> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying.

The only e-commerce site that fits this standard is that old one for buying (IIRC) nuts and bolts or such, that pops up on HN every other year, and whose name sadly escapes me now. Everyone else is ruthlessly optimizing their experience to fuck shoppers over and get them to products the vendor wants them to buy, not the products the shoppers actually want (or need).

> A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.

That is precisely the point.

Chats may suck as an interface, but majority of the value and promise of end-user automation (and more than half the point of the term "User Agent" (as in, e.g., a web browser)) is in enabling comparison shopping in spite of the merchants, and more generally, helping people reduce information asymmetry that's intertwined with wealth and power asymmetry.

But it's not something you can generally sell to the vendors, who benefit from that asymmetry relative to their clients (in fact, I was dumbfounded to see so much interest on the sales/vendor side for such ideas, but I blame it on general AI hype).

Adversarial interoperability is the name of the game.

You were thinking of McMaster-Carr, but Digikey is also that good for electronics parametric shopping.

Sadly Sigma-Aldrich, the hyphenated retailer for chemistry, appears to have been covered in javascript sludge.

https://www.mcmaster.com/

Not sure you're aware but you initially sound like you disagree with the post you replied to, only to follow up by enthusiastically reiterating that author's words as if in agreement.

You realize what shoppers and vendors each consider to be "good" e-commerce sites are fundamentally opposed concepts?