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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

#31

Post by lukan »

LoganDark wrote: post #8
charcircuit wrote: post #3

What if they made instant checkout actually instant? You ask ChatGPT to setup a website and it instantly purchases web hosting and sets up the website there. You can't beat a 100% conversion rate by actually checking out instantly. If you didn't like that host you can ask it to find it alternative and ChatGPT would automatically attempt a refund and then purchase from someone else.

I'd become afraid to ask that bot anything, not knowing what it would automatically try to purchase for me. Paying for the bot itself is already a lot: $20/mo to $200/mo or more.

20$ for a personal assistant is not much, but no, I surely don't trust those assistants to access my money.

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

#32

Post by throwaway290 »

bko wrote: post #19
__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.

Why is this good? I want an impartial consistent system for shopping. If I can find it at a different site for a lower price, I should be able to do so. I should also be able to have it give me non-bot reviews and ask relevant questions about the product. The same way I think shopping at Amazon is better than a place like Nike due to objectivity and comparison, I think a chat interface has the potential to take this…

> impartial consistent system for shopping

> for a lower price

Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.

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

#33

Post by raincole »

everdrive wrote: post #28
keiferski wrote: post #24

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.

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."

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

#34

Post by ares623 »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #18
__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.

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.

You can sit on your couch all day for 30 days and corporations will still be able to take your money. The marvels of frictionless payments.

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

#35

Post by crooked-v »

everdrive wrote: post #28
keiferski wrote: post #24

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.

Even if they're (somehow) bias-free, you're still stuck with "the state of the internet circa 20XX" from the training data.

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

#36

Post by rvz »

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…

Also having to wait for ChatGPT for a "thinking" response to search for information that is slower than a Google search loses them lots of money.

I believe that it can still work and I won't claim about being unsurprised about this failure. But this is a great opportunity to execute this problem really well if OpenAI and others are not interested in getting good at this.

Perplexity also attempted this, got sued by Amazon and it appears semi-abandoned.

The only problem is that it must be quicker or just as quick as a Google search, and also compatible with the existing checkout flows.

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

#37

Post by netsharc »

zmmmmm wrote: post #25

> Walmart will embed its own chatbot, Sparky, inside ChatGPT. Users will log into Walmart, sync carts across platforms, and complete purchases within Walmart’s system. The enshittification is upon us.

Hah, Clippy's cousin Sparky: every once in a while after ChatGPT answers a question it'll say "Looks like you still have stuff in your WalMart cart. Would you like me to complete that checkout for you? Also, WalMart-brand diapers is on offer this week, shall I add that to your cart?"

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

#39

Post by TeMPOraL »

petcat wrote: post #17
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…

> 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.

I think they're operating beyond their current (human) capacity, trying to test out too many things at a time.

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.

(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, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. Not to software or computing, just to all the software vendors, whose job is to slice off pieces of computational universe, put them in boxes to prevent interoperability, and give each a name so it's a "product" that can be sold or rented).

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

#40

Post by amelius »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #18
__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.

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.
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