Claude for Commerce Agents | Hacker News Reader

Claude for Commerce Agents

claude.com

62 pointsashazal62 comments

>Retailers running shopping agents on Claude have seen carts up to 35% larger and shoppers 60% more likely to complete a purchase.

I feel like this is a messed up thing to brag about. From dark patterns now to whatever this is. Like a dark nudge from something that can appear intelligent, acting as a person, with the goal of selling more and more.

The flip side is that it helps people find items they want, leading to less friction and buying more. Not that I trust it to be to the benefit of the consumer by default, but we've definitely seen better conversion and AOV increases after moving from straight lexical search to hybrid vector.

Special price for you, my friend!

E-commerce is full of vendors claiming stuff like this. It's how Klarna sells itself to merchants

I said almost the same thing. From a business perspective, I get it. 35% increase in cart size??!! Sign me up!

From a consumer perspective, I'm going to avoid coming anywhere near something like this. They've got data harvested from all of humankind and are weaponizing it as this discrete marketing tactic, convincing me to spend 35% more money on things I didn't actually need.

Such a bleak outlook. "Robot tells me to buy so I buy"...

It's all part of the capitalism end game. Almost no Silicon Valley startup is about supplying actual value.

Ah, I see Anthropic is back at that “saving humanity” game…

I don't want this. I want the diametric opposite of this: I want stores that expose their entire real-time catalog as RAG endpoints and let my agents go bonanza on them. My agents; agents whose loyalties are to me.

I'd enthusiastically pay a large premium for this, if any hungry startup people are looking for ideas.

I'm not interested in using agents controlled by vendors. Our interests are adverse! Even plain text search on modern storefronts is an anti-consumer tarpit that promotes (upranks) defective products and things I wasn't deliberately seeking, and hides what I actually need, to maximize my eyeball time in their store. Imagine how much worse the experience could get, with a predatory AI guiding the process—studying the hapless human's psyche; gaming it.

No; I don't want that at all. I want to view as few commercial offers as possible. I want to invest as little time as possible in these meaningless-to-my-life consumerism chores.

> "Retailers running shopping agents on Claude have seen carts up to 35% larger..."

Yup; the opposite of that, please!

The problem is Amazon, Ebay etc don't want this at all, they wont give you access to their data if you try to do anything meaningful with it for yourself as a end-user because they dont want you finding something cheaper somewhere else, they want you to buy from them, or whatever profits them most otherwise why sell "ads" for products within their stores?

Indeed. It would be interesting instead of some of the Lina Khan style "cleave a company apart" trust busting we instead had a push for government action to enforce this state of affairs, given the nature of the private incentives.

This would also be more transparently a benefit to consumers, as I recall one of the hurdles in the present state of anti monopoly law is present monopolies (like notably Amazon) have rather obviously reduced costs/made life easier for consumers.

This tension between these companies and consumers becomes more obvious as companies resist these moves while more and more consumers adopt LLM intermediaries.

I had a friend build an eBay app so you could scan things while at Walmart to see if you found cheaper products, but that's as far as he was able to get with his app, he couldn't do any pricing comparison against Amazon etc because they would revoke his API access...

It's really a shame, because it would 100% be nice to have a one-stop shop that you can find the exact same SKU product and figure out who has it the cheapest.

>I'd enthusiastically pay a large premium for this, if any hungry startup people are looking for ideas.

Dropshipping as a "make $10k/week and be your own boss" idea is back?

You now have full courses on how to clone high quality YouTube edutainment channels using genAI. Some of the clone channels have millions of views. exactly like drop shipping scams, you have discord channels and online course (with hidden fees of course!) telling you what to do, the whole pitch is “you’re uncreative and want to make quick money passively without effort? Here is how to do it”.

Fern, a popular human made channel published this yesterday: https://youtu.be/-Gnrp_caPvo?si=H9V6Pa3rwJr5UzeW

Ironically, the fact that those methods are being sold as classes is because they are used up and not as effective anymore.

Yep, not in the sense that you cannot make money from it, but platforms are now fighting against it. but that doesn’t stop people from trying out. And companies like ElevenLabs are themselves publishing guides on how to create what is now called “faceless YouTube video channels”.

Agree, but we may be a minority of shoppers ;)

Ok Shopify, you called the demons, now Anthropic makes you obsolete!

You know, maybe merchants now have to "justify to the bank why they are using Shopify instead of Anthropic" just like your software engineers have to "justify not using AI".

A new AI purity spiral is emerging that devours one by one.

anthropic shows here a little demo of a raw python agent, absolutely no value add.

this is just marketing for them, they will do these kinds of posts for every possible industry.

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly.

They know they need to differentiate from other offerings that are catching up, but I don't know anyone who has just left their work up to any of these specialised products. Most try it say "it's interesting" and then move on.

What do you mean spinning off these nieche offerings?

This is akin to a demo / SDK ready to plug into a store, it’s just making it easy for devs to get started. it’s still using core models and APIs, no special magic models.

I read it more as throwing a bunch of things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Definitely. The cost of making and throwing spaghetti is now very low, so they're throwing a lot of it.

They're desperately trying to break out of the niche of coding agents to justify their IPO.

>> The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly.

You posited two extremes, with no evidence for either, and with no other possibilities in between, or even outside the spectrum. That's beyond mere conjecture: it's just nonsense. I hope you realize that.

Maybe at this point it's all nonsense. I can only speculate with the framing of what what would lead me to barely push into so many verticals with no follow up.

Large businesses who choose enterprise solutions over cheaper indie/open-source solutions for similar reasons (dedicated support, sticky products designed for their industry, less regulatory concerns, etc.)

Do they not measure returns on their investments? It's not like Anthropic is the only enterprise out there, any other offering is significantly cheaper. Like I said, I do not believe there are agentic pipelines out there built on their flagship models, if there are then they are eating the costs and not profitable or they have found some serious market that makes no sense to me.

>Who is still using Anthropic seriously

Too many people, hence all the friction and cost.

It's pretty clear that there is massive unmet demand for AI, and compute cannot keep up. So you can pretty reliably dial in the "free compute for inference" situation for any given lab based on their pricing and friction tactics.

Anthropic/Google getting stuffed (Google is an odd case here)

OAI doing alrightish

Grok/Meta basically doing giveaways

Chinese models trying to fill vacancies on 3rd party compute

It does seem to be that way, though, I'm very curious to what capacity and how they are using Anthropic.

I suspect they just have loads of subscription users, probably many enterprise seats, but I sort of doubt there are agentic pipelines built on their metered pricing in the same scale as they may have subscription seats.

It also depends on how much compute you want to devote to training. If Anthropic is training heavy and compute constrained, users will feel it.

I think the whole pentagon thing really cast Anthropic into the spotlight, and their aesthetic is pure marketing excellence. It is the "trendy" AI to use. However on the backend, they did not have the compute available to serve everyone, especially since they seem to lean towards massive parameter models.

FWIW, Claude is an available model of Enterprise Copilot, and I'm sure Microsoft is paying a pretty penny to keep that as an option. Between Chat and Claude, most of my workplace prefers to use Claude. To your point though, the user isn't paying, and doesn't need to concern themselves with cost. I'd imagine if any of them have an active subscription to either, it's Chat

For most tasks I tried the choice is either expensive Claude that will actually deliver vs Codex or others that are cheaper but won’t.

Having said that Terra is awesome for clearly defined (by Opus/Fable) research task, and Sol is amazing for adversarial review, but I won’t allow them to touch my codebase any more.

If someone has a workflow where they keep tight control over agents, reviews the code by hand and so on, I can imagine them being useful.

I seriously doubt that. There's some myth going on here (lol, myth->Mythos).

For example, this exact narrative you're framing was said back during Opus 4.6/4.7 and fast forward to today we have open weight models that perform at Opus 4.6 level.

Are you talking from experience or from benchmarks?

Many corporates move very slowly and adopt 1 provider and stay put for a couple year.

> Who is still using Anthropic seriously...Subscriptions only get you frustrated

If you're using Claude in a pair-programming/"exoskeleton" sense, you'll probably never get close to maxing your subscription allotment unless you really lean on Fable.

The "you can't get anything done" comment confounds me, frankly.

That's a fair pushback, I'm sure there are ways to get value out of it if you lean less on it and have a slower more supervised workflow.

To share more on my comment, that was when contrasting it with the competition and their credit allowances.

If we go by your scenario, then you could get even more with just a $20 plan from some of the others.

Who is using it? when everyday they have issue with capacity, clearly some people are using it and using it heavily.

> Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days,

likely they hooked many fat enterprise customers

Claude is finally entering the agentic commerce race, but as a buyer, why would I want to limit myself to stores Claude or even ChatGPT whitelist? LLMs are slowly eating away the moat that marketplaces have since an agent in the terminal can scour the web and find the product you need without the product search dark patterns and sponsored products everywhere.

Automating the checkout is tricky, but with WebMCP, I feel like agents will be able to go and checkout directly on websites soon. I myself am building an open-source agentic commerce chat that uses MCP-UI under the hood and brings the full checkout experience to the chat.

I would suggest that bringing the "full checkout experience" to chat is backward thinking--that approach adds more friction than a traditional checkout. The ideal flow is when checkout happens behind-the-scenes and the chat is simply a confirmation of purchase.

Yes it is a bit awkward going thru the checkout process in the chat. MCP-UI returns the cart UI so you can interact with the cart directly like change quantity or change shipping method. You can also paste in your address and the chat LLM will figure out how to handle the address submission for that specific site.

Also, we bring in the PayPal and Stripe Elements directly into the chat so you can enter your credit card info. Just like entering it on that merchants website.

Thanks for those extra details, that approach could be useful in many circumstances / scenarios. It almost reminds me of "punch-out" in the B2B world.

I would rather not let agent use checkout. I think they are not "smart" enough to tell scam from real website apart. Even recently Claude/Opus referred me to scammers website telling me to buy a product there.

Agents checkout + risk of prompt injection => big nop!

What is even the legal basis here? Can the agent sign contracts on your behalf? What if it is tricked by the vendor into signing for a monthly subscription you never wanted?

>agentic payments provider

The LAST thing you want to be non-deterministic is a payment system, right? What is the possible use of AI in the payment process? I fill in fields and that gets whisked away to an API somewhere to verify. Why do I possibly need Claude involved?

I think the way that reads is payments originated from an agentic flow, the payment gateway itself is still done through old fashion plumbing.

Very nice jeans you've got there! Up for some belts-and-suspenders, maybe?

Anyone else worried about the premise of Anthropic selling specific agentic tools that also use their models underneath? My first thought is apps on the iPhone that got banned after Apple introduced an official option with the same functionality in a new iOS.

I'm not sure I would risk building an agentic app that competes with this on Anthropic models out of fear of that scenario.

Yeah, I had the same thought. If you build something successful that integrates well with Anthropic future plans you’re poised to be sherlocked

Does anyone have any idea on how this links (or could be linked) to what was launched by Google on WebMCP?

This is going to be an extremely interesting space to watch. Will online shops open their perfectly sculpted and sales-optimized webpages to accept requests from chat bots? such that they can just do highly targeted requests for shoppers? Or will they implement custom chat bots that guide and nudge you along your purchasing journey on the page itself? I'm very curious how consumer behavior will evolve from here. is every online search still going to start with a google query? or maybe soon a query on claude and chatgpt? or maybe three separate queries to the chat bots of the respective stores?

Preventing upsells won't fly with most smaller shops who depend on social media advertising and average order value (AOV) to make profits from ads.

The intelligence is artificial, but the dollars it spends on your behalf are very real.

What I find peculiar about this repository is that Anthropic expects that the buying agent will sit inside the merchant's own platform or application. This seems antithetical to what most people building in agentic commerce are expecting, which is that product discovery will happen in another LLM Chat interface, outside the merchant's platform.

Either they are deliberately leaving out a space to build or, which is more likely, they just want to get as many merchants accustomed to relying on Claude as the intelligence and will then export their data to their own chat interface.

that example of getting wooden blocks for a 9 year old child isn't going to go down well.

Thats more of a 2 year old thing...

I'm also a little worried about their example of "two buyer messages contain instructions to refund and reprice the store" - the intent is clearly to show the agent refusing the command, but the fact it has made it into it's context here shows this is a terrible idea

I know what you’re saying buuut https://www.areaware.com/collections/blockitecture is amazing and really fun. A 9 year old may scoff but a 29 year old might see new desk decor.

This has nothing to do with Claude - just showing neat things out into the world for people to find.

I get a 404

"Hey, Mythos, get me the best discount. Negative bill is even better"

All I see is slop.

lol much innovation wow

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