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(Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying. A chat interface

• TZubiri 7mo ago
  It depends on the product, if we are talking commodities or mass produced products like groceries, sure. If we are talking custom products or complex appliances that need a lot of guidance, then maybe chat interface is appropriate.
  • pjc50 7mo ago
    The problem is that the chat transcript is legally binding. If the chatbot makes incorrect statements which the customer relies on for their complex purchase, then you're going to have to refund them. https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-cha...
    • TZubiri 7mo ago
      When comparing a sales chatbot agent with a sales human agent, there is no difference. A chatbot answer would be no more legally binding than a human's answer. The actual reduction in liability would come down to who can make less mistakes, the fact that the mistakes are or aren't legally binding does not change the decision to put a chatbot. In fact I think you are plain wrong, it's standard case law that errors in pricing are not binding, if you find a wheel of 50kg cheese priced at 30$ (the price of a kg of cheese), then the supermarket is not obligated to honour that price, they obviously mispriced the cheese.
  • bashkiddie 7mo ago
    When I shop for special hardware (e.g. bicycle shift gear) it is usually underspecified. If the information does not exist in the text block, a chat bot is of no use.
    • TZubiri 7mo ago
      The use case for chat interfaces would be as follows: Grandma wants to buy a good bike, but doesn't know about types of wheels or how many gears they need, or what type of frame is appropriate for their body type.
      • TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        Reliable information on this does not exist on vendor sites, though. It exists on Reddit and in books and in med/physio papers and bunch of other places a SOTA model has read in training or can (for now) access via web search. LLMs are already very good for shopping, but only as long as they sit on the outside.
        • TZubiri 7mo ago
          We are talking about a hypothetical sales chatbot which would be built alongside the business, so they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.
          • TeMPOraL 7mo ago
            > they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients. That doesn't follow. In fact, having this capacity and information creates a moral dilemma, as giving customers objectively correct advice is, especially in highly competitive markets, bad for business. Ignorance is bliss for businesses, because this lets them bullshit people through marketing with less guilt, and if there's one thing any business knows, is that marketing has better ROI than product/service quality anyway.
            • TZubiri 7mo ago
              My brother in christ, the function is just that of a salesman, you are pondering philosophical about whether a salesman's actions are ethical. Company makes a chatbot that sells their product and advises customers on what to buy. To be fair with you, you are not asking the wrong questions and you are on to something, it's just that it's basic if you are into sales. Read up on the subject, a source I would recommend, although obscure, is Claude Whitacre. I believe in "Sales Prospecting" he talks about this specific dilemma of giving good advice vs selling your product. He argues that a good salesman will give good advice over selling their own product, and that this is beneficial because it creates trust in the salesman and might result in more sales down the line even if the very specific interaction didn't result in a sale.
• exegete 7mo ago
  The article says Walmart is not abandoning ChatGPT but is going to use their own app in Chat’s ecosystem
• itopaloglu83 7mo ago
  They practically want to funnel users like cattle and not let them think about it or compare things. It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money.
  • ares623 7mo ago
    You can sit on your couch all day for 30 days and corporations will still be able to take your money. The marvels of frictionless payments.
  • amelius 7mo ago
    Users already use the internet to compare things. It makes no sense to bet on them not doing that.
    • cogman10 7mo ago
      Not so much and I'm certainly guilty of buying something from amazon because I'm already on amazon.com. I have my favorite set of retailers that I use for a fair number of my purchases, I'm sure a lot of people are like that.
  • Elfener 7mo ago
    > It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money. This is why I think the "you're the product" saying is wrong. You're just some annoyance to managers (whether they're trying to use you just for user numbers and ad views or they're trying to get your money), whose product is the company (shares or just outright selling the company).
• bko 7mo ago
  Why is this good? I want an impartial consistent system for shopping. If I can find it at a different site for a lower price, I should be able to do so. I should also be able to have it give me non-bot reviews and ask relevant questions about the product. The same way I think shopping at Amazon is better than a place like Nike due to objectivity and comparison, I think a chat interface has the potential to take this to another level since places like Amazon have degraded considerably in terms of things like fake third party products and fake reviews.
  • throwaway290 7mo ago
    > impartial consistent system for shopping > for a lower price Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
    • TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      Catalog is an ad, the SKU database behind the catalog is impartial (at least as much as it gets), but no one is giving you access to that.
    • danlitt 7mo ago
      I do agree with your conclusion, but the catalog in most online shops is certainly not impartial. Amazon sells the entire first page of search placement, for example.
      • throwaway290 7mo ago
        But we know it and it's obvious.
        • recursive 7mo ago
          Within a few years people will be accustomed to the idea of AI chatbots selling them stuff and it will be obvious then too. The first time paid placements appeared in a catalog, it was probably also not obvious then.
• locknitpicker 7mo ago
  > (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying. I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
  • froggit 7mo ago
    > I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality. You think a crude, unoptimised "minefield" is the route that leads to something as delicate as a "fragile equilibrium?" I don't see something as carefully balanced as your unstable equilibrium even being something that could exist without the processes involved having been refined down to a science. The only real alternative that meets your narrative would be that this is an industry that runs entirely on hope and luck (and enough human sacrifices to keep ample supplies of both on hand).
• TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  > (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying. The only e-commerce site that fits this standard is that old one for buying (IIRC) nuts and bolts or such, that pops up on HN every other year, and whose name sadly escapes me now. Everyone else is ruthlessly optimizing their experience to fuck shoppers over and get them to products the vendor wants them to buy, not the products the shoppers actually want (or need). > A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop. That is precisely the point. Chats may suck as an interface, but majority of the value and promise of end-user automation (and more than half the point of the term "User Agent" (as in, e.g., a web browser)) is in enabling comparison shopping in spite of the merchants, and more generally, helping people reduce information asymmetry that's intertwined with wealth and power asymmetry. But it's not something you can generally sell to the vendors, who benefit from that asymmetry relative to their clients (in fact, I was dumbfounded to see so much interest on the sales/vendor side for such ideas, but I blame it on general AI hype). Adversarial interoperability is the name of the game.
  • busymom0 7mo ago
    https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/
    • TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      It's the one, thank you!
    • jaapz 7mo ago
      Wow, that's amazing
    • bandrami 7mo ago
      Just made an order from them. It's weirdly comforting to know there's a company that knows I need clevis bolts and is willing to sell them to me for a transparent price.
  • froggit 7mo ago
• hrmtst93837 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• maccard 7mo ago
  What’s your example for this? Because my experience in e comm is that targeted advertising is awful (I bought a lawnmower last week, Amazon knows I bought it. I am now getting ads for lawnmowers, suggested products for lawn mowers, rather than lawn care, gardening tools, or anything to do with the lawnmower I’ve already bought), sites are absolutely overrun with ads and suggested placements for the product they want to sell me rather than the one I’ve searched for, and that everyone except Amazon interrupts the checkout flow with multiple up-sells, verifications, 2FA prompts, 3d Secure validations…
• skywhopper 7mo ago
  Where are these sites? Everywhere I shop online is full of distractions and attempts to funnel me away from what I wanted and confuse me along the way. Not that a chat interface would be an improvement.
• criddell 7mo ago
  > A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. Isn't there a Chinese messaging service (Weixin?) that has been very successful in getting people to buy stuff through it?
• notepad0x90 7mo ago
  Do you have any examples? Because from Amazon to Uber, they're not great from an end user perspective. It's not like people who like the website will stop using it because of chatgpt, this would be attracting people who complain about the website/app. People are always complaining about amazon for example, i don't like the experience but I haven't had all that much bad product experience from them, but people who keep saying they're getting bad products on Amazon can maybe use chatgpt, talk to it so it understands what they're looking for in natural language, in a way the search bar can't and keep their patronage. By the way, who names their AI "rufus" (amazon!)
• janalsncm 7mo ago
  I just had a horrible thought. Maybe online stores will just take away the ability for customers to see the full inventory and force you to go through the chatbot. This will allow them to fully control the shopping experience even more. If you want running shoes, you have to go through their chatbot. Amazon might already have the monopoly power to do this. They would just need to swap out the search bar for a chat box.
  • jborichevskiy 7mo ago
    It's possible, but then wouldn't retailers who don't force their customers to crawl through an LLM maze eat their lunch? Natural economics at play would still happen I think
    • janalsncm 7mo ago
      Maybe. In a world where people are already vendor locked to Prime or Walmart there’s a nonzero switching cost. Amazon product search already has a ton of problems but they get away with it because of free 2 day shipping.
• nitwit005 7mo ago
  I feel the opposite. It's inconvenient having to type (or voice) anything. How much text do you have to type into Amazon when shopping? Usually just a product category, and then you just scroll and click around. A lot of the optimizations, like showing related products, or saving payment or shipping info, are essentially reducing text entry.