5 ms·

ChatGPT recommended me some good hard drives for price per TB, and one particularly cheap one had direct checkout with Walmart, so I tried it, because why not?

ChatGPT recommended me some good hard drives for price per TB, and one particularly cheap one had direct checkout with Walmart, so I tried it, because why not? It let me get all the way to the payment step before it told me it was out of stock. Walmart's website told me it was out of stock when I decided to click on the link. This is probably part of why it doesn't convert.

jms703 6mo ago
This is my experience also, when trying chatgpt to purchase.
alex43578 6mo ago
That's typical of my experience with all of these stock-aggregator sites. Either the best price is some dodgy or outright fake storefront, the item's OOS from the real vendor, or the price is out of date. Trying to buy things like GPUs or SSDs are a joke. I really wish even one vendor would just implement an actual waiting list, locked to an account with a verified address and purchase history. I'm fine to wait for my purchase, but having to race bots for a lottery ticket purchase is a pain.
jborden13 6mo ago
Sounds like an opportunity for a live inventory context layer before an LLM makes recommendations
- brookst 6mo ago
  Check out UCP
  - kingjimmy 6mo ago
    do we need another protocol for this? seems like a stream data problem more than anything
    - brookst 6mo ago
      Agreed, but “protocol” is changing its meaning. MCP is t really a protocol either. They’re both better described as conventions, but whatever.
keeda 6mo ago
On a related note, I think that's a good monetization vector for chatbots. Long back I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few USB hard drives with very specific requirements -- including a small size and weight ("can be duct-taped to a tablet form-factor device without being obtrusive and constantly falling off"), low cost, and speed fast enough to boot an OS from. After a pretty technical conversation, it came up with 3 very specific products, one which ended up being the start point of the one I actually purchased on Amazon. I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way. I keep thinking of that interaction whenever the discussion of ads on chatbots crops up. In an ideal world, model providers could better capture the value they provide. Unfortunately, I suspect such conversations are too rare, and often harder to monetize. (Like that time free tier ChatGPT helped me recover $500 in compensation for an airline delay. Great value for me, but no upside for OpenAI.) Unfortunately given the amounts and timelines of returns that investors expect from OpenAI, and their scale, and with ChatGPT constrained to its “Free Consumer-facing Internet App” form factor, they are doomed to have to trade in the reserve currency of the web: ads.
- satvikpendem 6mo ago
  Gemini does this, it has Google Shopping links.
- otherme123 6mo ago
  >I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way. I also ask LLMs for product recomendations. But the moment I suspect they are hidding the best items (not paying for the ad) to push the second best (not even talking about pushing shit as good products because they pay more) is the moment the LLM loses its value as recomender.
  - toomuchtodo 6mo ago
    How do you know what recommendations you can trust from the LLM output?
dmorrison1 6mo ago
My AI agents recommended RAM, GPU, and CPU upgrades, but deemed the prices were still pre-their-existence, when I went to the links they sent they were often 2x more expensive.
cat-turner 6mo ago
Turns out real-time inventory access is not a trivial issue.
tmaly 6mo ago
I had the opposite, but it was for a SSD for a raspberry pi 5. I asked it to look online for good price. It found a place, and I ordered it. It was not a well known site like Walmart, but I got what I needed.
- dawnerd 6mo ago
  The fake product scammers are going to absolutely love people like you. Glad it worked out for you but that’s putting a lot of blind trust in it.
- internetter 6mo ago
  We are talking about the instant checkout feature: https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/ Assuming you visited this "not a well known site" directly, you did not use the "ChatGPT checkout" feature discussed in TFA
try-working 6mo ago
meta-search sites in travel (Skyscanner, etc) have the same problem of out of date cached information from the merchant. not solvable in practice because there's so much traffic volume and low rate of conversion that you must cache for cost reasons.
- account42 6mo ago
  Those typically have a list of vendors from lowest to highest (cached) price. IME the prices are correct more often than not but if the best deal has expired you can still check out the next best one.
  - try-working 6mo ago
    Well, my point is that there is always a certain level of incorrectness and that can never be fixed because of the cost of retrieving up to date pricing and availability.

jms703 6mo ago

This is my experience also, when trying chatgpt to purchase.

alex43578 6mo ago

That's typical of my experience with all of these stock-aggregator sites. Either the best price is some dodgy or outright fake storefront, the item's OOS from the real vendor, or the price is out of date. Trying to buy things like GPUs or SSDs are a joke. I really wish even one vendor would just implement an actual waiting list, locked to an account with a verified address and purchase history. I'm fine to wait for my purchase, but having to race bots for a lottery ticket purchase is a pain.

jborden13 6mo ago

Sounds like an opportunity for a live inventory context layer before an LLM makes recommendations

brookst 6mo ago
Check out UCP
- kingjimmy 6mo ago
  do we need another protocol for this? seems like a stream data problem more than anything
  - brookst 6mo ago
    Agreed, but “protocol” is changing its meaning. MCP is t really a protocol either. They’re both better described as conventions, but whatever.

keeda 6mo ago

On a related note, I think that's a good monetization vector for chatbots. Long back I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few USB hard drives with very specific requirements -- including a small size and weight ("can be duct-taped to a tablet form-factor device without being obtrusive and constantly falling off"), low cost, and speed fast enough to boot an OS from. After a pretty technical conversation, it came up with 3 very specific products, one which ended up being the start point of the one I actually purchased on Amazon. I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way. I keep thinking of that interaction whenever the discussion of ads on chatbots crops up. In an ideal world, model providers could better capture the value they provide. Unfortunately, I suspect such conversations are too rare, and often harder to monetize. (Like that time free tier ChatGPT helped me recover $500 in compensation for an airline delay. Great value for me, but no upside for OpenAI.) Unfortunately given the amounts and timelines of returns that investors expect from OpenAI, and their scale, and with ChatGPT constrained to its “Free Consumer-facing Internet App” form factor, they are doomed to have to trade in the reserve currency of the web: ads.

satvikpendem 6mo ago
Gemini does this, it has Google Shopping links.
otherme123 6mo ago
>I came away thinking if those were presented as affiliated links, that conversation could have been monetized in a mutually beneficial way. I also ask LLMs for product recomendations. But the moment I suspect they are hidding the best items (not paying for the ad) to push the second best (not even talking about pushing shit as good products because they pay more) is the moment the LLM loses its value as recomender.
- toomuchtodo 6mo ago
  How do you know what recommendations you can trust from the LLM output?

dmorrison1 6mo ago

My AI agents recommended RAM, GPU, and CPU upgrades, but deemed the prices were still pre-their-existence, when I went to the links they sent they were often 2x more expensive.

cat-turner 6mo ago

Turns out real-time inventory access is not a trivial issue.

tmaly 6mo ago

I had the opposite, but it was for a SSD for a raspberry pi 5. I asked it to look online for good price. It found a place, and I ordered it. It was not a well known site like Walmart, but I got what I needed.

dawnerd 6mo ago
The fake product scammers are going to absolutely love people like you. Glad it worked out for you but that’s putting a lot of blind trust in it.
internetter 6mo ago
We are talking about the instant checkout feature: https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/ Assuming you visited this "not a well known site" directly, you did not use the "ChatGPT checkout" feature discussed in TFA

try-working 6mo ago

meta-search sites in travel (Skyscanner, etc) have the same problem of out of date cached information from the merchant. not solvable in practice because there's so much traffic volume and low rate of conversion that you must cache for cost reasons.

account42 6mo ago
Those typically have a list of vendors from lowest to highest (cached) price. IME the prices are correct more often than not but if the best deal has expired you can still check out the next best one.
- try-working 6mo ago
  Well, my point is that there is always a certain level of incorrectness and that can never be fixed because of the cost of retrieving up to date pricing and availability.