Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books).
Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas.
And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
I suspect super fast delivery is only a differentiator when all else is equal. At $6+/gal diesel, I'll take the cheaper item delivered by bicycle in a week. (A bit of a joke, but you get the point.)
As to delivery times, many things could take 2 weeks to show up and I wouldn’t care. The range where I can wait 18+ hours but can’t wait ~1 week just doesn’t cover that many of my purchases.
Amazon drivers are also terrible in my area. They leave parcels as soon as the app tells them they can (it's done via GPS) so sometimes that is on top of an apartment block mailbox on a main road with high foot traffic.
So you can just tell your agent "Hey X order me a Nintendo Switch 2. I want it by the weekend." Then it will order it for you from whoever has the cheapest price that conforms to the given criteria.
If the local agent has access to your digital wallet (Apple pay or Google pay) and your email then it has all it needs to perform and verify the transaction.
It has shown that it is a much better intermediary than all others because it does what you ask it to, unlike Google Search and Amazon Search et al, whom make their bread and butter by disregarding what you ask for and instead sending paid slop to you.
It's Amazon's whole business model.
https://prosperousamerica.org/amazons-heavy-recruitment-of-c...
Ironically, this is what Amazon did to local business owners. Now that the tables are turned (and they have billions to spend on lawyers), they see the threat.
No, we have to own it.
I'm so tired of these abusive control freak corporations. I'm actually starting to look forward to these "unaligned" AIs which are just going to ignore all of this nonsense whether they like it or not.
A device with a custom agent that has a screen, mic and speaker can now turn amazon into a logistics company.
The most low friction way of doing anything is to just ask someone else to do it for you. In this case it's the agent. So now if a company wants to capture a percentage between the buyer and seller then they need to have influence over the agent or capture a percentage of the transaction fees.
> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation.
you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier
you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected
As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There are already off the shelf devices that can do this if you install an agent harness.
Like an ad blocking DVR for the 2020s.
Or do you give out KVMs to all your customers and say “place your DD orders with us this way”?
How will DD detect that I put a sticky note on my screen at the spot where ads are displayed?
How will DD detect if a robot is operating the touchscreen or a human finger?
I understand that individuals can make purchases with the DD API. People who want to buy things without seeing ads can always do that. Very few people will do that.
I’m referring to the obvious B2B2C use case where a company embeds DD functionality via the API. Then you’d have to teach the trick to everyone who uses your app or service and that’s not practical. If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.
I don't see how. If I built a touchscreen-using robot, DD couldn't detect it. If some middleman business had a boiler room of 10 robots, it would be the same. All network requests identical to the official app. And if you think they'd look at IP addresses or something, how would they tell it apart from a college campus or a CGNAT gateway?
This is awesome!!
The local AI revolution is going to be glorious. It's no wonder they want to regulate this shit.
I can't wait until uBlock Origin integrates AI support.
I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them.
Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are.
The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.
After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace
We have people using it for B2B distribution as well, opportunities are endless.
You can reach me at junaid[at]openship.org
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
I think Amazon should be more worried about simple price comparison and tracking. They fought really hard against having to show the 90 day low and have gone out of their way to still rig it.
That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink.
But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero.
Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master.
So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.
As a brief reminder to readers at home, in a theoretically perfect free market, profit trends towards 0 as competition increases.
The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents.
In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification.
Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.