Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website • Hacker News Board

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#141

Post by mrbungie » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #134

rune-dev wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can’t even deliver their own flagship products without bugs, and terrible UX. So I’m doubtful of their abilities. These are also the same companies allowing their AI to make decisions in war, have no qualms about the mental issues they’re causing in people, and have abused workers in 3rd world countries for years. But you think they’re holding out on “destroying the software industry” out of the goodness of thei…

I think his reasoning was pretty clearly presented as not the goodness of their heart but rather the medium to long term predicted outcome on their bottom line. Ultimately failing or getting tangled up with regulators any more than necessary is to be avoided. If you move too early and it chases people away from your platform which undermines your ability to keep innovating then a competitor who held back will ultimat…

But then there is no safe way for them to "mortally wound" the software industry. The full argument is moot.

I would add there are more reasons why this wouldn't work: costs due to OOM more usage, adoption/AI backlash, adversarial environment, players with big head starts (Google).

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#142

Post by bigfishrunning » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #132

janalsncm wrote: post #15

This 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…

30 years? E-commerce hasn't been around that long - try 5 years of optimization MAX. FWIW OpenAI is desperately trying to monetize and they think e-commerce is a "simple" problem to solve. I mean they do need to convert their funnel without alienating their users. I assume they are going to have some big payouts for agentic purchases gone awry or leave merchants on the hook.

So, you're proposing we've been optimizing E-Commerce since...2021? Amazon was founded in 1994. It was not the first site selling things online (but it's the most recognizable one). E-Commerce has been getting attention for a *very* long time [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_e-commerce

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#143

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #15

This 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…

It's an interesting question.

I am behind schedule on developing a "summer phase" [1] for my foxographer costume and was chatting with Gemini about a crash priority "spring phase" [2] and asked it for suggestions and it gave me a 10-pack of results that had one good thing in it at rank #8, a similar query run against a normal search engine actually got something better at #1. Now sure I am talking w/ Gemini with big words like "supergraphic" whereas a normal search would be heavy on 3-letter and 5-letter words used in the product descriptions.

It makes think though of expert system based product configurators back in the 1980s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon

thing is that kind of product configurator is based on an ontology, constraints and rules as opposed to embeddings which might capture the "feel" of things like clothing.

[1] Busytown meets Arknights

[2] supergraphic shirt + camera gets resonance with my promotional system and people keep approaching me (e.g. laugh but every KPI in the system has an extra zero on the left)

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#144

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

mrbungie wrote: post #66

TeMPOraL wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any line drawn here. I think if they executed well (and by they I mean any one of the three SOTA LLM vendors), they could already mortally wound the entire software industry today. Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious: 1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status…

How would they mortally wound the software industry as of today? I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.

Buying astral to get uv is a wound but not a mortal once because it got forked this weekend.

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#145

Post by meroes » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #50

TZubiri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Idk I earnestly tried using LLMs to find me the smallest by volume regular ATX PC case 3 months ago and it was a nightmare. That info is out there, but it could not avoid mentioning ITX, mini atx (sometimes because Reddit posters messed up) and just missed a bunch of cases. And letting in any mistakes meant I had to double check every volume calculation it did.

I found the Jonsbo D41 without the help of LLM despite trying. (There might be a few smaller but they are 3x the price)

LLMs don’t weigh and surveil the options well. They find some texts like from Reddit in this case that mention a bunch subset of cases and that text will heavily shape the answer. Which is not what you want a commerce agent to do, you don’t want text prediction. I doubt that gives the obscure but optimal option in most cases.

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#146

Post by bee_rider » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #61

latexr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it. Sam Altman doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and has time and again shown he has no restraint for trampling over others to further his own goals. Why would e-commerce be where he draws the line?

I don't think there is any line drawn here. I think if they executed well (and by they I mean any one of the three SOTA LLM vendors), they could already mortally wound the entire software industry today. Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious: 1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status…

Why would investors keep paying their OpenAI’s engineers and power company, if they were on an obviously self-destructive trajectory?

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#147

Post by npilk » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

So they are comparing to the conversion rate of people who click on a link in the chat and go to Walmart's website to view the product? Wouldn't that be a really strong intent-to-buy signal?

The better comparison might be conversion rate for those who searched on Walmart.com vs those who searched within ChatGPT. Or maybe that is what they're comparing and I misunderstood?

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#148

Post by bigfishrunning » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

epsteingpt wrote: post #127

Stores 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.

That was only true because the internet wasn't completely saturated -- many people didn't get online until the late 2000s [0]. This was a major barrier to entry keeping brick-and-mortar stores ahead.

The only thing holding back "Agentic Purchasing" is convenience. It's much easier to do a conventional search and click "Buy" then it is to have a conversation with some chatbot. If I walk into a store, most of the time I don't want to talk to a salesperson, I just want to grab the thing I came for and leave; this is also true for online shopping. The chatbot is another barrier to the purchase.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#149

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #15

This 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…

[deleted]

Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

#150

Post by chasd00 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

butlike wrote: post #137

boringg wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 years? E-commerce hasn't been around that long - try 5 years of optimization MAX. FWIW OpenAI is desperately trying to monetize and they think e-commerce is a "simple" problem to solve. I mean they do need to convert their funnel without alienating their users. I assume they are going to have some big payouts for agentic purchases gone awry or leave merchants on the hook.

30 years ago is 1996. Amazon had been around for 2 years (they were incorporated in 1994).

> 30 years ago is 1996.

as an aside, fall of '96 is when i started college. There was an elementary school on my drive to class where I would routinely get caught in drop-off traffic. All those kids i remember crossing the street are at least in their mid 30s now. ...I think i need to lay down and it's not even 9AM my local time.