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Comment by gz5 | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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.

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"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc."

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.

Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane.

Delivery time is super important--50% of the time. Maybe less than 50%. I never pay for express shipping on personal orders. One or two days is never worth $3 cost to me. Let alone a $12-20 charge.

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.)

I ordered something the other day from another website and it was $9 cheapest shipping option and took 5 days. When all Prime is 1-2 day “free” delivery for me, that’s hard to beat.

Amazon prime was costing me 20$/order so I cancelled it a while ago. Which made many sites competitive with Amazon on shipping.

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.

For me small things are generally cheaper on Aliexpress.

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.

Not really. They’re a day or more late most of the time in the major metro where I live. Usually only when I’m relying on them.

Not everyone is optimizing for time. The agents will give you the choice of what you want to optimize for.

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.

I’m sure I’m an outlier out here in the boonies but they are consistently slower than the other 3 carriers out here.

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