announced deals with recently:

https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2025/10/14/walmart-partne...

https://openai.com/index/target-partnership/

Didn’t see that yet, interesting!

I'm not sure. Amazon isn't usually hugely price competitive nor does it have stuff I can't find elsewhere.

What it does have is very high convenience (I'm signed in already, and I know the checkout process by muscle memory). To be fair it also has excellent customer support, but I'm not sure I would go out of my way just for that (I return a handful of purchases a year out of 100+).

These go away with 'agentic commerce', at least in theory, because the agent/MCP/API does this for the user.

The other advantage it has is excellent logistics, but that's more of a benefit for Amazon than the user IMO. Lots of small ecommerce sites can have 'excellent' logistics, because they are much smaller. The only unique thing Amazon has in the UK at least is same day delivery, but I believe they lose a fortune on that and really try and push you away from it. This may vary where you are but in general next day delivery works great in the UK from most sites (DPD/RM Tracked 24). Gets a bit hairy with 'economy' delivery from Evri or Yodel tho.

> But Amazon will fight for its life to stop this

have you seen Amazon's "Rufus"? It's hilariously useless.

> have you seen Amazon's "Rufus"? It's hilariously useless.

I'd argue -- for now. Maybe it's an incentive/urgency thing. At the moment, Amazon isn't seeing ChatGPT do the buying of goods bypassing Amazon's own search. I expect Rufus to drastically improve especially given that Amazon has an AWS offering of LLM(s) [0].

[0]https://aws.amazon.com/ai/generative-ai/

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