The tech industry is hot for shopping bots, but they're years away

The thought of automated software making purchases on behalf of consumers from online merchants thrills much of the tech and financial industry. The chatter started in early 2025 and has surged since then, giving rise to the term "agentic commerce." A few reality checks have called the idea into question. For example, Amazon …

[Richard 12]

Literally nobody wants this

Consumers cannot afford to rent the agent in the first place, and toddlers spending hundreds or thousands due to failures of parental controls are semi-regular news stories.

Business customers need human payment controls - in many cases this is a legal duty. They're already getting in trouble due to AWS and other cloud automated overspends.

The merchants cannot accept these payments, because the customer will reverse the charges if they later disagree with the agent's actions.

The payment processors cannot process them, because they're liable for the costs of reversing the charges.

The whole thing is yet another example of the AI industry flailing around trying to find a market. The only way it could ever happen is if the AI pedlar accepts liability for "mistakes", and they never will.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Literally nobody wants this

Despite years of data, learning and Amazon AI … they can’t recommend for shit.

Esp. If you accidentally click on something … you don’t want a follow-up mail making a recommendation for something way outside your purchasing profile.

It’s as useful as the ‘careful’ Tesco/Sainsbury’a/Morrison’s/Asda.com shoppers picking shit and date questionable (nit catching for the longest date) fruit and veg and other time limited goods.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Literally nobody wants this

What would be useful if you can give an agent a task to find something for you.

‘I’d like to go to New York for 2 weeks, somewhere between 1st April and 31st April next year. I don’t mind one stop to save some money, but door to door travel must be less than 13 hours. I won’t fly Icelandair, British Airways or EasyJet for any part of my journey. From Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow or Edinburgh. I will find my own accommodation. Please suggest and keep looking twice daily.’.

However I’m sure the AI LLM/agent suppliers/comparison engines will have already sold out and be colluding with airlines and IP tracking …. so you will still get fucked £€$.

[Richard 12]

Re: Literally nobody wants this

There's already algorithms for that.

Repeatable, verifiable algorithms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tethering a person's identity to an agent.

Goody goody, another route to forcing digital identity papers.

It doesn't matter if the (claimed) original intent is "just" to take the place of a credit card* number so your agent can buy loo roll online, once there is an identifier it can be repurposed. Even easier if you, the consumer, become habituated to supplying that id every time you shop online; then in bricks and mortar shops (AI ID Inc.: "we can just buy Nectar..."), before you know it Government will take control of the issuer, directly or indirectly via "consumer safety legislation" and next week it is conveniently printed on your driving licence, then passport.

Like the story of the Social Security Number only in reverse, this time get commerce to set it up and then governments can appropriate it.

* They'd happily use the credit card number as your forever id, if only they could stop you from changing banks, getting more than one.. Ditto phone numbers: those are cross-referenced already, frustratingly without the formal connection to the individual (not that banks and other two-factor uses aren't trying to say otherwise). With a brand new ID supplier, industry-wide so the AI companies can swap you around as they merge with each other or create new spinoffs, and "for your safety" requiring government proof of identity to register (if FaceBook feel they can demand that, for the advertiser's^^^^^^^^^^^^user's sake...)

[araczynski]

Trust in agents aside, I don't see "hey, buy this gadget when it's 90% off on amazon" being allowed to really work out. Its like trying to play poker with everyone's hands showing.

I've seen Amazon's own "show me price history" lie straight to my face too many times to give a F about agentic shopping for many years to come.

[DS999]

I dunno

I check a deal site daily just to look and see what's on offer. Sometimes I'll buy things that I wasn't planning to buy because it is something I either know I need or might eventually need that's at a really attractive price.

I could see telling my agent "let me know if you see this specific product or something in this product category that's more than 50% off the typical pricing". It would alert me and I could ask for the price history it has seen (so I don't have to believe Amazon et al) ask it to summarize reviews for that and so forth and if I decide to pull the trigger tell it to buy.

I'd only do this if I truly had a personal agent though. That means something that runs on a device I own that's only responsible to me. Not an agent controlled by a giant advertising and social media firm whose CEO is often compared to a lizard, even if they claim that it is "private" because it runs in a VM in their datacenter. Private from other people's agents perhaps but not private from Zuck's influence!

[mebh]

Shopping as a hobby

There is also the factor that a lot of people enjoy shopping - it's basically a hobby to look at stuff whether in person or online. Why would they want to turn that over to an agent?

[MachDiamond]

Re: Shopping as a hobby

"There is also the factor that a lot of people enjoy shopping - it's basically a hobby to look at stuff whether in person or online."

Beyond the hobby aspect, I want to look at a seller's feedback or reviews of the product. Will an agent take those things into account or will it strive to save that last couple of cents no matter what?

I'm happy to spend an extra buck to buy something from a seller that has local stock. I don't want to pay express shipping and if the local seller ships promptly, I'll have the item quick enough. There are nuances to that. The closest seller might not be the one with the fastest shipping. Getting something that ships from a major city that's further away can often be faster over a firm that is closer but in a small town.

I also don't want to discover that an agent has bought something with a deceptive name or description that isn't what I want. Sure, I could return it and/or dispute the charges, but I will still need to order the correct thing and there's no guarantee that the payment processor will honor the dispute.

[DS999]

Re: Shopping as a hobby

That's true for anything people consider a hobby. Some people enjoy growing their own food in a garden, others would pay almost any amount for their vegetables rather than spend countless hours digging around in the dirt under the hot sun, fighting weeds, pests, and roving deer and rabbits.

I would absolutely have vegetables growing in my backyard if I had a household robot who did all that labor for me!

[MachDiamond]

Re: Shopping as a hobby

"I would absolutely have vegetables growing in my backyard if I had a household robot who did all that labor for me!"

You'd want to pay for the top-tier weed detection upgrade so the bot doesn't decide your almost ripe harvest looks like weeds.

Images of Morticia lopping off the rose flowers to be left with thorny stems.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agentic Shopping

Even if we work past the technicalities of electronic agency and payment, there remains the problem that A.I. is ignorant and does not understand anything. If you unleash such an agent with your credit card, you probably will be burned.

"Hello, Agent. Buy me the cheapest Western Electric Type 507 switchboard you can find."

"Okay, Boss, I got you one for just fifty bucks."

Let's see what happened ...

(First try) Shipping is "free alongside ship, freight collect," from Vrieedespoort, Lower Elbonia. The company's truck rattles to a stop in front of (for example) Berth 17, the truck's rear door is rolled up from inside the truck (Hell, no, they are NOT getting out of that truck), the ramp slams down, they push the crate onto the ramp, and the moment the crate and the dolly it's riding on roll (or possibly, "tumble") onto the cobblestones, the truck is in motion again, the ramp banging and bouncing behind the truck.

The military forces of the Eastern Association are rolling through Lower Elbonia, and it's about even money whether your item will be snatched by street kids, snatched by adult gangs, or shot up by the E.A. as their tanks roll past, "just because."

(Second try) The item arrives (Miracle!) undamaged at your home, but because your A I. agent bought it from Temu, the moment you get the crate open and your item is touched by sunlight, it collapses into a pile of broken, grey paper mache and cardboard.

(Third try) The item arrives at your home, but turns out to be a six-inch-high, 3-D-printed model of a Type 507 telephone switchboard.

Then your agentic A.I. says to you, "Insert twenty-five tokens for the next three minutes, please ..."

[Dinanziame]

Another problem, she said, is that the site calculated taxes and shipping based on the customer's location. When agents operate from a remote server, she said, that may change the location data.

Waaiiiit a minute. There is no shopping website, no matter how badly botched, that will use IP geolocation to compute the tax and shipping costs rather than, y' know, the delivery address...?