5 ms·

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

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.

strulovich 15d ago
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)
- mrheosuper 15d ago
  >to get me the best price How do you know it's the best price ?
  - igor47 15d ago
    Found the evals fan!
- digdugdirk 15d ago
  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.
- iJohnDoe 15d ago
  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?
- pvab3 15d ago
  its going to get worse though as cloudflare keeps blocking more and more
  - ericd 15d ago
    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.
    - ezst 15d ago
      And yours and other's agents will probably remain an insignificant and invisible customer base anyway. My crystal ball is as good as anyone's, but if "agentic shopping" ever becomes mainstream, you can be sure that the vast majority will ask their phone (i.e. Google, i.e. Google Shopping) what the best price is anyways.
      - ericd 15d ago
        Sure, Google could be their agent, or ChatGPT, or Claude, or whatever local model the person is running. The big guys might all have the results cached so they don't have to rerun the crawl. Whatever their choice of agent, it seems pretty clear that almost everyone's going to use them, they're way too useful not to.
    - Marsymars 15d ago
      I expect a small site that undercuts the top Google results by 18% with a sign-up discount probably isn't profitable on those orders, so blocking agents would save them money - it's not like someone using agents in that way is going to have any loyalty to shopping from that site in the future.
      - tmp10423288442 15d ago
        If no one can find your site because you block agents, that won’t do much good either.
- FinnKuhn 14d ago
  Hi Omer, I think that is a use case where I'm sure an AI agent does well right now, but I have 2 follow-up thoughts based on it and what it is means that this is one of the best use case for AI online commerce so far. My first thought was that this is a quite limited application as most of shopping (online & retail) is not spent comparing prices and is instead spent on finding what product to buy in the first place. I believe this "shopping fun" and exploration of multiple options is not going away any time soon as those are some of the most attractive parts of the whole experience. I also think that the price comparison websites that exist, e.g. geizhals.de here in Germany (includes most e-commerce shops, and shipping information), are pretty good already and AI only being a better version of that would be quite a sad turn of events and with ads (and commission systems?) potentially coming to ChatGPT in the near future the incentives to find the best price are rly misaligned and I have doubts that people will trust results from ChatGPT. We already saw this as Google's sponsored links evolved to show whoever spent the most for the placement. Paid providers without ads and commissions might fare better though. edit: paragraph 3 is already happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563386

strulovich 15d ago

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)

mrheosuper 15d ago
>to get me the best price How do you know it's the best price ?
- igor47 15d ago
  Found the evals fan!
digdugdirk 15d ago
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.
iJohnDoe 15d ago
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?
pvab3 15d ago
its going to get worse though as cloudflare keeps blocking more and more
- ericd 15d ago
  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.
  - ezst 15d ago
    And yours and other's agents will probably remain an insignificant and invisible customer base anyway. My crystal ball is as good as anyone's, but if "agentic shopping" ever becomes mainstream, you can be sure that the vast majority will ask their phone (i.e. Google, i.e. Google Shopping) what the best price is anyways.
    - ericd 15d ago
      Sure, Google could be their agent, or ChatGPT, or Claude, or whatever local model the person is running. The big guys might all have the results cached so they don't have to rerun the crawl. Whatever their choice of agent, it seems pretty clear that almost everyone's going to use them, they're way too useful not to.
  - Marsymars 15d ago
    I expect a small site that undercuts the top Google results by 18% with a sign-up discount probably isn't profitable on those orders, so blocking agents would save them money - it's not like someone using agents in that way is going to have any loyalty to shopping from that site in the future.
    - tmp10423288442 15d ago
      If no one can find your site because you block agents, that won’t do much good either.
FinnKuhn 14d ago
Hi Omer, I think that is a use case where I'm sure an AI agent does well right now, but I have 2 follow-up thoughts based on it and what it is means that this is one of the best use case for AI online commerce so far. My first thought was that this is a quite limited application as most of shopping (online & retail) is not spent comparing prices and is instead spent on finding what product to buy in the first place. I believe this "shopping fun" and exploration of multiple options is not going away any time soon as those are some of the most attractive parts of the whole experience. I also think that the price comparison websites that exist, e.g. geizhals.de here in Germany (includes most e-commerce shops, and shipping information), are pretty good already and AI only being a better version of that would be quite a sad turn of events and with ads (and commission systems?) potentially coming to ChatGPT in the near future the incentives to find the best price are rly misaligned and I have doubts that people will trust results from ChatGPT. We already saw this as Google's sponsored links evolved to show whoever spent the most for the placement. Paid providers without ads and commissions might fare better though. edit: paragraph 3 is already happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563386