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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

#81

Post by froggit »

locknitpicker wrote: post #22
__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.

> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying. 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 certai…

> 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.

You think a crude, unoptimised "minefield" is the route that leads to something as delicate as a "fragile equilibrium?" I don't see something as carefully balanced as your unstable equilibrium even being something that could exist without the processes involved having been refined down to a science. The only real alternative that meets your narrative would be that this is an industry that runs entirely on hope and luck (and enough human sacrifices to keep ample supplies of both on hand).

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

#82

Post by TeMPOraL »

mrbungie wrote: post #66
TeMPOraL wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any line drawn here. I think if they executed well (and by they I mean any one of the three SOTA LLM vendors), they could already mortally wound the entire software industry today. Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious: 1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status…

How would they mortally wound the software industry as of today? I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.

By embracing adversarial interoperability - instead of chasing hundreds of integration deals across industries that put LLMs in products, they focused fully on integrating product access into chat, by combination of business deals, apps/MCPs, and engineer/designer support for users, all directed towards the goal of having the LLM become the "superapp" where work is done, gradually replacing product classes in order of how easy it is.

There's lots of easy but drudge work to enable this that needs to be done at the fringes. For example, LLMs today could easily replace most people's smartphone homescreen experience, or travel/commute experience, as the data is there and LLMs have the capability, even prices are acceptable - what's missing is explicit first-party support to wire it up, keep it wired up.

One step up, what's missing is accepting this explicitly as a goal: to replace software, to make existing products (whether whole or in pieces) the tools AI uses to do work for you. All the vendors seem to carefully walk around the idea, but avoid engaging with it directly, because once they do, they'll be competing with everyone instead of milking them.

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

#83

Post by ralferoo »

antisthenes wrote: post #79
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…

> 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, bu…

I think you're misinterpreting what his comment meant. I read it as meaning that e-commerce has been optimised repeatedly over the 30 years, from a basic start (which as you pointed out was haphazard) to the point where it is now optimised to extract every possible cent from the user, whether by encouraging them to buy with one click (the Amazon one-click patent must be around 20 years old now), time-limited promo spot pricing, sending you e-mails about what you had in the basket if you don't complete a sale, etc...

Right now, by comparison, it sounds like AI based shopping is still in the very early stages. Maybe further along than the early e-commerce, but still with a long way to go in its evolution. That'll probably happen quicker than with e-commerce, because a lot of the knowledge about what does or doesn't work has already been learned, but it sounds like it's still a long way behind. Caveat - I've never used it myself, so I don't know how far it is along that path, I'm just basing that from the article.

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

#84

Post by TitaRusell »

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…

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.

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

#85

Post by moffkalast »

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…

Shopping research has been pretty funny to me at least, a straightforward way for them to do product placement that people actually want, but implement it so poorly that half of the links it returns are broken.

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

#86

Post by bko »

__alexs wrote: post #46
bko wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

That's a cynical way to look at it. Most likely the LLM will take a cut of sales and they'd be more or less indifferent who cuts the check. There's a market for this sort of thing. People will go to the best LLM for shopping. If the LLM is a shitty product, people will switch. LLMs are increasingly commoditized.

All you say is true for an aggregator like Amazon. But Amazon is better than Nike.com because as an aggregator they go from 1 to many retailers. LLMs will go from 1 aggregator (Amazon) to many so it will be better. And they don't have to invest a lot in UI/UX as chat is the interface.

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

#87

Post by le-mark »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #39
petcat wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

> but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry.

The US stock market has priced this in already. Many software only companies are perceived to be under threat by ai. It represents a wonderful arbitrage opportunity for ai skeptics in fact.

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

#88

Post by pluc »

You can either have AI be honest or AI become a marketing tool. The two are fundamentally incompatible.

You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.

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

#89

Post by bko »

throwaway290 wrote: post #32
bko wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

> impartial consistent system for shopping > for a lower price Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.

Catalog is impartial? Then why are ~40% of every search I do on Amazon a sponsored product? There is no pure "catalog" especially with cheap crap coming out every day from no-name Chinese labels.

Am I the only one that think Amazon has gotten pretty awful in the last 5 years?

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

#90

Post by StilesCrisis »

stavros wrote: post #41
bashkiddie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next years headline will be > AI accounts for 90% of accidents while only accounting for 1% of traffic

Waymo cars cause 90% fewer accidents than human drivers: https://abit.ee/en/cars/waymo-robotaxi-autonomous-driving-sa...

Yeah, but consumers can't buy Waymos. They can get dangerously unsafe Teslas and pretend it's the same tech.
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