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

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

#211

Post by janalsncm » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

porridgeraisin wrote: post #156

TitaRusell wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell would AI even bring to the table here? Already your favourite e commerce site has all your data. You can switch on the "buy this automatically" feature.

More targeted ads. Today, ads are based on user information you can reasonably collect from the users historical actions on your website, and then whatever search term they enter. But soon, ads can be based on your current chat context + (derived interests of yours from your entire chat history across all chats. Shhhh.) passed in full to the e-commerce website that will use it to choose ads, generates creatives on th…

ChatGPT doesn’t know what the best-converting dog food in Scranton, PA is. Amazon does.

Anything that starts with chat history presumes the theoretical limit for ad effectiveness is higher than it is now, and chat is a better way of getting there than actual purchase history. I have a feeling it’s not.

Imagine a person who shops on Amazon for basically everything. So theoretically Amazon should know a ton about them, more than enough to put together a profile on that person.

To say OpenAI could do a better job of selling products is to say they can do better than Amazon already does if you scroll through their personalized product recommendations. There is some better feed out there, or some better way of presenting the feed that Amazon hasn’t thought of.

I don’t doubt it can be marginally better.

I do doubt whether it can be double or triple digits better that can justify trillion dollar valuations. And I do doubt whether a model trained on Internet text rather than user interactions can do better.

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

#212

Post by Terr_ » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

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

Just because a target-audience has >0 members doesn't mean the target is plausible or good. :p

______________

To transcribe an old Dilbert comic, which I think captures the sometimes, uh, aspirational nature of "target audiences":

1. Dogbert, presenting a labeled circle: "Your target market is the high income group. They're the only ones who can afford your product."

2. Dogbert, adding circles to Venn-diagram: "More specifically, they must be rich, tasteless and easily amused. I've located a cluster of them for study."

3. Scene change to outdoor lawn, one suitably-dressed man confiding to another: "That dog's watching us golf again."

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

#213

Post by radus » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

irishcoffee wrote: post #206

Auracle wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I can tell ChatGPT to order me what I need to replace the bottom element on my water heater, and here’s a picture of the ridiculously long model number, that saves me quite a bit of time. I used that as an example because I did that last week, apart from me just going to the store to get the links that it brought up.

Conversely, I did something similar, but I took a picture of the model number, copy/pasted the text from the image into a search engine, and that was that. Either way you're taking a picture and performing a manual step (query an LLM, query a search engine) I would never trust an LLM to accurately identify and purchase something for me based on a picture, a prompt, and a prayer.

It's simple, just tell it not to hallucinate.

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

#214

Post by notepad0x90 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

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.

I disagree, walmart's website isn't nice. a lot of commerce sites are cancer!

if i can just ask chatgpt or gemini to shop I'd love that.

Just navigating their sites for items is a pain, I can imagine an LLM being great at finding items, and facilitating the browsing experience. My only concern would be having to chat with it a lot, and any dark patterns coercing impulse purchases.

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

#215

Post by janalsncm » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

StilesCrisis wrote: post #80

__alexs wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

Is there a way to measure users "making the best choice?" You could measure the amount of time spent comparison-shopping, but most people are terrible at that anyway; it's an acquired skill for sure. Besides a willingness to spend time, it seems like an impossible-to-quantify metric even in the abstract.

Maybe the best proxy metric is whether the customer returns the product. But the store will also be willing to eat more returns on a higher margin item if they make more profit at the end of the day.

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

#216

Post by notepad0x90 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

__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.

Do you have any examples? Because from Amazon to Uber, they're not great from an end user perspective. It's not like people who like the website will stop using it because of chatgpt, this would be attracting people who complain about the website/app. People are always complaining about amazon for example, i don't like the experience but I haven't had all that much bad product experience from them, but people who keep saying they're getting bad products on Amazon can maybe use chatgpt, talk to it so it understands what they're looking for in natural language, in a way the search bar can't and keep their patronage.

By the way, who names their AI "rufus" (amazon!)

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

#217

Post by janalsncm » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

__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.

I just had a horrible thought. Maybe online stores will just take away the ability for customers to see the full inventory and force you to go through the chatbot. This will allow them to fully control the shopping experience even more.

If you want running shoes, you have to go through their chatbot.

Amazon might already have the monopoly power to do this. They would just need to swap out the search bar for a chat box.

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

#218

Post by bigstrat2003 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107

_heimdall wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products That seems reasonable, its just yet to be seen if LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word. They're impressive ML for sure, but that is in fact different from AI despite how companies building them have tried to merge the terms…

What I'm saying is not (directly) related to whether or not LLMs are "true AI" or not. It's sufficient that they are fully general problem solvers. A software product (whether bought or rented as a service) is defined by its boundaries - there's a narrow set of specific problems, and specific ways it can be used to solve those problems, and beyond those, it's not capable (or not allowed ) to be used for anything else…

> That's the distinction I'm talking about, that's the threat to software industry, and it doesn't take "true AI" - the LLMs as we have today are enough already.

They most certainly are not. With the current state of LLMs, anyone who puts them in charge of things is being a fool. They have zero intelligence, zero ability to cope with novel situations, and even for things in their training data they do worse than a typical skilled practitioner would. Right now they are usable only for something where you don't care about the quality of the result.

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

#219

Post by porridgeraisin » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #211

porridgeraisin wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More targeted ads. Today, ads are based on user information you can reasonably collect from the users historical actions on your website, and then whatever search term they enter. But soon, ads can be based on your current chat context + (derived interests of yours from your entire chat history across all chats. Shhhh.) passed in full to the e-commerce website that will use it to choose ads, generates creatives on th…

ChatGPT doesn’t know what the best-converting dog food in Scranton, PA is. Amazon does. Anything that starts with chat history presumes the theoretical limit for ad effectiveness is higher than it is now, and chat is a better way of getting there than actual purchase history. I have a feeling it’s not. Imagine a person who shops on Amazon for basically everything. So theoretically Amazon should know a ton about them,…

No... I'm not saying chatgpt will do better than amazon.

>> passed in full to the e-commerce website that will use it to...

I'm saying Amazon+chat data will do better than amazon.

Thats the agentic shopping play.

In the process note that the chat host also gets a lot of info over time.

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

#220

Post by mindslight » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:55 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…

> Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust

Does anybody else just feel the aloof out of touchness just oozing from that sentence? "Trust", as if this is just any old metric they merely have to work to increase.

This is what I want from a purchasing agent: I make a list of items that I repeatedly buy (mostly household supplies), and that I keep roughly updated with my inventory / need. The agent tracks prices and sales across all web stores, making appropriate purchase decisions based on which is the least expensive, combining shipping, taking advantage of sales to stock up, etc. For other one-time purchase items, I input what I am looking for and can create a persistent pan-site shopping cart that once again minimizes costs and shipping fees. Being very explicit here: the main goal of an "agent" should be to represent and carry out my own interests.

And these functionalities have been straightforwardly doable without "AI" for the past few decades, except for the glaring incentives against them! It is in every web store's interest to undermine customers' ability to obtain semantic pricing, shop around, create a cart independent of their site, etc. These incentives are why when you visit any web store these days, the very first thing they do is hassle you with CAPTCHAs (and the bad ones keep doing it throughout the session!) - they want to make sure you're an actual computationally-unassisted human sitting there, wasting your personal time with their bloated pages that take tens of seconds to download and render, so that you don't spend that time being a more efficient market actor.

Now, does "AI" have the capability to go against these trends and enable user-centric algorithmic shopping and purchasing? Perhaps, and I hope so! But it's certainly not going to be led by these popups on web stores nagging me if I want to chat instead of doing the thing I went there to do (which when you think about it, this is just the latest instance of these stores trying to make you waste your time on their site). Rather, it will come from completely third party services (or ideally software) setting out to act in customers' interests, and performing adversarial interoperability to achieve this!