But that also seems like a very inefficient way to accomplish this automation task from the drop shippers side too. What do you gain from the LLM that non LLM automation couldn't do more cost effectively?

The LLMs are being used to hack around the fact that while the software mostly works for what people need any given user inevitably has a few workflows that are clunky or highly manual.

Stuff that used to have to be laboriously scripted can now be pseudo code.

More importantly, doing this will quickly get throttled on the provider side (if using chat UI) or costs will skyrocket (if using APIs).

The right way to use LLMs here is to have them write (and perhaps maintain) scraping scripts and run those.