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.
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.
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.
> for a lower price
Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
Am I the only one that think Amazon has gotten pretty awful in the last 5 years?
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.
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.
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.
Not that a chat interface would be an improvement.
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).
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.
How much text do you have to type into Amazon when shopping? Usually just a product category, and then you just scroll and click around. A lot of the optimizations, like showing related products, or saving payment or shipping info, are essentially reducing text entry.
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?
Sadly Sigma-Aldrich, the hyphenated retailer for chemistry, appears to have been covered in javascript sludge.
If we are talking custom products or complex appliances that need a lot of guidance, then maybe chat interface is appropriate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-cha...
The actual reduction in liability would come down to who can make less mistakes, the fact that the mistakes are or aren't legally binding does not change the decision to put a chatbot.
In fact I think you are plain wrong, it's standard case law that errors in pricing are not binding, if you find a wheel of 50kg cheese priced at 30$ (the price of a kg of cheese), then the supermarket is not obligated to honour that price, they obviously mispriced the cheese.
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.
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.
Company makes a chatbot that sells their product and advises customers on what to buy.
To be fair with you, you are not asking the wrong questions and you are on to something, it's just that it's basic if you are into sales. Read up on the subject, a source I would recommend, although obscure, is Claude Whitacre. I believe in "Sales Prospecting" he talks about this specific dilemma of giving good advice vs selling your product. He argues that a good salesman will give good advice over selling their own product, and that this is beneficial because it creates trust in the salesman and might result in more sales down the line even if the very specific interaction didn't result in a sale.
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.
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.
Isn't there a Chinese messaging service (Weixin?) that has been very successful in getting people to buy stuff through it?
By the way, who names their AI "rufus" (amazon!)