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by bko12 hours ago |
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upvoteby __alexs11 hours ago|
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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 possible. There is no basically no consumer market for "power shopping" outside of weird niches like pcpartpicker.com etc.

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upvoteby StilesCrisis10 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby janalsncm4 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby StilesCrisis1 hours ago|
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I don't think I agree. If I overpay by 10%, I'll never know it and probably wouldn't return it even if I did know--once the shrinkwrap is off, too late. If a superior product exists but I don't find it, by definition I wouldn't know and wouldn't return the thing I did buy.
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upvoteby bko10 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby __alexs8 hours ago|
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It's not cynical it is materialism.

Shoppers do not want to pay to shop. Retailers pay thousands to encourage you to shop with them. They are the economic buyers of this feature.

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upvoteby throwaway29011 hours ago|
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> impartial consistent system for shopping

> for a lower price

Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.

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upvoteby danlitt11 hours ago|
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I do agree with your conclusion, but the catalog in most online shops is certainly not impartial. Amazon sells the entire first page of search placement, for example.
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upvoteby throwaway2908 hours ago|
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But we know it and it's obvious.
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upvoteby recursive5 hours ago|
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Within a few years people will be accustomed to the idea of AI chatbots selling them stuff and it will be obvious then too. The first time paid placements appeared in a catalog, it was probably also not obvious then.
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upvoteby TeMPOraL11 hours ago|
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Catalog is an ad, the SKU database behind the catalog is impartial (at least as much as it gets), but no one is giving you access to that.
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upvoteby bko10 hours ago|
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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?

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upvoteby throwaway2908 hours ago|
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You can skip sponsored products
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upvoteby iso16319 hours ago|
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more like 20 years. Basically when they introduced third party sellers.
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