is 3x worse like a 300% decrease?
Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
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Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#72(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.
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Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".
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Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce
They definitely would if they could. They desperately need money. They already told the whole world they want to replace them, they just can’t.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#75[dead]
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#76Earlier 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.
We are talking about a hypothetical sales chatbot which would be built alongside the business, so they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#77(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.
What’s your example for this? Because my experience in e comm is that targeted advertising is awful (I bought a lawnmower last week, Amazon knows I bought it. I am now getting ads for lawnmowers, suggested products for lawn mowers, rather than lawn care, gardening tools, or anything to do with the lawnmower I’ve already bought), sites are absolutely overrun with ads and suggested placements for the product they want to sell me rather than the one I’ve searched for, and that everyone except Amazon interrupts the checkout flow with multiple up-sells, verifications, 2FA prompts, 3d Secure validations…
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#78The idea that AI will suddenly solve e-commerce demonstrates a lack of understanding on everything that has happened in this space over the last 25 years. There’s a lot of this going on in AI at the moment. New folks come in thinking they have a magic solution and then produce a total train wreck as it turns out domain expertise is still a thing.
What would it even mean for an ai to solve e-commerce? Is that a claim made here? Is e-commerce a problem to be solved? It seems like e-commerce does just fine, if plagued by poor quality product, fake reviews, and relentless borderline fraudulent marketing. Was anyone suggesting AI would help with it? It seems from the article that Walmart (presumably experts in e-commerce) themselves willingly collaborated with ope…
Well everyone is desperate to show that they’ve built and deployed some AI thing. Few have done so and demonstrated meaningful value that justifies all the expense of doing it.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#79This 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…
> E-commerce has been optimized to the last decimal point for the last 30 years.
It certainly hasn't been optimized to anything in 1996. In 1996 it was people clumsily scanning print catalogs, spending 5 hours to upload 10 images on dialup and making a simple HTML page (no DB or any kind of backend) and putting their landline phone on it with a message to "call to checkout"
I know you were exaggerating for effect, but E-commerce and catalog normalization are definitely not "solved" everywhere.
McMaster Carr is a good example of a company that has 90%+ of their stuff ironed out, but most websites and especially small ecommerce isn't like that.
Re: Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.