Comment by variety8675
19 hours ago
Companies don't want it to be easy to cross shop their competition, the whole premise of Amazon is that it's so easy and simple you don't even check the competition. AI agents are leveling the playing field and helping customers find the best deals, so of course they're being banned
Everyone focuses on Amazon here, but there is an entire industry of e-commerce tools and products and platforms and services designed around optimizing e-commerce sites for sales and other uses.
Agents invalidate a lot of that and so it is an existential threat to many of them. I expect the near future will result in a lot of different results tailored to agents that may actually result in higher priced products for agents browsing versus humans.
Current AI agents overindex on price. The price has to be reasonable but I often rank fast shipping and easy returns higher than price.
Recently bought something online from Home Depot and it arrived damaged. When I asked them for help they said I had to drive it back to the store myself.
If I have to drive to the store to get it, I wouldn’t have shopped with them! It feels like every time I don’t order with Amazon the stores remind me why I ought to.
True, and agents can also present a comparison table of options including: total price, shipping time, return convenience, etc.
The last thing I want from an agent is a table of options.
Agents are likely the slow death of Amazon. Muse could decide to sell anything and group buy their way into the everything store.
Amazon's strength lies in their logistics/3PL/last-mile systems. They invested heavily into this very early on into their business and it's been paying off ever since.
Walmart is the only other company that can compete at that scale given their very mature ground distribution network and even then Amazon has them beat good on air cargo (Amazon has a virtual cargo airline operated by Air Transport/Atlas Air, both of whom they have some ownership over) and inventory management (they hired some very very smart folks to help them build inventory forecasting systems)
As long as Amazon remains the only company that you can buy almost anything and get it in two or three days almost anywhere on Earth, they won't need to worry about the grim reaper coming for them.
Agents cannot provide free 2-day delivery or easy returns
Even if they could, it will be a _long_ time before the average person uses an agent for personal tasks like this
It's really hard to build a walled garden just for human users, and not for agents. Have to pick a side.
It's not that hard. Make an iOS app and use the remote attestation features to verify the client. In theory Android has similar mechanisms available, not sure how secure they are but Apple's is pretty good.
Now whether you want to restrict your shop to only being accessed via a mobile app is a totally different proposition.
Your first sentence makes sense, but not following your second. Who needs to pick and what are the sides they are choosing between?
It's mostly because of ads though. Not cross shopping.