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Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

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

#161

Post by WarmWash »

everdrive wrote: post #130
raincole wrote: post #33

Earlier 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."

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.

Drifting off topic now, but Amazon could easily implement a few measures to really lock down reviews, but they purposely leave it gameable because it drives sales.

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

#162

Post by dessimus »

Kuyawa wrote: post #153

Where everybody sees failure I see a trillion dollar business, a faceless ai shop that merges all shops around your location. "I need mayo, ketchup, mustard and ground beef" "Here is a list of products with prices ... proceed to pay $25 (yes/no)" Yes "Your card has been charged. Delivery will knock on your door in 7 minutes" I'll code that app in one month, what's there to lose?

I highly doubt that a consumer would see any financial benefit from this. Sure different grocery stores use different products as loss leaders, but the trade off is time, so rather than the cost of having one person go to one store and by X number of items, we're sending either one person to three stores for ~X/3 items, or three separate people to three stores. All of which will take more total time than 1 store, which puts more resource demand and will cost more to the consumer.

Also, it would rather be in the faceless ai shop's interest to arbitrage orders, always show the "middle" price but use the cheapest one for orders.

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

#164

Post by Vexs »

nope1000 wrote: post #135
holografix wrote: post #102

Wow 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…

I would assume the average purchase in Walmart is significantly more low-tech than this though

It's not even just that- with component selection you have a handful of datasheets that give you (ideally) fairly truthful information about the device. You can rather deterministically look at these and compare them.

Regular consumer products? Good fucking luck. Anywhere an LLM pulls from is probably going to be mostly SEO'd listicles.

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

#165

Post by dylan604 »

bilekas wrote: post #95

ChatGPT Checkout, a solution looking for a problem. Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong, where handing over payment details in another chain. Just let me buy my stuff in peace. Shopping is not the 'killer app' for GenAI.

Just because you're not the target audience doesn't mean there's not a real target audience.

There a people today learning to use an LLM instead of an actual search engine. For these types of people whatever happens outside of the LLM app is invisible to them. The social media apps did similar where they started letting people purchase directly within the app. People started looking at these shops rather than doing searches for it elsewhere.

Buying things on a social media app is crazy to me, but I don't use the social media apps. Buying things from an LLM app seems crazy to you, (because it's new and it's borked is fixable), but to people that first turn to their LLM app of choice that decision isn't so crazy.

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

#166

Post by sayYayToLife »

bilekas wrote: post #95

ChatGPT Checkout, a solution looking for a problem. Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong, where handing over payment details in another chain. Just let me buy my stuff in peace. Shopping is not the 'killer app' for GenAI.

As bad as the idea of a solution looking for a problem, this is peak science. Copernicus who figured out that the Earth was not at the center of the solar system, he had a solution. The general word is called deduction.

Personally I am an inductivist, I imagine you may be too.

Think top down decisioning is deduction. Bottom up is induction.

You might think induction is amazing but if you ask yourself "Are there any black swans?" and your answer is "No I've never seen any so there can't be any black swans." The issue is you've never actually seen every Swan and actually there are black swans in Australia.

Point being, we don't know if this is a good thing until it's tested.

This is an age-old problem.

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

#167

Post by hattmall »

dylan604 wrote: post #165
bilekas wrote: post #95

ChatGPT Checkout, a solution looking for a problem. Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong, where handing over payment details in another chain. Just let me buy my stuff in peace. Shopping is not the 'killer app' for GenAI.

Just because you're not the target audience doesn't mean there's not a real target audience. There a people today learning to use an LLM instead of an actual search engine. For these types of people whatever happens outside of the LLM app is invisible to them. The social media apps did similar where they started letting people purchase directly within the app. People started looking at these shops rather than doing s…

Social media apps generally opened up new markets though of their existing user bases as sellers. Perhaps chatgpt could know everything in your house, if you don't actually use it, and pair you with a neighbor that needs it!

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by cogman10 »

amelius wrote: post #40
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Users already use the internet to compare things. It makes no sense to bet on them not doing that.

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.

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

#170

Post by criddell »

__alexs wrote: post #5

(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 is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.

> 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?

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