Not that I suspect perplexity is any kind of innocent of that behavior (or at least will remain so if extremely successful)
Now companies are doing the same with AI. We can use AI, and other tools to maximize what we extract from you, but you cannot use AI to help yourself with better outcomes.
I also commented here that it sounds anti-competitive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816871
It’s actually the idea behind the decentralized marketplace I’m building. It uses MCP-UI to bring the whole storefront and checkout into the chat.
I’m keeping a close eye on e-commerce and AI and the recent deal Paypal made with OpenAI and Amazon getting aggressive, it’s clear they want to make AI powered commerce a walled garden.
That would be nice indeed. Let’s decouple ratings, reviews etc from the place we purchase the product from. Those can never be in the same place.
I would love to be able to just type "buy me a FooCorp BarBaz" into an LLM, and have it take care of choosing the retailer based on whatever criteria I've decided, whether that's lowest price, best return policy, fastest shipping... whatever. That sounds like it could be a much better experience than what we have now.
But I do worry that a service like yours could be biased in myriad ways, and an unscrupulous owner of such a service could do shady things like allowing retailers to pay to be preferred over others. Ultimately I'd want the open source version of this that I can self-host.
We felt AI was the perfect glue between different types of stores and could navigate them using intelligence. An example of this is being able to paste in your address in chat and AI will figure out which is the country, state, etc. Different stores handle addresses differently.
Also, you're adding a discovery platform where businesses have to compete against other businesses for visibility and customers. Why would I choose to, yet again, help create another "aggregator" to the already saturated "aggregator" market (Amazon, Shopify, Google, ChatGPT, etc.)?
Btw, I'm not trying to bash your idea. The reason I ask is that businesses (even smaller ones) don't pay just for software, but for everything else (support, etc), and among those things, software too, and frankly, the main problem 15 years ago was discovery, but with social media (Twitter, ig, and now TikTok), discovery itself is a solved problem.
This marketplace doesn't charge transaction fees because stores already have their own infrastructure. We're just connecting to it. Marketplace operators who fork this can charge flat listing fees or affiliates, but the model works because discovery is separate from infrastructure.
On discovery being solved: social sends traffic to your site, but checkout still happens on your platform. Same here. The difference is stores aren't locked in. They expose a standard interface once and automatically work with every marketplace using that protocol. One store can be listed on multiple marketplaces serving different audiences without any extra integrations.
You're right that businesses pay for more than software. But they also shouldn't have to pay 15-30% transaction fees when they already own the checkout stack. That's the shift.
Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon? Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon? Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon? Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy? What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?
Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?
A private business can 100% refuse service to you. Examples with regards to "delegation":
- If you come in using a form of non-cash payment that doesn't belong to you.
- If you're purchasing a car, and are filling out paperwork under someone else's name. FYI, you can buy cars on Amazon.com.
- If you attempt to pick-up a pre-order or an item earmarked for someone else.
...
Of course some businesses are more or less restrictive base on fraud chance, yada yada, but you get the idea. You're not being oppressed. Go shop elsewhere.
I completely understand private businesses having a right to refuse a service without a cause. But as others pointed, the question is to what degree "delegation" is acceptable if I'm acting in a good faith?
I'm guessing the answer is "to a degree it doesn't impact our business".
But yes, agreed, businesses have the right to refuse service to anyone (outside of illegal discrimination).
We should fight it, though, when those refusals are backed by anti-consumer practices. It's pretty clear that Amazon doesn't like agent-mediated purchases because it allows the customer to bypass Amazon's ability to put sponsored products in front of you, and try to get you to buy related and add-on products along with what you actually want.
Sure, it is their right to do that, but as consumers I think we shouldn't be complacent and just take what the big shopping overlords feed us. Consolidation (and races to the bottom such as this) is making it harder and harder to find competing retailers and products when we want to vote with our wallets as to what kinds of shopping experiences are acceptable.
And the bottom line is that if Amazon realizes that they're losing sales because people want to use AI agents to buy things, and they're banning those agents, they'll change their tune. But that only works so long as there are alternatives with better practices, and, well... there aren't many.
Note that the broken patent system is a part of the abuse enablement. Companies like Amazon rack up huge portfolios of mostly frivolous patents for this purpose. They may claim they only use them defensively. But the reality is if you cross them in any way, they can then “defensively” make your life miserable by abusing the law through the broken patent system. For example if a company like Amazon copies your innovative product, you can’t practically go after them, because they hold all sorts of leverage through the patent system.
Now, maybe that is monopoly abuse. But monopoly abuse isn't taken seriously in America, so Perplexity's options are limited.