Comment by xnx
16 hours ago
Without a convenience moat, commerce will get even more adversarial: membership pricing, surveillance pricing, loyalty perks, varied products to avoid price comparison (like mattresses and Costco).
Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.
try anything and everything except providing a better product.
How would the agent know it's a better product? All it has to go on are whatever bot-generated spam reviews and prompt injections that they can scrape.
In a fully agentic shopping experience, it's not obvious to me that providing a better product works to drive sales. Bargain-basement stores can make up a story about how their goods are lovingly handcrafted for decades of durability (adversarially tested against the most common agents, so they'll believe it) much more efficiently than I can honestly provide one.