alt Hacker NewsYou 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.
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)