Comment by WarmWash
2 days ago
At least in a few examples it looks like it is surfacing the manufacturers page, and then random 3rd parties have it cheaper, which is pretty commmon.
2 days ago
At least in a few examples it looks like it is surfacing the manufacturers page, and then random 3rd parties have it cheaper, which is pretty commmon.
Yes, I feel this is like when I look for a hotel and see a low price through a sketchy website but it is because it is a non-refundable member-only price. I wonder what the actual click through prices are. Sellers might try to serve higher prices to AI models but I'm not sure that would be useful to them.
Yeah and I know one issue with this is that sites like Amazon tend to have greater protections against scraping from AIs, so there is not much AI providers could do if they wanted to find the true lowest price.
I wonder if Amazon will lose enough sales to more bot-friendly vendors that they’ll notice this and do something about it?
As long as there are 200M American Prime subscribers who like two day shipping it seems unlikely.
Then again, that makes it more expensive for the inconspicuous buyer who has no idea, which is a considerably larger population than HN readers.
Sure but in my own experience, the cheapest seller often means you are setting yourself up for headache if anything goes wrong.
It's easy to envision a parallel story about AI recommending sketchy vendors with no protections.
I think it's a good thing if this forces manufacturers to list honest prices instead of inflated ones.