Walmart: ChatGPT Checkout Converted 3x Worse Than Website (searchengineland.com)
- Reference: 0181087016
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/23/1537238/walmart-chatgpt-checkout-converted-3x-worse-than-website
- Source link: https://searchengineland.com/walmart-chatgpt-checkout-converted-worse-472071
> Starting in November, Walmart offered about 200,000 products through OpenAI's Instant Checkout. Users could complete purchases inside ChatGPT without visiting Walmart's site. Daniel Danker, Walmart's EVP of product and design, said those in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions. He called the experience "unsatisfying" and confirmed Walmart is moving away from it.
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> Instant Checkout was designed to let users complete purchases directly inside ChatGPT without visiting a retailer's website. However, earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed it was phasing out Instant Checkout in favor of app-based checkout handled by merchants. Walmart will embed its own chatbot, Sparky, inside ChatGPT. Users will log into Walmart, sync carts across platforms, and complete purchases within Walmart's system. A similar integration is coming to Google Gemini next month.
In other Walmart-related news, the retailer announced plans to roll out " [2]digital price tags " to all U.S. stores by the end of the year.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/walmart-chatgpt-checkout-converted-worse-472071
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/22/2346224/walmart-announces-digital-price-labels-for-every-store-in-the-us-by-the-end-of-2026
WTF does this mean? (Score:4, Informative)
"in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions"
Theres a lot of jargon in that summary.
Re:WTF does this mean? (Score:5, Informative)
It means when people asked ChatGPT, "What kind of diapers should I buy for my chihuahua?" three times more people ended up buying the diapers when ChatGPT just gave them a link to the Walmart website versus ChatGPT describing the item and saying "I know who you are and where you live and have your credit card info. If you want to buy these diapers, just blink twice."
I know, it's a surprising result.
Re: (Score:2)
And those that bought from within ChatGPT happened to do so because the chihuahua blinked twice, er each eye blinked once a few seconds apart.
AI has the potential to do so many good things (Score:2)
Why do AI companies keep coming up with these stupid ideas?
Re: (Score:2)
At any given moment in their history, AI companies have tried to get AI to do what it can do in its current state. These ideas may or may not appear to be "stupid" but they are waypoints in the development of the technology.
They have gone from games (chess, etc.) to machine-learning applications (autonomous planetary probes and online recommendation engines) to deep-learning applications (jeopardy, go, voice-recognition, image-analysis) to our current collection of human-like technologies (chatbots, LLMs, a
I don't trust AI agents to make decisions (Score:2)
And I ESPECIALLY don't trust AI agents to make decisions about Walmart purchases! I worked as a Spark driver (until I got fired for putting one foot inside a customers doorway). If something ordered wasn't it stock, it would suggest completely unrelated replacements, and expect you to ask the customer, "Would you like me to bring you this instead?" I generally just told them, "Sorry, it's out of stock."
Not that bad... (Score:5, Funny)
... still a much higher conversion rate than the Jehovah's Witnesses that keep coming to my door!
Whole Lota Nonsense (Score:2)
Walmart is moving away... openAI is discontinuing.
Walmart will embed its own AI... inside ChatGPT? With a similar system inside Gemini next month?
Users will complete purchases within Walmart's system.
What a whole lot of nonsense.
In CmdrTaco's day... (Score:2, Flamebait)
I hate talking for others, but I'm pretty sure CT would have prioritized the "Digital price tags", which has all kinds of technical and legal implications like the ability to do surge pricing and change prices between the shopper getting something and checking it out at the checkouts, over "Fraud tech whose fraud has become obvious still awful."
But you guys do you, and keep hyping this shit.
And another LLM business model dead (Score:2)
I guess there really is nothing left besides "somewhat better search" now, and that one is nowhere near able to generate enough profits to keep LLMs running and updated.
Who the fuck (Score:5, Insightful)
would shop through ChatGPT
Re: (Score:2)
I'm frankly surprised they had any "conversions" at all. I wonder what the actual rate was.
Re: (Score:2)
> would shop through ChatGPT
Apparently, people who don't want to be ominously "converted".
Re: (Score:2)
Someone got an immediate answer on a subreddit post who said they spent 30 minutes asking ShatGPT for an explanation and not getting one.
Folks who used to go to Google for everything instead of going to a specific shop or Wikipedia are now just using ShatGPT instead.
It's like the people who would type searches into the URL bar before they turned URL bars into garbage.
Re: Who the fuck (Score:2)
Journalists use it for summaries (and sometikes don't double check sources even). Both Nate Silver and Tech Dirt blogs talk about their use and use paid versions.
A lot of programmers use it to do tedium too.
These two user classes pay less than it costs to provide them service, but do get significant value from it.
I use it to fix some of the tedium of using pandas, and also to generate pivot tables in Excel.
I think when they AI companies start focusing on their cost rather than improved benchmarks we'll see
Re: (Score:2)
People who use ChatGPT as the next generation search engine. So they might ask it for "I want to buy a new computer" and ChatGPT would now provide direct links to buy them from Walmart.
Or they may ask ChatGPT to find the difference between two similar products and it might suggest a third.
That was the idea, i think. But in reality people are probably doing their research after ChatGPT suggests a product rather than just blindly buying it leading to lower conversion rates.
Re: (Score:2)
The way things are going, everybody who can't figure out how to turn if off (and they will make it as impossible as they can to do so).
What business doesn't dream of eliminating the one obstacle between them and your money, your choice not to do business with them?
Re: (Score:2)
The business model makes more sense than you would think. Let's say you are chatting with ChatGPT about repairing something and after some discussion and ChatGPT loading quite a few repair tutorials it presents you the solution and the question "Look up offers for the repair parts?" This is basically the scheme how YouTubers who make hundreds of repair videos make money using referal Links, only that that tutorial was by ChatGPT and the offers fetched via some kind of API which shops can use to offer their