alt Hacker NewsIt makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.
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I don't think it does make sense. I think Amazon is way overestimating brand loyalty, and underestimating how much of their success comes from being a one-stop shop for everything.
I'm using Claude for everything from finances to dinner planning to project planning. If Amazon doesn't let Claude search and buy, I'm not abandoning Claude, I'm abandoning Amazon.
As long as my actions are as simple as possible, I don't care whether Claude is searching 5000 online retailers or only 4999, minus Amazon. I'm certainly not going to say "ok, this project requires buying 13 things for about $500, but I don't see amazon in the list, so let me go manually search for each one on Amazon and see if they might have a better price or something."
This is Walmart / Apple Pay all over again. Yes, near-monopolies, lots of power. But they got there by making things easy for consumers. Making things difficult to force consumer behavior never ends well.
I always check Google before Amazon, because it's impossible to find anything on Amazon. Amazon is a bit like the bargain bin of a DYI shop. If it's immediately visible it's okay, of not, don't bother searching.
Half the time I can't even find the category page. And if I do find it, the filters will just be useless anyway.
In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction.
Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big.
Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that.
Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.
Amazon is not usually very good anymore, quality has suffered massively.
Should not stores make shopping with AI easier instead, as the number of ”customers” that are agents will increase and they will shop where they can?
Amazon is supposed to be the cheapest/best delivery store due to it's huge scale.
It's how they killed the competition.
Sounds like Amazon is trying to use its monopoly position to give it an competitive advantage over smaller stores.