Comment by subroutine
14 hours ago
What is the use case for LLM agent shoppers? I can't imagine delegating the purchase of a used item to an AI (I'd be okay with AI identifying the best deals for me to review). This must be something for people who are doing something at scale like flipping items on Ebay or drop shipping.
I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.
"Hey, ChatGPT/Grok/GeneriBot4000, please watch for a great deal on a 1982 stratocaster guitar - must be in good or better condition, $600 or less, and if you see it, go ahead and buy it without confirmation"
Ongoing tasks, arbitrage for mispriced postings in ways that aren't currently exploited that LLMs make feasible - by banning auto-buy, maybe they're attempting to delineate between human seeming behavior and automation, and giving AI permission to buy looks too much like a real person?
Seems pretty petty to me.
I have decent tech company salary but I don't even buy $10 books without checking everything. This week I almost bought a wrong book (manually) because how similar the title is. Automating stuff with AI is interesting, but I don't want the hassle of getting surprised and handling returns, if the item can be returned at all, especially on eBay.
I genuinely wonder, would you do that, really? Sure 600$ is not the end of the world for certain countries, but neither it is a sum I'm willing to just lose on random. What if the electronic parrot buys from an obvious counterfeit vendor or obvious scammer? Or what if it buys you a stratocaster but different? Or a random 1982 guitar? What if it ignores 600$? Or what if it buys 600$ item with 300$ shipping and 500$ customs from god knows where?
I've seen enough by now and I know that some people will just unleash LLMs on anything without almost no oversight. We can already see people use agentic IDEs with "do all the shit" flag, they would probably easily add finances to the list of automation.
But, honestly, would you?
Yeah I guess that makes sense for some people. I'm just not in a financial position where I'd let an AI buy a $600 used guitar without me taking a look at it first.
An '82 stratocaster would normally go for around $2000, so someone offloading an estate, fat fingering a price entry, etc, could give you a chance to double your money or more. $600 would be a very low price - same for a Martin D18 in fair+ condition, no cracks, etc.
If I were going to automate something like this, I'd have a suite of products to watch for - common enough to be reasonably frequent but obscure enough to be mispriced, kinda the whole idea behind secondhand ocmmission / antique / estate sale shops.
I don't know how EBay is supposed to differentiate automation from real users in this scenario. To get around it, all you need is human intervention at the last act, so you could fire up your bot and have it forward the "buy now" link when all parameters are met? Maybe they just don't want AI companies to have an argument for some sort of revenue sharing or commissions.
2 replies →
Yeah literally price mistakes being picked up right away. But also seems like a good way to get scammed.
I wager the scammer industry looking for active bots and exploiting them would thrive. Automate creation of fake listings using throwaway accounts using popular keywords and arbitraging price lower and lower, and until automatic buyers start bidding, remember the price and delete listing. Recreate listing with that price from a separate account selling bricks for 600$, and voila - free money.
"Hey ChatGPT, I need more glass cleaner"
*OpenAI issues a micro auction to glass cleaner companies and distributors to see who will bid the highest combined commision*
"Sure thing! I ordered some Glass Clean Plus from Target for you!"
[Recycling a joke from many months ago]
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKSQrhX7BM&t=0m13s)
I don't understand why you're putting the joke here. I mean yeah they'll probably start putting ads in, but that's a whole different topic.
Sir, are you aware you are not drinking regular coffee, but Columbian decaffeinated coffee crystals?
Drop shippers who arbitrage between major and minor ecommerce platforms need to maintain their listings, re-price things, etc. They don't care if the AI gets it wrong sometimes as long as they more than make back the cost of deploying it.
So now imagine ten thousand of these jerks telling their AI of choice "hey go scrape everything you can and re-list it for 10% more". That's a lot of load on the platforms at both ends for listings that are unlikely to generate many sales.
But that also seems like a very inefficient way to accomplish this automation task from the drop shippers side too. What do you gain from the LLM that non LLM automation couldn't do more cost effectively?
More importantly, doing this will quickly get throttled on the provider side (if using chat UI) or costs will skyrocket (if using APIs).
The right way to use LLMs here is to have them write (and perhaps maintain) scraping scripts and run those.
"Hey ChatGPT I want to build my own personal cloud storage computer, buy all the hardware for me then walk me through building and configuring it. My budget is $600, try to get the best deals and make sure that all the parts are compatible. I'm fine with used parts as long as they're a good deal and are in working order."
You would really do this? You'd not even want to at least briefly review the cart before making a $600 purchase of used computer hardware?
I would. I would in particular like to review the cart in form of a table rendered in LLM interface, because all e-commerce sites have bullshit. user-hostile UI/UX and I'm tired of it.
Really, dealing with bullshit for you is by far the biggest promise of any agentic solutions today.
How do ticket scalpers make money? It's an automation war. You can run arbitrage strategies at scale if you can scrape markets with bots that understand unstructured data. Even if trades go wrong sometimes it can be profitable on average.
Does it need a known and enumerated use case to be allowed? I don't like that implication.
An AI that shops for a blind user, for one free example of the untold and unexplored uses of new technology.