> Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research

Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.

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vineyardmike 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t buy it.

First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then?

Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third party marketplace (who will want a cut).

Finally, OpenAI has been aggressively pushing for this so they can take a cut of the transaction. So it’ll just be another middle man.

	▲	CodingJeebus 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> So it’ll just be another middle man. Exactly this, and not just another middleman, a middleman with an obscene burn rate that isn't close to profitability and is incentivized to ratchet up prices as soon as they can. And then AI procurement has problems on the buyer side. Do I just blindly trust that the model is going to make the purchase as specified? Do I trust the model's search capabilities and objectivity of returning results? How do I know that OpenAI isn't running its own "marketplace", only showing me options to buy that they want me to see while filtering out less desirable options for them? It's a fundamentally less transparent experience than Amazon.
	▲	theturtletalks 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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eloisant 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How long until the AI provider takes a 15%-20% cut? "Affiliate fees"...

	▲	theturtletalks 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's why I'm building an open-source agentic commerce chat

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ks2048 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amazon has giant warehouses all over the country to deliver things to people quickly, sometimes within a couple of hours. What is an LLM going to do about that?

	▲	theturtletalks 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Amazon has a monopoly in the US, but elsewhere in the world, 3rd party sellers have their own infra. Even in the US, sellers that sell outside Amazon have 3PLs they use that aren't as fast as Amazon, but also don't take a 20% cut on every sale.

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zadikian 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amazon has brand value because both buyers and sellers trust it, aside from the shipping speed. An LLM can't evaluate trust for you, and it especially won't win in adverserial games like price haggling.

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micromacrofoot 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You disregard the fact that the sellers will have opposing LLMs constantly adding more signals that they're legitimate.

The sellers and the marketplaces can spend more time on their LLMs because it's their livelihood. It's the same asymmetry with different tooling.

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paxys 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"We are going to put online shopping on the blockchain and eliminate gatekeepers and fraud"

	▲	theturtletalks 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Who mentioned blockchain? You just need to allow e-commerce website to expose their storefront as a MCP app or UI and then clients can interact with them directly.