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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> impartial consistent system for shopping

> for a lower price

Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.

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.

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.

But we know it and it's obvious.

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.

catalog ads are labeled. "what's the best something I can buy?" is begging for unlabeled ads that go against your interest. if you literally cannot tell between ad and not ad, you can't skip to actual results, it's useless.

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?

more like 20 years. Basically when they introduced third party sellers.

You can skip sponsored products

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