Comment by FinnKuhn
8 hours ago
You can't even get many people to buy things online at all and if you can it's less profitable than retail, because you need to spend a lot of money to convince people, advertise to be seen, and account for returns. I think this is also due to the factors you mention.
One quick example: In fashion, Inditex and Shein have about the same revenue (€39.9bn and $41.8bn in 2025), but Inditex is more than three times as profitable. I don't see how there is a demand for agentic commerce that would remove even more control from the customer when shopping. Part of why we shop is for the experience. For B2B producurement platforms like Alibaba I can see the appeal though.
I recently needed to buy some hardware for a piece of furniture.
Ran Codex, it found it for 18% less than what I found in the top Google results. It did it by finding smaller shops, applying a discount code, subscribing to a newsletter for a better code after approval, and took into account the shipping (by placing it in the cart and going to checkout) all to get me the best price.
I’m guessing without it I would have spent much more time on it and paid the original price I saw.
If you use AI agents well, they can easily save you more money than they cost, and saving money is something most people are pretty excited about.
(Disclosure: OpenAI employee)
>to get me the best price
How do you know it's the best price ?
Found the evals fan!
I mean, that's cool and all, but the numbers are really going to shift when it accidentally goes off and orders that same hardware from every vendor in your local region and the top 5 online results for comparison.
It's the same problem as all other LLM solutions (that I hope OpenAI is working on!) it's non-deterministic, and there's no way for the user (or model provider) to know what the distribution of possible outcomes is. This just gets compounded when multi-call harnesses come onto play.
its going to get worse though as cloudflare keeps blocking more and more
I‘m using mostly the browser automations for things like that now. Same for research - ChatGPT is banned from reading many pages, but Codex can read anything I can.
But isn’t it funny that Cloudflare is blocking AI on their pages, but on the other hand is researching and marketing things like „you can put a browser in a CF worker“
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The sites that do that won't be getting money from my and others' agents. Guessing that's going to become more and more of a problem for those sites.
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Thanks. This is genuinely a cool usage example.
How did you run this? Web interface, desktop app, CLI?
How did you complete the final transaction?