21–30 of 300 posts
Perhaps clickthrough is worse because there are fewer dark patterns involved and people are mostly just browsing and occasionally buying only what they need.
They didn't really seem to specify the "why" of it with any research. And weird that OAI wasn't supporting them to see wha the issue was.
(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.
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.
I sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
The enshittification is upon us.
(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.
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.
Last year they couldn't draw fingers on hands properly, this year they can't convert at checkouts, I wonder what they'll be failing to do a year from now.
> AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1% of traffic
I don’t trust AI bots to access my wallet. Not sure I ever will. I sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
Never, ever.
(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.
> (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…
I don’t trust AI bots to access my wallet. Not sure I ever will. I sort of trust them to make product recommendations, but at best I will only open a link they suggest and buy the product there.
>I sort of trust them to make product recommendations Never, ever.
Do you have a better alternative?