Claude for Commerce Agents • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#31

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #19

giancarlostoro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rath…

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.

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#32

Post by risyachka » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

klps10 wrote: post #25

Ok Shopify, you called the demons, now Anthropic makes you obsolete! You know, maybe merchants now have to "justify to the bank why they are using Shopify instead of Anthropic" just like your software engineers have to "justify not using AI". A new AI purity spiral is emerging that devours one by one.

anthropic shows here a little demo of a raw python agent, absolutely no value add.

this is just marketing for them, they will do these kinds of posts for every possible industry.

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#33

Post by hmokiguess » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #29

hmokiguess wrote: post #10

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

>Who is still using Anthropic seriously Too many people, hence all the friction and cost. It's pretty clear that there is massive unmet demand for AI, and compute cannot keep up. So you can pretty reliably dial in the "free compute for inference" situation for any given lab based on their pricing and friction tactics. Anthropic/Google getting stuffed (Google is an odd case here) OAI doing alrightish Grok/Meta basical…

It does seem to be that way, though, I'm very curious to what capacity and how they are using Anthropic.

I suspect they just have loads of subscription users, probably many enterprise seats, but I sort of doubt there are agentic pipelines built on their metered pricing in the same scale as they may have subscription seats.

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#34

Post by tombot » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

ActionHank wrote: post #15

hmokiguess wrote: post #10

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly. They know they need to differentiate from other offerings that are catching up, but I don't know anyone who has just left their work up to any of these specialised products. Most try it say "it's interesting" and then move on.

What do you mean spinning off these nieche offerings?

This is akin to a demo / SDK ready to plug into a store, it’s just making it easy for devs to get started. it’s still using core models and APIs, no special magic models.

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#35

Post by dpoloncsak » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

hmokiguess wrote: post #10

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

FWIW, Claude is an available model of Enterprise Copilot, and I'm sure Microsoft is paying a pretty penny to keep that as an option. Between Chat and Claude, most of my workplace prefers to use Claude. To your point though, the user isn't paying, and doesn't need to concern themselves with cost. I'd imagine if any of them have an active subscription to either, it's Chat

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#36

Post by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

ActionHank wrote: post #15

hmokiguess wrote: post #10

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly. They know they need to differentiate from other offerings that are catching up, but I don't know anyone who has just left their work up to any of these specialised products. Most try it say "it's interesting" and then move on.

I read it more as throwing a bunch of things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#37

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

ActionHank wrote: post #15

hmokiguess wrote: post #10

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly. They know they need to differentiate from other offerings that are catching up, but I don't know anyone who has just left their work up to any of these specialised products. Most try it say "it's interesting" and then move on.

[deleted]

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#38

Post by dpoloncsak » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

>agentic payments provider

The LAST thing you want to be non-deterministic is a payment system, right? What is the possible use of AI in the payment process? I fill in fields and that gets whisked away to an API somewhere to verify. Why do I possibly need Claude involved?

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#39

Post by kolinko » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

hmokiguess wrote: post #10

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

For most tasks I tried the choice is either expensive Claude that will actually deliver vs Codex or others that are cheaper but won’t.

Having said that Terra is awesome for clearly defined (by Opus/Fable) research task, and Sol is amazing for adversarial review, but I won’t allow them to touch my codebase any more.

If someone has a workflow where they keep tight control over agents, reviews the code by hand and so on, I can imagine them being useful.

Re: Claude for Commerce Agents

#40

Post by WarmWash » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

hmokiguess wrote: post #33

WarmWash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who is still using Anthropic seriously Too many people, hence all the friction and cost. It's pretty clear that there is massive unmet demand for AI, and compute cannot keep up. So you can pretty reliably dial in the "free compute for inference" situation for any given lab based on their pricing and friction tactics. Anthropic/Google getting stuffed (Google is an odd case here) OAI doing alrightish Grok/Meta basical…

It does seem to be that way, though, I'm very curious to what capacity and how they are using Anthropic. I suspect they just have loads of subscription users, probably many enterprise seats, but I sort of doubt there are agentic pipelines built on their metered pricing in the same scale as they may have subscription seats.

It also depends on how much compute you want to devote to training. If Anthropic is training heavy and compute constrained, users will feel it.

I think the whole pentagon thing really cast Anthropic into the spotlight, and their aesthetic is pure marketing excellence. It is the "trendy" AI to use. However on the backend, they did not have the compute available to serve everyone, especially since they seem to lean towards massive parameter models.