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Comment by _6wbq | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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"...

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

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.

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

Special price for you, my friend!

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

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