Look, another thing AI is empirically bad at. Can we dispense with cramming AI into every product and service and just use it where it's useful? It's very wasteful and an utterly obnoxious experience for users.
Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
121–130 of 300 posts
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#122This is from one of the links in the article > Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google W…
> not that interested in getting good at it I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so. They expect their many failures and short-comings to be shored up by continuous model training. But that, of course, means that in the meantime it will suck and nobody will use it.
Things that are not doing the thing. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument is "they're designed to influence us" right? Amazon reviews are paid influence. Reddit posts are paid influence. Everything everywhere you read online is paid influence. I'd rank LLMs between "people I personally trust" and "random people online."
Since LLMs are trained on "random people online", why are they not of equal rank?
I see LLM as the average of multiple random people and traditional common sense from wikipedia and books.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#124Wow the sceptics really came out in force for this one. I’m currently using Gemini to research components for a remote controlled plane. I have the frame of the plane and now need to buy correctly specced servo motors, an engine, battery, etc etc. It has saved me so much time and educated me tremendously on how the different components interact and the options available. If I could just press “buy” from within Gemini…
The entire point of shoehorning AI into everything is to make people stop thinking for themselves and allowing a corporation to do it for them.
“””If I could just press “buy” from within Gemini and pay via Google Pay (or better still, Apple Pay) I’d do it in a heartbeat”””
Yeah, until that becomes enshittified and you don’t notice because you no longer do research on components.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
The buyer of this technology is not shoppers, it's retailers. The measurement of quality is "does it make us more money?" not "does it help me make better buying choices." Retailers do not want you to make better choices. They want you to buy the widget. A lot of evidence suggests that also shoppers aren't that interested in making the best choice either. They want to make a tolerable choice with as little effort as…
That's a cynical way to look at it. Most likely the LLM will take a cut of sales and they'd be more or less indifferent who cuts the check. There's a market for this sort of thing. People will go to the best LLM for shopping. If the LLM is a shitty product, people will switch. LLMs are increasingly commoditized. All you say is true for an aggregator like Amazon. But Amazon is better than Nike.com because as an aggreg…
It's not cynical it is materialism.
Shoppers do not want to pay to shop. Retailers pay thousands to encourage you to shop with them. They are the economic buyers of this feature.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Chat bots don't belong to an e-commerce site; chat bots belong on the outside, specifically to comparison-shop and pull in some external information to de-bullshitify offers, correct "mistakes" and "accidental omissions" in the listings, resolve the borderline-fraudlent crap companies play these days with store-specific and season/promotion-specific SKUs with different parameters all resolving to same model/make name…
Agree. AI is (currently) fantastic at "de-bullshitifying" the internet. "Give me a table that compares Products A & B by z, y, and z." Companies have gone out of their way to make comparison shopping near impossible. Specs are hidden, if they're shown at all. Just figuring out if a certain TV had an ARC-HDMI out required downloading the manual.
I dread the day when ads inevitably make their way into the main AI models. One of the things its currently good at will be destroyed.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#127Stores converted better than eCommerce for a long time and adoption was slow.
The next generation will shop in a different way, if it's better, and the change will be gradual as well.
Adoption takes time.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#128This is from one of the links in the article > Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google W…
> E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years. It certainly hasn't been optimized to anything in 1996. In 1996 it was people clumsily scanning print catalogs, spending 5 hours to upload 10 images on dialup and making a simple HTML page (no DB or any kind of backend) and putting their landline phone on it with a message to "call to checkout" I know you were exaggerating for effect, bu…
And quickly after that, we were meassuring traffic data with simple "how-many-requests-were-done" (including images) :-D
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since LLMs are trained on "random people online", why are they not of equal rank?
I see LLM as the average of multiple random people and traditional common sense from wikipedia and books.
It's worth keeping in mind that some of those random people are trolls.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I sort of trust them to make product recommendations Never, ever.
Your argument is "they're designed to influence us" right? Amazon reviews are paid influence. Reddit posts are paid influence. Everything everywhere you read online is paid influence. I'd rank LLMs between "people I personally trust" and "random people online."
In fairness to your point, I also find that Amazon reviews can no longer be trusted, and I really try to buy as little as possible from Amazon. Due to this, and other reasons, I find it quite difficult to have a good sense for whether I've bought something high quality, or if it'll be a piece of trash.