Posted by simianwords 23 hours ago
Amazon ads is a relatively large portion of its retail profits.
Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability.
No wonders, Amazon is actively banning these agents. but for how long is this even viable? Do we simply move our shopping to more agent friendly destinations? Is this an opportunity for Walmart to finally reclaim it’s throne?
Would agents be susceptible to advertising? If humans have issues differentiating ads from real results, and are swayed by TV ads and stuff (they are), then why wouldn't an AI agent.
I kind of assume they would, given how ChatGPT brings up garbage websites sometimes for my questions.
>We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.
Probably to protect their advertising business which is very strong.
We’ll see how this plays out.
I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect?
But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it.
Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important.
Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.
Something like declaring agents as representatives of consumers and blocking them violates ADA or just shouldn’t be allowed unless they are abusive.
Lacking that, it seems it’ll be an arms race between offense and defense. At some point, computer control probably wins (running my browser, on my computer, is pretty difficult to detect with reasonable f1 score)
The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance
I’ve already used it to handle customer support request calls. I see 30+ minute hold+conversation times and generally the issue gets resolved. That is hugely empowering.
They just don't want to, because there's no ads. The human gets removed from the loop of visiting the site entirely. And it doesn't say Amazon all over it.