Comment by peri-cl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peri-cl | Hacker News Reader

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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 ;)

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