> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads
No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
>If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books).
Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc."
How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas.
And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane.
Delivery time is super important--50% of the time. Maybe less than 50%. I never pay for express shipping on personal orders. One or two days is never worth $3 cost to me. Let alone a $12-20 charge.
I suspect super fast delivery is only a differentiator when all else is equal. At $6+/gal diesel, I'll take the cheaper item delivered by bicycle in a week. (A bit of a joke, but you get the point.)
I ordered something the other day from another website and it was $9 cheapest shipping option and took 5 days. When all Prime is 1-2 day “free” delivery for me, that’s hard to beat.
Amazon prime was costing me 20$/order so I cancelled it a while ago. Which made many sites competitive with Amazon on shipping.
As to delivery times, many things could take 2 weeks to show up and I wouldn’t care. The range where I can wait 18+ hours but can’t wait ~1 week just doesn’t cover that many of my purchases.
For me small things are generally cheaper on Aliexpress.
Amazon drivers are also terrible in my area. They leave parcels as soon as the app tells them they can (it's done via GPS) so sometimes that is on top of an apartment block mailbox on a main road with high foot traffic.
Not everyone is optimizing for time. The agents will give you the choice of what you want to optimize for.
So you can just tell your agent "Hey X order me a Nintendo Switch 2. I want it by the weekend." Then it will order it for you from whoever has the cheapest price that conforms to the given criteria.
If the local agent has access to your digital wallet (Apple pay or Google pay) and your email then it has all it needs to perform and verify the transaction.
I’m sure I’m an outlier out here in the boonies but they are consistently slower than the other 3 carriers out here.
Not really. They’re a day or more late most of the time in the major metro where I live. Usually only when I’m relying on them.
If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
Amazon cannot even sort by price. An AI that gives me a list of Amazon products sorted by price will instantly replace Amazon for me.
What about the end game where my own computer running my own code controls the experience? There's a 10 trillion dollar incentive to never allow that reality.
It was legal when amazon did it to everyone else
> You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying product becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
Ironically, this is what Amazon did to local business owners. Now that the tables are turned (and they have billions to spend on lawyers), they see the threat.
> You have to own the consumer experience.
No, we have to own it.
I'm so tired of these abusive control freak corporations. I'm actually starting to look forward to these "unaligned" AIs which are just going to ignore all of this nonsense whether they like it or not.
Disintermediation.
It's Amazon's whole business model.
https://prosperousamerica.org/amazons-heavy-recruitment-of-c...
This is what I have been saying since LLMs came out.
A device with a custom agent that has a screen, mic and speaker can now turn amazon into a logistics company.
The most low friction way of doing anything is to just ask someone else to do it for you. In this case it's the agent. So now if a company wants to capture a percentage between the buyer and seller then they need to have influence over the agent or capture a percentage of the transaction fees.
Disintermediating the consumer experience the primary value proposition of AI clients, and, yes, I mean to say disintermediating even though AI -- in effect -- becomes an intermediary.
It has shown that it is a much better intermediary than all others because it does what you ask it to, unlike Google Search and Amazon Search et al, whom make their bread and butter by disregarding what you ask for and instead sending paid slop to you.