Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods".

LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).

I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.

Wow - than at least my behavior - and that of quite an impressive amount of non tech people in my circle of acquaintances - are "unnatural".

I know people who took a photo of their car's driver side mirror cap (the thing that is on the opposite of the drivers side mirror and often colored like the rest of the car) - and asked chatGPT to search for the part. Because they were not able to navigate the respective auto parts portals.

I myself had perplexity generate a comparison report for different electric cars in a specific price range to get a first rough understanding of the used eCar market. Including links to respective models in used car sites.

Using Kagi for the few regular searches I need to do nowadays, Claude Code on the commandline for any other extended research/searches, I actually only use Google nowadays when I use the Google song detection function. Like Shazam - I just find this thing to be on my phone, so no need for an additional app.

I could give you a lot of additional examples from acquaintances and family - esp. from the not so tech people. Google is catching up, though. So - I think, with habits being hard to break, most people find Google good enough for quite a long time to come.

> Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.

I recently used ChatGPT to compare headphones before buying them, although the workflow there was a bit manual; I took some headphones that I had in mind off a cursory search off Amazon, had ChatGPT produce a summary of the differences and then picked the "best" one.

I'd assume this happens a lot more, I can easily someone doing, produce a list of [product category X] under < $Y, then use follow-up queries, etc.

> As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now.

I assume this would only work for the things that influencers can directly sell, e.g. selling makeup to women that way is apparently a thing; for other products that are not impulse-buys, ChatGPT is a perfectly reasonable way to shop.

Searching with llms is the single best use case for it. It is some form of natural language apropos. Ask it what is the best way to have a beautiful and modern website, Vercel will make money and tailwind will receive a visit and gain one more consuming application. Ask it how to be safe, rust will gain more power and influence no matter what originally was your intent. It doesn't need to be justified. Chatgpt said so therefore true (the audience vulnerable to this has established that generative technology==chatgpt)

I used ChatGPT to find a bike for me. It asked good questions, recommended good results, linked me to options and the websites I needed to further research things. I don't do a lot of shopping though so this is one tiny example. If I was looking to actually shop again though I'd use it again. Most of my shopping these days is the grocery store. I don't have a lot of needs.

I might be unusual, I only use LLMs to shop these days.

"What is still considered a highly regarded 35mm film camera for under $400 (used)?"

Of course then I go to eBay…

"Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest."

I use Gemini to help with shopping decisions pretty frequently. It's been very effective and useful for that.

>Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.

I used it for evaluating air filters. I used to for making shopping lists for food I want to cook.

I used Chatgpt to compare product specs. Pretty good to get a rough idea but obviously not reliable.

LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison.

Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.

So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.

Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.

In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.

ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.

I have used LLMs to find dozens and dozens of products when I didn't know the proper name for the solution or what to look for.

> It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.

There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.

> Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.

Show of hands for anyone still compiling 500 Amazon reviews by hand…

This won’t necessarily work well in a year (month?),

but up through now?

Absolutely I’ve been using assistants for some shopping purposes.